Corroborating Evidence

Let's let our imaginations run wild and suppose that a black man shot and killed a white youth. The shooter claimed that he'd been punched in the nose, knocked to the ground, and was having his head smashed against the concrete when in desperation he pulled his firearm and shot the attacker once in the chest.

Suppose then that white groups go beserk, placing a bounty on the shooter. Agitators show up to fan the flames of racial rage. The media pronounces the shooter guilty of homicide, disregarding his side of the story. The president identifies with the victim, suggesting that the shooting was racially motivated. I know it's hard to imagine all this, but just suppose....

Then in the discovery phase of the trial it was learned that all the forensic evidence supported the black man's version of events. Don't you think that all of the above groups would be forever discredited for their inexcusable prejudice against the black man? Wouldn't they be forever made objects of shame and derision, just like those who jumped at the chance to condemn the Duke lacrosse players in 2006, for their closed-minded, racially bigoted stupidity?

Well, we'll see. Meanwhile, here's the latest on the George Zimmerman/ Trayvon Martin incident:

A medical report compiled by the family physician of Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman and obtained exclusively by ABC News found that Zimmerman was diagnosed with a "closed fracture" of his nose, a pair of black eyes, two lacerations to the back of his head and a minor back injury the day after he fatally shot Martin during an alleged altercation.

Zimmerman faces a second degree murder charge for the Feb. 26 shooting that left the unarmed 17-year-old high school junior dead. Zimmerman has claimed self defense in what he described as a life and death struggle that Martin initiated by accosting him, punching him in the face, then repeatedly bashing his head into the pavement.

And that's not all:

WFTV has learned that the medical examiner found two injuries on Martin’s body: The fatal gunshot wound and broken skin on his knuckles.

If this is all true, if Zimmerman's account is corroborated, then a lot of people in the media and in the black "community" should socially ostracize themselves in penance for their sin of inexcusable prejudice. They would also owe Zimmerman a huge apology, but don't hold your breath while you wait. People that small don't usually do things that big.

Should Everyone Vote?

MSNBC political analyst Andrea Mitchell says on a promo for her network that she thinks it's a scandal that some people are trying to prevent other people from voting. We should try to get as many people as possible to vote, she opines, regardless of which party benefits.

Well, no we shouldn't. In the first place no one is trying to prevent anyone who has the right to vote from voting. What some people are trying to do with voter ID legislation is to prevent the system from being abused by people who are not legally eligible to vote. Ms Mitchell and others of her ideological persuasion think that the voting franchise should be as broad and as easy to exercise as possible, but this is ludicrous.

Should we extend voting rights to 16 year-olds? How about resident non-citizens? How about citizens of other countries who once upon a time visited this country? Why not let anyone anywhere vote in our elections? If we adopt what we might call the Mitchell Principle there's no obvious reason why we shouldn't.

Should we make it hard for eligible citizens to vote? Not especially, but neither should we encourage people to vote who have not taken the time to inform themselves on the matters upon which they'd be voting. Someone who cannot name at least four Supreme Court judges or explain what the Supreme Court is or does should not be encouraged to vote. Someone who pays no federal income tax and thus has no economic stake in the country should not be encouraged to vote. Someone who cannot name their U.S. Senators should not be encouraged to vote. Indeed, they should be encouraged not to.

People like Ms Mitchell want these folks to cast a ballot, of course, because she knows that the less well-informed people are the more likely they are to vote for candidates who have charisma and who promise them access to goodies that must be paid for by the rest of the population. In other words, the more uniformed a voter is the more likely he or she is to vote for the liberal candidate.

This may seem a bit unkind, but in the last election Mr. Obama won largely on the basis of the support he received from two groups of people who are generally the most indifferent toward politics - young voters and poor minorities.

People like Ms Mitchell argue that we all have a civic duty to vote, but this isn't true either. We have a civic duty to inform ourselves so that we can vote responsibly. If we haven't done that then we actually have both a civic and a moral duty not to vote.

Major League Baseball doesn't allow just anyone to vote for their MVP. They restrict the process to sportswriters who make it their business to follow the game. There's a reason for that. The MVP shouldn't be a popularity contest, it shouldn't be based on which player is the best looking or the best speaker at off-season events, it should be based on his merits as a baseball player. The same is true of the office of the President. People who only read the sports pages of the newspaper shouldn't vote for president anymore than people who only read the editorial page should vote for baseball's MVP.

Dodd-Frank

The Economist's Tom Easton talks briefly in this 4 minute video about why he thinks Dodd-Frank is terrible legislation and will be repealed one way or another:

Determinism and Moral Coherence

James Atlas of the New York Times, in a review of books on the subject of thinking, touches briefly on the subject of the relationship between free will and morality. He closes his essay with this thought:

Does this mean we have no “agency,” no capacity to act on our own? Or can autonomy thrive within the prison of self-ignorance? “We have to believe it does,” says Steven Lukes, a professor of sociology at New York University highly admired for his work in moral philosophy. “If we seriously thought that our intentions made no difference to how we behave, we couldn’t go on using the language of ethics. How would we go on living the lives we live?” Or doing what we think is right? “People have free will when they ‘feel’ they have free will,” says Professor Kahneman. “If we didn’t believe in it, we would have no responsibility.”

But of course what one “feels,” as we’ve learned from all these books, could well be — indeed, probably is — an illusion. As Timothy Wilson puts it with haunting simplicity: “We are strangers to ourselves.”

We can't have it both ways, however. If we believe free will is an illusion then we have to believe the same thing about morality. If determinism is true and we have no genuine choices then words like "ought" and "should", when used in an ethical context, are purely emotive. If I say A ought to do B all I'm saying is I would like it if A did B. It doesn't mean that B is "right" in any moral sense. If A doesn't do B there's no reason for him to feel guilty about it since A is not guilty of anything other than doing something that disappoints, or perhaps angers, others.

It would not be "wrong" in any transcendent sense if A did not do B. If there's no genuine choice in the matter there is no morally right or wrong choice. There are only alternative behaviors. Whether Mersault in Camus' The Stranger shoots the Arab on the beach or doesn't shoot him is morally the same. Whether one "chooses" to help hungry children or refuses to help them is morally indifferent. Our behavior was determined by the laws of nature and we're no more capable of doing otherwise than what we do than the moon is capable of choosing to change its orbit around the earth.

Of course, there are some who would welcome the ethical nihilism that would result from the widespread recognition of this fact, but most would blanch at the moral chaos that would be unleashed on our social landscape. Ethics would quickly devolve to a matter of simple power, of might makes right, and few would want to live that way.

Most people are convinced in their hearts that they and others are indeed in some sense free to choose even if they can't articulate exactly what a free choice is. Most people are profoundly persuaded that they and others are morally responsible for what they do, but if one is an atheist (or naturalist) it's very difficult to avoid the conclusion that determinism is true and that there is, therefore, no genuine moral responsibility.

That's one reason why atheism is irrational. The atheist has to live as if his atheism is wrong in order for him to live in harmony with his moral instincts. In order to be consistent with his atheism he has to sacrifice moral coherence, and this most atheists are just unwilling, and psychologically unable, to do.

Alphas and Betas

Bill Whittle observes in this short but punchy video that conservatism is an alpha male political philosophy whereas beta males tend to populate the more liberal ideological precincts. See what you think:

Another example Whittle might have used is the difference between the stranger (Clint Eastwood) in High Plains Drifter and the timorous beta males who hire him to protect their families and property from a gang of thugs.

I also think Whittle makes an interesting point about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin not talking about the problems of their moon landing because alpha males just don't talk about their heroics nor their brushes with death. Alphas tend to be stoics, in other words. It reminded me of the unflattering contrast between the navy SEALS who took out Osama bin Laden and the President and his surrogates who couldn't shut up about how much courage it took to authorize it.

Messy Quest

I recently finished reading a book written by a friend and former student of mine named Stephen Martin. Steve's work, titled The Messy Quest for Meaning: Five Catholic Practices for Finding Your Vocation, is a wonderful, gentle guide to finding meaning and purpose in the life we've been given. He draws deeply on his own life experience, his Catholic faith, and numerous vignettes from the lives of people as diverse as U-2's Bono, former Duke basketball star Bobby Hurley (and Hurley's father), Newark mayor Cory Booker, Catholic author and monk Thomas Merton, actor Martin Sheen, social activist Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, the French artist Matisse, and numerous others, to illuminate a path for those who may feel their own lives are empty, shallow, and listless.

Steve's a deft story teller and a gifted writer whose narratives about the lives of some famous, and some not-so-famous, people are filled with humor, wisdom, and insight. I should also add that he says some nice things about me which have in no way, I assure you, influenced my enthusiasm for his book.

I invite you to check out his blog to read more about Messy Quest which can be ordered from my favorite bookstore Hearts and Minds.

Off with Her Head!

Last Friday we mentioned the firing of Naomi Schaefer Riley from The Chronicle of Higher Education because she dared to question the academic value of Black Studies programs. Riley subsequently wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal revealing more details on the episode, and what she tells us does nothing to make her treatment at the hands of the Chronicle look any less craven.

Here's an excerpt: So last week, on the Chronicle's "Brainstorm" blog (where I was paid to be a regular contributor), I suggested that the dissertation topics of the graduate students mentioned were obscure at best and "a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap," at worst.

The reaction to my blog post ranged from puerile to vitriolic. The graduate students I mentioned and the senior faculty who advise them at Northwestern University accused me (in guest blogs posted by the Chronicle editors) of bigotry and cowardice. The former wrote that "in a bid to not be 'out-niggered' [their word] by her right-wing cohort, Riley found some black women graduate students to beat up on." (I confess I don't actually know what that means.) One fellow blogger (and hundreds of commenters) called my post "racist."

Gina Barreca, a teacher of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut, composed a poem mocking me. (It begins "A certain white chick—Schaefer Riley/ decided to do something wily.") MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry spewed a four-minute rant about my post, invoking the memory of Trayvon Martin and accusing me of "small-mindedness."

Scores of critics on the site complained that I had not read the dissertations in full before daring to write about them—an absurd standard for a 500-word blog post. A number of the dissertations aren't even available. Which didn't seem to stop the Chronicle reporter, though. And 6,500 academics signed a petition online demanding that I be fired.

There's much more at the link and almost all of it makes her critics sound petty, intolerant, juvenile, and stupid. I.e. they sound pretty much like one might expect a bunch of liberal academics to sound. Read it and weep for the kids who are being taught by these closed-minded chuckleheads whose concept of the ideal university, evidently, is something resembling a North Korean reeducation camp.

Landslide?!

Dick Morris is a sharp political strategist who worked for Bill Clinton and who has since become more conservative. He argues that, current polls notwithstanding, were the election held today Romney would win in a landslide.

Here's his reasoning:

The published polls reflect a close race for two reasons:

1. They poll only registered voters, not likely voters. Rasmussen is the only pollster who tests likely voters, and his latest tracking poll has Romney ahead by 48-43.*

2. As discussed in previous columns, a study of the undecided voters in the past eight elections in which incumbents sought a second term as president reveals that only Bush43 gained any of the undecided vote....

So when polls show President Obama at 45 percent of the vote, they are really reflecting a likely 55-45 Romney victory, at the very least. If the election were held today, Obama would lose by at least 10 points and would carry only about a dozen states with fewer than 150 electoral votes.

It gets worse, at least it does if you're a Democrat:

The Republicans would keep their Senate seats in Arizona, Texas and Nevada while picking up seats in Virginia, Florida, Indiana, Nebraska, North Dakota, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri and Montana. The GOP will also have good shots at victory in the Senate races in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and — if Chris Shays wins the primary — Connecticut. Only in Maine are their fortunes likely to dim.

So why do the folks in Big Media seem to think that an Obama victory is all but inevitable?

The journalists in the mainstream media, who are not politicians and have never run campaigns, do not realize what is happening. The Democrats, as delusional in 2012 as they were in 2010, are too much into their own euphoria to realize it. But America is sharply and totally rejecting Obama and all he stands for and embracing Romney as a good alternative. While few are saying these words, they are the truth.

I don't know if Morris is right about this, but I do think that Mr. Obama will go into November with fewer advantages than he had in 2008. I don't think he'll have nearly as much enthusiasm behind him as he did then, nor will he have a lock on the youth vote. Blacks and Hispanics still favor him by large pluralities, but I doubt the turnout among these two groups will be what it was four years ago. People knew almost nothing about him in 2008, today they still don't know him well, but what they do know they don't like much.

I also think that Mr. Obama's string of good luck in the opponents who have faced him from his days in the Illinois legislature through his race against John McCain is about to run out. Romney appears to be much more formidable, and his campaign more adroit, than anything Mr. Obama has faced before.

The election may or may not be a landslide, but if it is I'm pretty sure that Romney will be the one doing the celebrating. Mr. Obama may win in November, but if so it'll be a squeaker.

*Actually as of today Rasmussen has it 50/42 Romney over Obama with 4% going for a third party candidate and 3% undecided.

Censorship by the Mob

I remember the days when liberals would stand on the barricades proclaiming that though they may despise what you say they'll defend to the death your right to say it. That seems like such a long time ago. Today liberals are much more likely to cave under even the mildest pressure and fire someone who voices any opinion that aggrieves any member of an approved minority group.

That's what happened to Naomi Riley at The Chronicle of Higher Education who had the insolence to scoff at the academic frivolousness that typifies so much black studies scholarship. For stating out loud what most people already know and thereby rousing the ever-alert liberal speech police who read the Chronicle, Ms Riley found herself thrown unceremoniously into the street.

There was no discussion about whether what she said was actually true - truth is irrelevant in these matters, you understand - it's that many readers found it offensive that she would actually poke fun at a field that is, in fact, eminently pokable, but which is a refuge of liberal black intellectuals who probably couldn't succeed in a legitimate academic discipline.

Jonathan Last of The Weekly Standard has the details:

Late last night, in a shameful example of editorial cowardice, the Chronicle of Higher Education fired Naomi Schaefer Riley. Naomi is a good friend of mine, a sometimes contributor to The Weekly Standard and a fine writer. And the story of what happened to her is highly instructive....

Last week she wrote about the world of “Black Studies” in a post titled “The most persuasive case for getting rid of Black Studies? Read the dissertations.” You should read the whole thing, because it’s only 520 words, but here’s the gist of Naomi’s argument:

I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recent piece on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.

Naomi then went on to dissect two other incredibly silly “Black Studies” dissertations. One of these was written by TaSha B. Levy. Here’s how the Chronicle itself—not Naomi—described Levy’s work:

Ms. Levy is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have “played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.”

Chronicle readers were outraged. Not that a graduate student was earning a doctorate by claiming that Sowell, Thomas, and McWhorter are threats to civil rights. Oh, no. They were outraged because Naomi would dare poke fun at such insanity. Because, you know, that’s racist.

Eight days and 497 comments later, the Chronicle’s Liz McMillen fired Naomi.

You should follow the link to read McMillen's rationale for firing Riley. It's a wonderful profile in pusillanimity. What McMillen says, without saying it, is that she succumbed to the pressure of the outraged mob to silence a voice with which they disagree.

I wonder if Riley had been a black blogger writing about, say, the superficiality of the religious beliefs of white liberal protestants if she would have been fired. I know. Silly question. Liberals don't fire anyone for offending whites, especially religious whites, and besides, white liberal protestants don't take their religion seriously enough to be offended by a someone poking fun at it anyway.

In the Cathedrals of liberal academia there's only so much tolerance for dissenting opinions, and those who show themselves guilty of the heresy of making fun of a sacred scholarly endeavor, like those unfortunate Muslims who have the temerity to blaspheme Islam by parodying its dogmas, must be put to the sword, so to speak.

Nowhere do we find more intolerance than among those liberals for whom tolerance is supposed to be the highest virtue.

Permanent War

The White House and its subsidiary offices seem to be in a state of denial concerning Muslim extremism. They refuse to publicly acknowledge what everyone in every mosque seems to recognize which is that there's a war against the West being waged by a substantial fraction of the Islamic world. Strategy Page has a good piece on this strange delusion.

Here's part of it:

The senior commander in the U.S. military recently ordered a course taught at a staff school for the last eight years to be revised to eliminate any mention of a war between Islam and the West. The course (“Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism”) pointed out that Islam, at least according to many Islamic clerics, is at war with the West.

The U.S. has officially denied that since shortly after September 11, 2001, despite the fact that many Islamic clerics and government officials in Moslem nations agree with the "Islam is at war with the West" idea. But many Western leaders prefer to believe that by insisting that such hostile attitudes are not widespread in Moslem countries, the hostility will diminish.

To that end the U.S. government has, for years, been removing any reference to "Islam" and "terrorism" in official documents. This comes as a shock to military or civilian personnel who have spent time in Moslem countries. The "Islam is at war with the West" angle is alive and well among Moslems.

The article goes on to amass a lot of evidence for this claim, and the entire essay is well-worth reading.

Islam is not just at war with the West, however, they're at war with anyone who is not a Muslim as well as any Muslim who is not of the same sect as they. Islamic terrorism accounts for over 95% of all the terrorism in the world, and almost all religious violence is instigated by Muslims against Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Baha'is, and other Muslims.

Nor is this a recent development. The slaughter started with Mohammed in the 7th century and continued for over 700 years directed primarily against Christians and Jews. It abated for a time because Muslim civilization degenerated to the point where it could no longer strike against enemies beyond its borders, so they contented themselves with simply killing each other. The twentieth century, however, brought the discovery of oil and with it unimagined riches as well as access to weaponry and technology they could never have developed on their own. Now they're able to purchase and employ modern weapons in their jihad to make the whole world submit to Allah.

Some observers have emphasized that the radicals are just a small percentage of the Muslim population, which may be true, but it's not very comforting. There are a billion Muslims in the world. If only 1% of them are radical extremists who want to kill you and your children that's still one million terrorists on the loose. Moreover, many of the rest are sympathetic to the goals of the radicals, and most of the remainder who aren't sympathetic are too intimidated to do anything about the malignancy in their midst.

We find ourselves immersed in a war that began some 1300 years ago and will not end in any of our lifetimes. It may ebb and flow, but too many Muslims believe that it's Allah's will that they purge the world of all unbelievers, and as long as they believe this, as long as they believe that they'll be rewarded in Paradise if they contribute to the bloodshed, and as long as we're dependent upon their oil and keep pumping our billions into their bank accounts, there'll be no end to the violence.

We may, like the last two administrations, foolishly pretend that Islam is not really waging a permanent, existential war against the rest of the world, but the moment we relax and believe that fantasy, we'll be hit again as we were in the 90s and on 9/11. The next time, though, it may well be nuclear bombs rather than jet airliners that are used against us.

Phony Truth

For those who may not be aware of the amusing events transpiring in the Massachussetts Senate race between Democrat Elizabeth Warren and Republican Scott Brown, here's a quick summary:

Back in the 1990s when Warren was seeking employment at Harvard's law school she checked the box on the application indicating that she was Native American.

Presumably, she hoped this would give her a bit of an edge in the hiring process, and, anyway, there was a legend in her family that her great, great, great grandmother was part Cherokee. That would have made Ms Warren at most 1/32 Cherokee if it were true, which is still no excuse for checking the box. By Ms Warren's standard, after all, George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin, could call himself black (his great grandfather was black) and Barack Obama could call himself white (his mother was white).

Nevertheless, Warren was still claiming to be Native American as recently as April 27th.

At any rate, it turns out that there's no evidence that the ancestor in question was in fact Cherokee.

As if all this didn't make Ms Warren look silly enough it now turns out that the g.g.g.grandmother's husband, Ms Warren's g.g.g.grandfather, was a member of the Tennessee militia, and as such was almost certainly one of the men tasked with rounding up the Cherokee people into holding pens and then sending them off to Oklahoma along the infamous Trail of Tears. He also likely fought against Indians in Florida in the Seminole War of 1837. Breitbart has the story.

A lot of people have a had a good laugh at how Ms Warren's risible, if not dishonest, attempt to identify herself with an oppressed ethnic minority has blown up in her face, but there's a more serious point to all this. In the postmodern world of much of contemporary liberalism, truth is "whatever your peer group will let you get away with saying," as the late philosopher Richard Rorty once put it. It's whatever grabs you personally, whatever appeals to your subjective desire. It has no objective component. Thus, Ms. Warren's Native American heritage is true for her regardless of what the objective "facts" are.

This is the sort of nonsense one must accept when one gives up belief in the objectivity of truth and embraces the tenets of liberal postmodernism, and it explains why so many politicians can lie so glibly. They're probably convinced they're telling the truth, at least as they see it.

On the Wrong Side of Gay Marriage

President Obama has finally decided to end the charade he's been conducting on his position on gay marriage. He claimed to have been against it in 2008, and presumably more recently, but having consulted with Michelle and his daughters, as well as his neighbors, whoever the neighbors of the White House may be, he has decided that after a long process of evolution his position has mutated to the point where today he's all for it.

Rarely does one see a scientific theory confirmed by a president, but Mr. Obama has just demonstrated that Darwin was right after all. Politicians, like species, are in a struggle for survival and such a struggle rewards those most agile in adapting to changing environments. Thus Mr. Obama's evolution makes him more fit, he apparently believes, to survive in the current political climate.

Even so, Mr. Obama is simply wrong on this issue. Most people who favor gay marriage do so because they think it to be the compassionate thing to do, but this is a case of favoring the wrong thing for a good reason. Contrary to conventional opinion, permitting gays to marry is not a matter that affects no one but the blissful couple. It will have, probably sooner rather than later, a deeply corrosive effect on our social fabric by emptying marriage of any real meaning.

The traditional view is that marriage is a union of one man and one woman. Mr. Obama is telling us that he no longer believes that the gender of the couple entering the union should matter, but if the gender shouldn't matter why should the number of people in the union matter? Once we open up marriage to any combination of genders what logical ground will there be for limiting marriage to just two people?

Mr. Obama would have us step out onto a slippery slope which would lead almost inevitably to a nadir at which we'd have no rational basis for excluding any marital arrangement into which any combination of people wish to enter.

Indeed, what basis would there be, and I'm serious when I ask this, to limiting marriage to an assemblage of humans? What logical objection could anyone have, once we've crossed the gender threshold, to someone who wished to marry his or her pets? If people deeply love their pets why should they not be permitted to formalize their relationship? We can't just say that that's gross. We have to have logical reasons if we are to deny people this right and once we've discarded traditional and religious strictures there simply aren't any.

The point is that once the word "marriage" means any congeries of people (or animals) - and anyone who thinks it won't is either naive or hasn't thought this through - it has ceased to mean anything at all. Marriage will cease to exist as an institution in this country except, perhaps, among those backward religious folk who lack the wit to embrace the moral progress that our enlightened elites are foisting upon us.

Re: Carson, Emory, and Darwin

Yesterday we noted the disgraceful reaction of some Emory University biology faculty members to the invitation of Dr. Ben Carson to speak at the University's commencement.

There's an i-petition being circulated requesting Emory to reaffirm Dr. Carson's right, and that of any scientist or any thoughtful person at all, to hold a dissenting view on Darwinian theory without having to face rude and distorting attacks. You can go here to read about it and follow the links to the petition if you wish to affix your name to it.

Flipping and Evolving

Chris Matthews talks to his guests in the video below about how the president is trying to finesse his view on gay marriage to which he has publicly claimed to be opposed. Fearful, apparently, of alienating the gay sympathy vote or antagonizing anti-gay marriage independents, Mr. Obama has been loath to explicitly reaffirm his previously stated position or renounce it, opting instead to have his spokespersons disingenuously aver that the president's thinking on the issue is "evolving":

Everyone knows the president supports gay marriage but doesn't want to acknowledge that support for fear that it will cause him political trouble. So the most transparent administration in history dances around the issue rather than having the fortitude to tell us clearly where he stands on it.

It's ironic that the president was lauded in the media for having the courage to give the order to take down bin Laden, but seems to lack the courage to take a forthright position on a social issue like gay marriage.

It's also interesting that when Mitt Romney changes a position he's said to be a "flip-flopper," but when Mr. Obama changes a position he's said to be "evolving." Republicans "flip-flop," which sounds unprincipled, while Democrats "evolve" which sounds thoughtful and wise. It's a clever political tactic, I suppose, but rhetorical artifices like this do little to edify either the public or our political discourse.

Darwin and Ben Carson

World famous neurosurgeon Ben Carson is scheduled to give the commencement address at Emory University, an invitation which has some of the Emory biology faculty in a bit of a snit. Carson, understand, does not subscribe to the Darwinian orthodoxies, and his appearance at Emory, despite his remarkable scientific and medical accomplishments, is therefore a matter to be protested.

Here's the gist of it from the Baltimore CBS News affiliate:

World-renowned Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson is under fire from several biology professors at Emory University, where he’s scheduled to give the commencement address.

They wrote a letter to the school newspaper after learning Carson does not believe in evolution, calling it “deeply concerning . . . That he equates the acceptance of evolution with a lack of ethics and morality.” And that “not only encourages the insertion of unnecessary and destructive wedges between Americans but stands against many of the ideals of this university.”

“Dr. Carson was a childhood hero of mine, and he still is a hero of mine,” said Arri Eisen, Ph.D., Emory University Department of Biology. “What worried me the most was the fact that he said if you do accept evolution that you’re somehow ethically lacking.”

Well, now, that's an interesting objection to having Carson address the Emory grads. He has the temerity and bad manners to take Darwinism to its logical conclusion and to take Darwinians at their word when they acknowledge the incompatibility of a Darwinian worldview and any meaningful ethics.

Sal Cordova at Uncommon Descent (Comment #8) elaborates:

[S]o the Darwinists at Emory complained about Dr. Carson associating evolutionism with the lack of ethics. Why then don’t they write letters of complaint to their own! Consider the words of evolutionists themselves.

Evolutionism says rape is as natural as the leopard’s spots:

“Just as the leopard’s spots and the giraffe’s elongated neck are the result of aeons of past Darwinian selection, so also is rape.” — Randy Thronhill and Craig Palmer

It says about the same about murder

“over the eons of human evolution murder was so surprisingly beneficial in the intense game of reproductive competition” — David Buss

and

“Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.” — William Provine

and

“No inherent moral or ethical laws exist, nor are there absolute guiding principles for human society. The universe cares nothing for us and we have no ultimate meaning in life.” — William Provine

And here are some other delicious quotes from Darwinists:

We assume that cannibalism is always an aggressive, barbaric and degrading act,.... But that is a serious over-simplification, one that has kept us from realizing that cannibalism can have positive meanings. Beth Conklin, Vanderbilt University

and

Sexual relationships between humans and animals come as such a shock to people, but it doesn’t to me. There can be very deep, meaningful relationships between humans and their pets. Skatje Myers

Actually, Cordova is just sifting through the topsoil of what is a rich mine of such admissions. Here are a couple more quotes from Darwinists who admit that the Darwinian view of life pretty much does away with any meaningful ethical standards:

"If a person doesn’t think there is a God to be accountable to, then — then what’s the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That’s how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we, when we died, you know, that was it, there is nothing." [Biography, "Jeffrey Dahmer: The Monster Within," A&E, 1996.]

"What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler was right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question." Richard Dawkins

"Ethics is just an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate." E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse

“Worse, the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature....We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.” Steven Weinberg

And from the master himself:

"One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life…only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best." Charles Darwin

Perhaps the Emory biologists are so busy peering through their microscopes that they've neglected to pay attention to what their colleagues who are more attuned to the big picture are saying about the frightening and dehumanizing implications of the theory they so deeply treasure.

Hummingbird Video

A year or so ago Illustra Media produced a beautiful film about butterflies, and they now have another one in the works on birds. The trailer is a lovely close-up of the amazing phenomenon of hummingbird flight. Note how the hummingbird can fly both backwards and sideways. They can also fly upside down, and are the only kind of bird in the world that can do all this. Their wings beat an astonishing 70 times a second in normal flight and they weigh about as much as a penny.

Some other interesting facts about these birds include:

• Hummingbirds are the tiniest birds in the world.
• The bright radiant color on hummingbirds comes from iridescent coloring like on a soap bubble or prism.
• Hummingbirds are very smart and they can remember every flower they have been to, and how long it will take a flower to refill.
• Hummingbirds have little to no sense of smell.
• Hummingbirds do not drink though their beaks like a straw. They lap up nectar with their tongues.
• Hummingbirds have very weak feet and can barely walk. They prefer to fly.
• Hummingbirds do not mate for life.
• Hummingbirds have an average life span of about 5 years.
• Hummingbirds can live for more than 10 years.
• A hummingbird will visit an average of 1,000 flowers per day for nectar.
• Hummingbirds eat small soft bugs for protein.
• A hummingbird will lap up nectar at a rate of about 13 licks per second.
• Hummingbirds are only found naturally in the Americas.
• There are more than 300 types or species of hummingbirds. Most of which are found in South America.
• There are more than fifteen (15) types or species of hummingbirds that breed in the United States.
• Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds, the only species which breeds in the eastern U.S., have been known to travel 500 miles over the Gulf of Mexico to breeding grounds, a 20 hour non-stop trip.

Check the link for more.

U.N. Priorities

The United Nations is taking up the cause of Native Americans who believe they're being discriminated against:

James Anaya, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, said no member of the US Congress would meet him as he investigated the part played by the government in the considerable difficulties faced by Indian tribes.

Anaya said that in nearly two weeks of visiting Indian reservations, indigenous communities in Alaska and Hawaii, and Native Americans now living in cities, he encountered people who suffered a history of dispossession of their lands and resources, the breakdown of their societies and "numerous instances of outright brutality, all grounded on racial discrimination".

"It's a racial discrimination that they feel is both systemic and also specific instances of ongoing discrimination that is felt at the individual level," he said. Anaya said racism extended from the broad relationship between federal or state governments and tribes down to local issues such as education.

"For example, with the treatment of children in schools both by their peers and by teachers as well as the educational system itself; the way native Americans and indigenous peoples are reflected in the school curriculum and teaching," he said.

"And discrimination in the sense of the invisibility of Native Americans in the country overall that often is reflected in the popular media. The idea that is often projected through the mainstream media and among public figures that indigenous peoples are either gone or as a group are insignificant or that they're out to get benefits in terms of handouts, or their communities and cultures are reduced to casinos, which are just flatly wrong."

I do not wish to diminish the plight of Native Americans who often feel like second class citizens. Many of them suffer from desperate poverty and its concomitant dysfunctions, but surely there are far worse human rights problems around the globe to which the U.N. should be directing its attention and resources.

Christians in Muslim lands are being violently murdered, their property seized, their churches burned. Jews are portrayed in Muslim schoolbooks as monsters and pigs. The U.N. could do a real service by showing a little interest in these human rights atrocities.

North Korea and Cuba are statewide prison camps, shackling, starving, torturing, and killing hundreds of thousands of people whose only crime was to question their political leadership. The U.N. could do a real service by showing a little interest in these human rights atrocities.

Human rights dissidents in China live in fear of their lives. Jews in Europe are being threatened in ways reminiscent of the 1930s. White farmers in Zimbabwe continue to have their property expropriated by the government and given to political cronies of President Robert Mugabe. The U.N. could do a real service by showing a little interest in these human rights atrocities instead of fretting about how Native Americans are treated in American school books.

Julia

Iowahawk has a funny caricature of the Obama campaign's Julia ad here.

Nothing could make more pellucid the sort of future liberals envision than does this ad. Julia seems to have no real family support, no friends, no husband, no church. She's a ward of the state, almost completely dependent upon others to see her through life's challenges. The government is her ersatz family. It's a dependency the left fervently desires to achieve universally.

Russ Douthat of the New York Times puts it like this:

All propaganda invites snark and parody, and the story of Julia is ripe for it. She’s an everywoman only by the standards of the liberal upper middle class: She works as a Web designer, has her first child in her early 30s (the average first-time American mother is in her mid-20s), and spends her golden years as a “volunteer at a community garden.” (It will not surprise you to learn that the cartoon Julia looks Caucasian.)

What’s more, she seems to have no meaningful relationships apart from her bond with the Obama White House: no friends or siblings or extended family, no husband (“Julia decides to have a child,” is all the slide show says), a son who disappears once school starts and parents who only matter because Obamacare grants her the privilege of staying on their health care plan until she’s 26. This lends the whole production a curiously patriarchal quality, with Obama as a beneficent Daddy Warbucks and Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan co-starring as the wicked uncles threatening to steal Julia’s inheritance.

But if the slide show is easy to mock (and conservatives quickly obliged, tweeting Julia jokes across the Internet), there’s also a fascinating ideological purity to its attitudes and arguments. Indeed, both in its policy vision and its philosophical premises, the slide show represents a monument to certain trends in contemporary liberalism.

On the one hand, its public policy agenda is essentially a defense of existing arrangements no matter their effectiveness or sustainability, apparently premised on the assumption that American women can’t make cost-benefit calculations or indeed do basic math. In addition to ignoring the taxes that will be required of its businesswoman heroine across her working life, “The Life of Julia” hails a program (Head Start) that may not work at all, touts education spending that hasn’t done much for high school test scores or cut college costs, and never mentions that on the Obama administration’s own budget trajectory, neither Medicare nor Social Security will be able to make good on its promises once today’s 20-something Julias retire.

At the same time, the slide show’s vision of the individual’s relationship to the state seems designed to vindicate every conservative critique of the Obama-era Democratic Party. The liberalism of “the Life of Julia” doesn’t envision government spending the way an older liberalism did — as a backstop for otherwise self-sufficient working families, providing insurance against job loss, decrepitude and catastrophic illness.

It offers a more sweeping vision of government’s place in society, in which the individual depends on the state at every stage of life, and no decision — personal, educational, entrepreneurial, sexual — can be contemplated without the promise that it will be somehow subsidized by Washington.

Someone should do a clip that urges us to stay in school, get good grades, don't have children until you're married, stay married once you have them, shun drugs, alcohol and pornography, join a church, show up for work every day on time, and strive to be the best employee your employer has. If everyone followed these eight simple rules we'd have a lot fewer people in poverty and we'd hardly need government social welfare programs at all.

Hannity vs OWS

A few days ago I had some harsh words for a guy named Chris Mooney who claims in his book that Republicans are, by nature, intellectually inferior, or something like that. I thought his thesis was absurd, but afterward I got to thinking that maybe Mooney had a point. After all, I thought, a lot of Republicans adore Sean Hannity, a phenomenon I have never understood, and it seems to me that I should admit that that has to count at least a little bit in favor of Mooney's claim.

Anyway, Hannity recently had a guy from Occupy Wall Street on his television show, and the fellow's ideas were so incredibly naive that he made Hannity look, if you could somehow set aside his typical boorish self-righteouness, like a font of sagacity and reason. Here's the clip:

This is why OWS is going nowhere, and why people like Nancy Pelosi and others among the Democrat left simply make themselves look foolish when they embrace them. The guy evidently thinks that the rest of us owe him a living. He wants everything to be free, much like it is in Greece. One wonders how much he's really thought about any of this.

Musings on the News

A couple of thoughts on recent events in the news:

When it was discovered that the GSA had squandered a million dollars of our tax money to amuse themselves in Las Vegas there was justifiable outrage in the media. It seemed so irresponsible, so insensitive, to be wasting citizen's money on personal entertainment. Heads rolled as they should have.

But someone explain to me why there's not similar outrage when Mrs. Obama spends many millions of our tax dollars to amuse herself and her friends on her frequent vacations? What's the difference? She spent almost half a million of our dollars on a single trip to Spain. The individual responsible for the GSA disgrace was rightly dismissed. Why does Mrs. Obama get a pass?

When American intelligence agents located Kalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, George Bush didn't remind the nation that he was ultimately the man responsible for catching the big fish. When American forces killed Abu al Zarqawi, the sadist who beheaded Daniel Pearl and who turned Iraq into an abattoir, George Bush didn't strut around pointing to himself and beckoning audiences to applaud him. When American troops captured Saddam Hussein George Bush didn't do an endzone dance. Nor did Mr. Bush ever suggest that his opponents wouldn't have done any of these things.

Yet, Mr. Obama gives the "go ahead" to the American team that took out Osama bin Laden and you'd think from how often he and his surrogates remind us that he rappelled into the terrorist's lair himself and throttled bin Laden with his bare hands. Not only is the president taking every opportunity to remind people that he's the one who "got bin Laden" he's quite explicitly allowed that Mr. Romney would not have done so.

Think what you will about George Bush, he conducted himself with professionalism, dignity, and class. His successor could learn a few things from studying his example.

Finally, as someone asked this week, who is this "Julia" woman, and why do the Democrats think I should have to pay for her whole life?