A Brief History of Thought

In his bestselling book A Brief History of Thought French humanist philosopher Luc Ferry asserts that the paramount philosophical question throughout the history of civilization has been the question of how we find meaning in life when death looms for all of us.

He calls this the question of "salvation," and in his book he surveys the answers proffered by the ancient Stoics, Christians, Enlightenment thinkers, Nietzsche and the post-moderns, and comes, after much meandering, to the disappointingly tepid conclusion that salvation consists in loving others until we die. In considering others, he argues, we achieve a kind of transcendence without the metaphysical baggage of God.

Ferry himself anticipates the complaint that his conclusion is unsatisfying:

You might object that compared to the doctrine of Christianity - whose promise of the resurrection of the body means that we shall be reunited with those we love after death - a humanism without metaphysics is small beer. I grant you that amongst the available doctrines of salvation, nothing can compete with Christianity - provided, that is, that you are a believer.

So why does Ferry settle for what is really a hopeless, meaningless "humanism without metaphysics"? Because he simply can't, or won't, bring himself to believe that there's more to reality than matter and energy:

If one is not a believer - and one cannot force oneself to believe, nor pretend to believe - then we must learn to think differently about the ultimate question posed by all doctrines of salvation, namely that of the death of a loved one.

Ferry is correct, of course, that one cannot compel belief, either in oneself or another, but what he might be asked is whether he sincerely wants the Christian message to be true. Regardless of his disbelief, does he hope that he's wrong? Many if not most people who claim not to believe that we'll in some sense exist beyond death and that "we shall be reunited with those we love after death" by their own admission do not want such a notion to be true. They don't believe the Christian proclamation, and they don't want the world to be the sort of place where such claims are in fact correct.

I suspect that the person, on the other hand, who wants those propositions to be true, who is open to them, is much more likely to find belief slowly creeping over him than those others whom C.S. Lewis describes in The Great Divorce as having, "their fists clenched, their teeth clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see." They refuse to allow themselves even to hope that there really is salvation in the Christian sense.

Ferry doesn't seem to be this sort of person, though. He writes at the end of his book:

I find the Christian proposition infinitely more tempting [than any of the alternatives] - except for the fact that I do not believe in it. But were it to be true I would certainly be a taker.

He seems to recognize, even though he doesn't explicitly say it, that unless what we do in this life matters forever, it doesn't matter at all. If death is the end of individual existence then nothing we do has any genuine meaning or significance.

If Ferry's being honest with his readers and himself, if he really is open to "the Christian proposition," then I suspect he's closer to faith than he might realize.

The Bigger Danger

In a recent column Dennis Prager argues for the fairly obvious proposition that leftism is a religion, but in the course of his argument he asks a very interesting question.

Specifically, he wonders why people on the left fear big corporations but are enthusiastic about big government.

The left is generally supportive of Occupy Wall Street which is hostile to big business and reviles the Tea Party which fears big government. So which fear has most justification? Here's Prager:

No rational person can deny that big governments have caused almost all the great evils of the last century, arguably the bloodiest in history. Who killed the 20-30 million Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago -- big government or big business? Hint: There were no private businesses in the Soviet Union. Who deliberately caused 75 million Chinese to starve to death -- big government or big business? Hint: See previous hint. Did Coca Cola kill five million Ukrainians? Did Big Oil slaughter a quarter of the Cambodian population? Would there have been a Holocaust without the huge Nazi state?

Whatever bad big corporations have done is dwarfed by the monstrous crimes -- the mass enslavement of people, the deprivation of the most basic human rights, not to mention the mass murder and torture and genocide -- committed by big governments.... That the left demonizes "Big Pharma," for instance, is an example of leftwing thinking. America's pharmaceutical companies have saved millions of lives, including millions of leftists' lives. And I do not doubt that in order to increase profits, they have not always played by the rules. But to demonize big pharmaceutical companies while lionizing big government, big labor unions and big trial law firms, is to stand morality on its head....

There is yet another reason to fear big government far more than big corporations. ExxonMobil has no police force, no IRS, no ability to arrest you, no ability to shut you up, and certainly no ability to kill you. ExxonMobil can't knock on your door in the middle of the night and legally take you away. Apple Computer cannot take your money away without your consent, and it runs no prisons. The government does all of these things.

But, we're often told, big business is greedy and greed victimizes and hurts the masses. A powerful government, on the other hand, is necessary to keep business from exploiting the poor and to insure an equitable distribution of a nation's goods. Prager's not impressed with the objection:

To which the rational response is that, of course, government also does good. But so do the vast majority of corporations, private citizens, church groups, and myriad voluntary associations. On the other hand, only big government can do anything approaching the monstrous evils of the last century.

As for greed: Between hunger for money and hunger for power, the latter is incomparably more frightening. It is noteworthy that none of the twentieth century's monsters -- Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao -- were preoccupied with material gain. They loved power much more than money.

The left craves power through big government, the right craves freedom, including freedom in the marketplace. Which of the two is more dangerous?

On Wisconsin

Tomorrow's recall election in Wisconsin is arguably the most important political event this year aside from the presidential contest in November. Governor Scott Walker is being challenged by Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett in a recall attempt because Walker has stripped the public employees unions of a lot of their power to extort ever-increasing benefits from the taxpayers of the state of Wisconsin.

As a result Walker has in two years turned the state from economic infirmity to fiscal robustness. John Fund at National Review summarizes Walker's accomplishments:

Walker can claim to have wiped out a $3.6 billion deficit without raising taxes or seeing service cutbacks. Indeed, property taxes fell statewide by 0.4 percent last year, the first time they’ve fallen since 1998. The average homeowner’s property tax bill would have been about $700 higher if the previous rate of increase had continued. The state now expects to have a surplus of $150 million at the end of the current budget cycle.

Voters can see Walker’s reforms working at the grassroots level as well. Brown Deer, a suburb of Milwaukee, is saving $1 million in pension and health-care costs. More flexible work rules enabled the city to make changes in teacher schedules. “We had many teachers tell us, let’s save everybody’s job,” Brown Deer superintendent Deb Kerr told the Chicago Tribune. “We didn’t cut programs. We didn’t raise class sizes. And we maintained our level of staffing.”

At least 52 local school districts are saving an average of $220 per student because they can now shop around for health insurance for their employees. Before the reforms, unions forced the schools to do business exclusively with WEA Trust, the group run by the state’s largest teachers’ union.

The jobs picture is also improving. Last year, the state added 24,000 new jobs. Chief Executive magazine reported in 2010 that Wisconsin ranked 41st out of 50 states in terms of the ease of doing business. In its new survey, the state has jumped to 20th place, the fastest surge in the history of the magazine’s survey.

Separately, the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce survey just found that 62 percent of the members it surveyed plan to create jobs in Wisconsin by year’s end. A full 95 percent of CEOs surveyed said the state is headed in the right direction. “The word is out from Main Street to Wall Street that Wisconsin is the place to create jobs and expand,” says Kurt Bauer, the president of WMC.

So why are the Democrats trying to recall him after only two years of his term? One of the things Walker has reformed is collective bargaining (See here for a summary of what's in the new law). Another is that public employees will now have the freedom to choose whether they want to belong to a union or not. Both of these reforms have outraged liberals who believe that union membership should be compulsory for public employees like government workers and teachers and that unions should have the right to bargain for perks and benefits with the same people to whose political campaigns they contribute.

Both of these practices are unjust and Walker has shown a lot of courage in ending them. Now he's paying the price for that courage by possibly being booted out of office by those who feel entitled to demand that taxpayers pay for benefits far in excess of anything anyone in the private sector enjoys. It's the same mindset that was on display so obscenely in the GSA scandal.

If Walker wins tomorrow, and polls have consistently shown him to be ahead, the defeat of the progressives will reverberate across the national political landscape. This is why the left is so angry that President Obama declined to campaign for Mayor Barrett. There's a lot at stake and the leader of their cause was AWOL. If Walker wins, buy some popcorn, sit back and watch the recriminations fly.

China's One-Child Policy

The plight of the courageous blind activist Chen Guancheng has confronted the world with some uncomfortable facts with which it would rather not have been confronted. One of these is the repressive nature of China's one-child policy. Some liberals in the West would rather not have to talk about it because it's a form of population control to which they're not altogether opposed themselves, at least in theory, but which is in practice extremely cruel.

Robert Zubrin summarizes the history of the policy in an article in the Washington Times:

In June 1978, Song Jian, a top-level manager in charge of developing control systems for the Chinese guided-missile program, traveled to Helsinki for an international conference on control-system theory and design. While in Finland, he picked up copies of "The Limits to Growth" and "Blueprint for Survival" - publications of the Club of Rome, a major source of Malthusian propaganda - and made the acquaintance of several Europeans who were promoting the reports' method of using computerized "systems analysis" to predict and design the human future.

Fascinated by the possibilities, Mr. Song returned to China and republished the Club's analysis under his own name (without attribution), establishing his reputation for brilliant and original thinking. In no time at all, Mr. Song became a scientific superstar.

Seizing the moment to grasp for greater power and importance, he pulled together an elite group of mathematicians from within his department and, with the help of a powerful computer to provide the necessary special effects, issued the profoundly calculated judgment that China's "correct" population size was 650 million to 700 million people - which is to say, some 280 million to 330 million less than its actual 1978 population.

Mr. Song's analysis quickly found favor at top levels of the Chinese Communist Party because it purported to prove that the reason for China's continued poverty was not 30 years of disastrous misrule, but the very existence of the Chinese people. Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and his fellows in the Central Committee were very impressed by the pseudo-scientific computer babble Mr. Song used to dress up his theory and even more impressed by the possibilities that arrogating the power to permit or deny children would provide to the state.

Thus began the most forceful population-control program since Nazi Germany. Qian Xinzhong, a Soviet-trained former major general in the People's Liberation Army, was placed in charge of the campaign. He ordered all women with one child to have a stainless steel IUD inserted and to be inspected regularly to make sure they had not tampered with it. To remove the device was deemed a criminal act. All parents with two or more children were to be sterilized. No pregnancies were legal for anyone under 23, whether married or not, and all unauthorized pregnancies were to be aborted.

Women who defied these injunctions were taken and sterilized by force. Babies would be aborted right through the ninth month of pregnancy, with many crying as they were being stabbed to death at the moment of birth. Those women who fled to try to save their children were hunted, and if they could not be caught, their houses were torn down, and their parents thrown in prison, there to linger until a ransom of 20,000 yuan - about three years' income for a peasant - was paid for their release.

Babies born to such fugitives were declared to be "black children," illegal non-persons in the eyes of the state, without any right to employment, public schooling, health care or reproduction. Millions have been confiscated from their mothers and placed in "orphanages" where, if not adopted in short order, they are left to expire without food in "dying rooms."

Zubrin has more details at the link. I can't vouch for the accuracy of his claims, but I know Viewpoint has a few Chinese readers, and I invite them to weigh in on the matter via the "Contact Us" key.

Bad News on the Doorstep

May was a disastrous month, both for the economy and perhaps for Mr. Obama's reelection prospects. Larry Kudlow writes about it at National Review:

You would think $1 trillion in spending stimulus and $2.5 trillion of Fed pump-priming would produce an economy a whole lot stronger than 1.9 percent GDP, which was the revised first-quarter number. And you’d think all that government spending would deliver a whole lot more jobs than 69,000 in May.

But it hasn’t happened.

The Keynesian government-spending model has proven a complete failure. It’s the Obama model. And it has produced such an anemic recovery that frankly, at 2 percent growth, we’re back on the front end of a potential recession. If anything goes wrong — like another blow-up in Europe — there’s no safety margin to stop a new recession.

And that brings us to the grim May employment report, which generated only 69,000 nonfarm payrolls. It’s the third consecutive subpar tally, replete with downward revisions for the two prior months. It’s a devastating number for the American economy, and a catastrophic number for Obama’s reelection hopes. All momentum on jobs and the economy has evaporated.

Inside the May report, the data is just as bad. The unemployment rate rose slightly from 8.1 to 8.2 percent. The so called U6 unemployment rate, tracking the marginally employed or completely discouraged, increased to 14.8 percent from 14.5 percent. And labor earnings are barely rising at 1.7 percent over the past year, almost in line with the inflation rate. In fact, through April, after-tax, after-inflation income is scarcely rising at 0.6 percent for the past year.

"Don't blame me. It's all his fault."

Why is the news so bad? One reason is fear of a massive tax increase when the Bush tax cuts expire in January:

If all the Bush tax rates go up, incentives will go down and liquidity will leave the system. You can’t pick up a newspaper these days and not find a story about how the fiscal cliff is elevating uncertainty and slowing U.S. growth. House Speaker John Boehner asked Obama for help in extending the Bush tax cuts this summer. But Obama said no. Instead, he wants to raise marginal tax rates on successful upper-income earners, capital gains, dividends, estates, and many successful corporations.

A business tax cut would help enormously, but it’s nowhere in sight. Neither is the Keystone Pipeline, which is a surefire job-creator.

A second uncertainty facing businesses is the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare due in a few weeks. If all those crazy tax-and-regulation mandates are deemed unconstitutional, it’s Katy bar the door as businesses put profits to work and hire. But they’re not going to move until they see that court decision.

Then there’s the whole European mess with the threat of banking contagion from Spain, Greece, and Italy. That could blow up the whole world economy if it goes completely sour. The Europeans should guarantee all bank deposits, interbank loans, and bank debt until this story is straightened out. But they’re not. So the problem festers.

The President's policies - his intention to raise taxes, to prevent energy development, to impose Obamacare - are like a clog of matted hair in the economic pipeline. The president is determined to establish Eurosocialism on our shores and gives the impression that he cares little what price must be paid to achieve it.

Cure for Incurable Optimists

Do you know someone whose disposition is so positive and sunny that it's irritating? Are they a Pollyanna? Do they resemble Voltaire's Candide? No matter how bad things look do they always cheerily affirm that things really couldn't be better? If so, you might want to link them to this slide show by a prominent economist. In his view we're facing within the next few months an historically unprecedented worldwide economic cataclysm, and worse, there's nothing we can do to stop it.

Even if you don't understand all the graphs, slides 22 to 30 pretty much sum things up.

Have a great day.

Talking about Nothing

Physicist Lawrence Krauss argues in his book A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing that we need not think that the universe requires a transcendent cause, that it could have simply arisen out of nothing. Thus, Krauss maintains, there's no reason to think that there's a God who caused the universe to exist.

Philosopher Edward Feser, a Thomist scholar, writes a piece at First Things in which he exposes Krauss' philosophical naiveté and lack of understanding of the things about which he writes.

Krauss wants to argue, according to Feser, that the answer to the question of what caused the universe can't be God because then we can ask the question what caused God. This argument, however, Feser dispatches in a couple of paragraphs by showing how the classical Aristotelians, the Neo-Platonists and Gottfried Leibniz long ago showed that the ultimate cause of the universe cannot itself be something that requires a cause.

Leibniz, for instance, argues that God is not a contingent being whose existence is somehow caused by something else. If he were he would be part of the contingent world and not God at all. God is ab defino a necessary being which is the ultimate cause of all contingent entities. Apart from the existence of this being no contingent things (things which could possibly not be and which depend upon something else for their existence) could exist.

Feser then addresses Krauss' main point:

Krauss’ aim is to answer the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” without resorting to God — and also without bothering to study what previous thinkers of genius have said about the matter. Like Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow, and Peter Atkins, Krauss evidently thinks that actually knowing something about philosophy and theology is no prerequisite for pontificating on these subjects.

Nor is it merely the traditional theological answer to the question at hand that Krauss does not understand. Krauss doesn’t understand the question itself. There is a lot of farcical chin-pulling in the book over various “possible candidates for nothingness” and “what ‘nothing’ might actually comprise,” along with an earnest insistence that any “definition” of nothingness must ultimately be “based on empirical evidence” and that “‘nothing’ is every bit as physical as ‘something’”— as if “nothingness” were a highly unusual kind of stuff that is more difficult to observe or measure than other things are.

Of course, “nothing” is not any kind of thing in the first place but merely the absence of anything. Consider all the true statements there are about what exists: “Trees exist,” “Quarks exist,” “Smugly ill-informed physicists exist,” and so forth. To ask why there is something rather than nothing is just to ask why it isn’t the case that all of these statements are false. There is nothing terribly mysterious about the question, however controversial the traditional answer.

The universe exists and the question is, why? What caused it to exist? Whatever the ultimate cause that cause itself must be something whose existence is not contingent and therefore necessary. That is, it not only must exist, it cannot not exist and cannot be caused by anything else to exist. Such a being, if not the God of traditional theism, is something very much like him.

For a detailed treatment of this issue read Paul Herrick's reply to atheist philosopher Keith Parsons here.

Making Your Blood Boil Dept.

I shouldn't post on this stuff because it just makes my blood pressure go up, but let's go ahead and bust the cuff on the old sphygmomanometer. This article is from National Review:

The federal government is handing out $4.2 billion a year to illegal aliens.

This isn’t some service benefit that illegal aliens are receiving, like taxpayer-subsidized health care or education. And it’s not a tax deduction or a non-refundable tax credit, which would require recipients to actually pay taxes in order to receive the benefit. It’s a refundable tax credit, a taxpayer-funded check from the federal government. And the government requires no proof that the recipient is actually eligible under the law, which illegals are not.

Abuse of this tax benefit is one of the most ridiculous examples of fraud adding to our federal deficit today. Equally harmful, it is acting as a powerful incentive for more illegal aliens to come to America.

While illegal aliens don’t qualify for legitimate Social Security numbers, the IRS allows them to apply for Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs). The overwhelming majority of returns with ITINs are filed by illegals. This is how they fraudulently apply for and receive these checks.

This tax credit was designed to help working families offset the costs of raising children. But illegal aliens — who don’t possess valid Social Security numbers because they are not authorized to work in this country — are able to receive these tax credits by simply providing an ITIN and claiming to have children. So, American taxpayers are writing checks to illegal aliens — $1,000 per child, $4.2 billion per year total.

An investigative reporter in Indianapolis recently uncovered cases in which illegal aliens were claiming the child tax credit for nieces and nephews who did not even live in the United States. Some received more than $10,000 from the federal government.

One admitted that his address was used by four other illegal aliens who don’t even live there. They claimed 20 children were living in one mobile home and received returns, including the additional child tax credit, totaling $29,608. But only one child actually lives at the residence; the other 19 live in Mexico and have never even visited the United States.

There's more at the link to push your systoles and diastoles into the red and put you at risk of cardiac arrest. I have to go lay down.

Hope for Stroke Victims

Medical technology continues to give us hope of prolonging and improving the quality of life for millions of people. A recent development reported in Technology Review may give hope to stroke victims in particular:

For the 800,000 people in the United States who suffer a stroke each year, the window for drug therapy closes in the first few hours after the attack. That leaves some seven million stroke survivors in this country alone with no medical alternative beyond physical therapy. A small pharmaceutical company in New York hopes to change that with a drug that may help patients regain some of their lost mobility six months or more after a stroke.

Strokes happen when blood stops flowing to part of the brain, often due to a blood clot. Without blood to bring new oxygen, cells in the affected region start to die. If the symptoms of stroke are recognized quickly enough and the victim is brought to a hospital within a few hours, doctors can administer a clot-dissolving drug to minimize the damage. But only a small fraction of stroke patients seek medical attention soon enough for this intervention.

In the future, stroke patients who miss this window and are affected by reduced mobility long after their stroke may be able to turn to a drug that helps damaged nerves transmit electrical signals in the brain.

Earlier this year, Acorda Therapeutics reported that the compound dalfampridine improved motor function in both the forelimbs and hind limbs of rats that had suffered a stroke. This month, the company began recruiting patients for a clinical trial to test the effects of the compound in human stroke patients. Acorda plans to enroll about 70 people who have had a stroke at least six months prior. "That's the time that deficits seem to stabilize, so we can eliminate naturally occurring improvements in patients," says Jeff MacDonald, an Acorda spokesman.

Acorda is also developing drugs to treat Multiple Sclerosis and spinal cord injuries:

Spinal-cord injuries still garner a lot of focus from the company, which hopes to begin testing a compound licensed from Medtronic that protects neurons from the wave of cell death that follows the initial injury. Medtronic had already shown the compound to be safe in healthy patients, and later this year, Acorda plans to test its efficacy in patients in the first hours after a spinal-cord injury.

Patients with injured spinal cords are not nearly as numerous as stroke patients, "but if you are talking about costs to society, spinal-cord injuries are extremely expensive," says Naomi Kleitman, a spinal-cord injury expert with NINDS. "They tend to happen in fairly young people who need a lot of medical and assistive help if they have severe injuries."

The company is also looking to treat longer-standing spinal-cord injuries with a drug that would help break down the scar tissue that forms around a spinal-cord injury. The scar tissue is thought to prevent nerves from establishing the new connections that may help patients recover some functionality. The product is still in early development, and one challenge will be devising a method to deliver the large scar-busting molecule to its target site.

Despite the pressing need, the small market for spinal-cord injury drugs may be one reason the condition doesn't get a lot of attention from pharmaceutical giants. "No one else wants to develop compounds to treat spinal-cord injury as seriously as Acorda," says Edward Hall, a neurologist and spinal-cord and brain-injury specialist at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. "These aren't going to be billion-dollar-a-year products."

We should be thankful that there are companies like Acorda out there, but we need also be mindful that Acorda stays in business only to the extent that it can make a profit. Government regulations and high taxation will make it much harder for these companies to keep doing research and may thus ensure the continued disability or deaths of a lot of people who might in the future have benefited from the work they do.

Worse Than Our Despisers

Christianity has enough enemies, it doesn't need more, and it especially doesn't need them in the pulpit. There are two kinds of preachers who give Christianity a black eye. One is the liberal who really doesn't believe the classic creeds of the church but refuses to do the honorable thing and resign his post. The other is the preacher who believes the creeds but piles on a whole lot else that turns the Gospel into something cruel, hard, and unloving.

The Westboro Baptist bunch are an example of the latter. They've been around for a while, but lately a lot more like them seem to be popping up. The most recent example is a pastor in Seneca, Kansas who's declaring that the government should kill homosexuals. He doesn't say that individuals should take it upon themselves to do this, mind you, but the government should.

The Blaze has the story:

Over the past few weeks, bizarre and distressing video and audio files purporting to show anti-gay sentiment in U.S. Christian churches have been emerging.

First, there was the story of a pastor who quipped about parents hitting boys who appear effeminate (he has since attempted to better frame his words). Then, there was Pastor Charles L. Worley, who touted putting gays and lesbians in an electric fence, where they would inevitably die off.

And who can forget the small child who is seen on video singing about how homosexuals won’t be entering heaven. Now, there’s yet another audio file emerging of a pastor claiming that the government should kill gays. While it seems almost unbelievable on the surface, the clip, which was published by GoodAsYou.org, showcases some shocking words coming from Pastor Curtis Knapp of New Hope Baptist Church in Seneca, Kansas.

In the audio clip, a voice that is attributed to Knapp can be heard saying, in part:

They should be put to death. That’s what happened in Israel. That‘s why homosexuality wouldn’t have grown in Israel. It tends to limit conversions. It tends to limit people coming out of the closet. Oh, so you’re saying that we should go out and start killing them? No, I’m saying the government should. They won’t, but they should.

Knapp appeared on CNN (via the network’s KTKA affiliate this morning) to discuss the controversial March 27 sermon. Rather than backing down on his words, he defended them, claiming that they were Biblical in nature.

We punish pedophilia. We punish incest. We punish polygamy and various things. It’s only homosexuality that is lifted out as an exemption,” he said, going on to say that gays shouldn’t have fear about his words. ”I don’t believe I should lay a finger against them. My hope is for their salvation, not for their death.

My hope is that this guy finds some other line of work. A pastor is supposed to model Christ to his congregation. Does Mr. Knapp really think Jesus, the one who rescued the woman about to be stoned for adultery, would have urged Caesar to execute gays? Does he really think that saying someone who has not raped or murdered should nevertheless be executed is compassionate and just? Does he really think that this is the image of him that Jesus wants us to present to a skeptical world?

I don't know how big Pastor Knapp's congregation is, but if it's got a hundred or so people in it, I'll bet that some of those people have loved ones who are homosexual. How does it make them feel to hear their pastor, a man who is supposedly speaking for Christ, say that their loved ones should be killed as though they were vicious criminals? What has happened to the adage that Christians hate the sin but love the sinner?

Here's video of Knapp being interviewed on CNN:

Men like Mr. Knapp do a deep disservice both to the Gospel and to the God they claim to serve. They should get out of the ministry until they realize how unChristlike and cruel their words are and repent of their pharisaism. As long as they're in the pulpit they make it entirely too easy for atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris to caricature Christianity and for the rest of the world to ignore the claims of the Gospel.

About Birds

Byron links us to a piece at the Huffington Post on a book about birds for children. The article is titled Eleven Things You Didn't Know about Birds and has a slide show illustrating the eleven facts with a picture of the relevant bird.

The book and article are written by Bill Thompson who starts with this: Sociologists and cultural trend watchers have been decrying the broken connection between today's youth and nature. With so many stimulating digital options dominating the attention spans of young people, the worry is that we'll raise several generations who have no connection to or understanding of nature.

Birds provide an easy doorway to re-establishing this connection between kids and nature. Why? Because birds are almost everywhere, they are active, easy-to-see creatures, they often have bright, beautiful colors, and many birds sing melodious, enchanting songs. Most importantly, they capture our imagination with their ability to do something that we humans only figured out about 100 years ago: they can fly!

Go to the link for the slides. There are some beautiful birds to see there.

Escape from Camp 14

Some time ago I read a review of the book by Blaine Harden titled Escape From Camp 14, the story of a young North Korean named Shin Dong-hyuk who was born in a prison camp and managed at age twenty three to escape it - the only person who, born in a camp, has been known to have escaped.

The review prompted me to buy the book, and I encourage anyone looking for summer reading to do the same. The details of Shin's story are gripping, from the reason for his birth in the prison, to his childhood betrayal of his mother and brother, to his amazing escape, Harden's account makes you not want to stop reading.

Equally gripping is his ancillary description of the hell that is North Korea. The entire country is a prison that has deadened the souls of its people, of course, but the prison camps are places of especial savagery, cruelty, and amorality, a place where people have no hope, where all that matters is avoiding a beating and getting a scrap of food to stave off starvation.

Shin was so scarred by his experience, so emotionally stunted by what he did and what was done to him, that adjusting to life after his escape has been almost as difficult as living in Camp 14.

The book also offers a fascinating illustration of the depth of depravity to which people sink once they've conflated a deep hatred of Christianity with power. North Korea is spiritually barren and consequently the only morality is a might makes right ethic according to which whatever those who have power do is ipso facto right. It's a repetition of the trajectory of virtually every state of the twentieth century whose leaders were both atheists and politically all-powerful - from the Soviet Union to Germany to China to Cambodia to Cuba and dozens of lesser states. The stories of the miseries inflicted by these governments on their people are everywhere. North Korea is perhaps worse than most but only because its people suffer worse deprivations than have the people of other totalitarian states.

Anyway, I recommend the book. You won't be sorry you read it.

Polish Death Camps

It was doubtless an innocent mistake. The President didn't mean to offend Poles, nor did he mean to imply that WWII era extermination camps were operated by Poles. The only reason I even mention it is to show the hypocrisy of the Democrats and their media supporters who would be absolutely skewering George Bush had he made such a gaffe. We would never hear the end of it just as we still hear about Gerald Ford's "liberation of Eastern Europe", Dan Quayle's "potatoe", etc.

We also have been hearing, and will be hearing, about every error and faux pas committed by Mitt Romney from now until November. Each one will be held up as proof that Mr. Romney is intellectually unqualified to lead the nation's international affairs, but those who'll be promoting this meme will doubtless ignore Mr. Obama's howlers.

It seems that it could go without saying that no one who voted for a community organizer who assured us that he had campaigned in "all 57 states" (with one to go and two that he won't be visiting for a total of 60 states), and who offends an entire nation by referring to the "Polish death camps" should criticize anyone else's suitability and qualification to lead the nation.

Here's part of ABC's report on the story:

Poles and Polish-Americans expressed outrage today at President Obama’s reference earlier to “a Polish death camp” — as opposed to a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland.

“The White House will apologize for this outrageous error,” Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski tweeted. Sikorski said that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk “will make a statement in the morning. It’s a pity that this important ceremony was upstaged by ignorance and incompetence.”

The president had been trying to honor a famous Pole, awarding a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, a resistance fighter who sneaked behind enemy lines to bear witness to the atrocities being committed against Jews. President Obama referred to him being smuggled “into the Warsaw ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself.”

Sikorski also tonight tweeted a link to an Economist story noting that “few things annoy Poles more than being blamed for the crimes committed by the Nazi occupiers of their homeland. For many years, Polish media, diplomats and politicians have tried to persuade outsiders to stop using the phrase ‘Polish death camps’ as a shorthand description of Auschwitz and other exemplars of Nazi brutality and mass murder. Unfortunately this seems to have escaped Barack Obama’s staff [who] seem not to have noticed this.”

There's more on the Polish reaction to Mr. Obama's unfortunate blunder at the link.

Flame

First there was Stuxnet, then DuQu, now Flame. A Russian antivirus company has discovered another form of malware infecting computers in the Middle East, primarily Iran, which has amazing capabilities. Whereas Stuxnet was designed to discombobulate Iranian centrifuges used to enrich uranium to weapons grade, Flame, among other things, is designed to turn every computer it infects into a listening device for whoever planted the virus.

Wired has the story. Here's part of it:

A massive, highly sophisticated piece of malware has been newly found infecting systems in Iran and elsewhere and is believed to be part of a well-coordinated, ongoing, state-run cyberespionage operation.

The malware, discovered by Russia-based antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab, is an espionage toolkit that has been infecting targeted systems in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, the Israeli Occupied Territories and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa for at least two years.

Dubbed “Flame” by Kaspersky, the malicious code dwarfs Stuxnet in size — the groundbreaking infrastructure-sabotaging malware that is believed to have wreaked havoc on Iran’s nuclear program in 2009 and 2010.

Although Flame has both a different purpose and composition than Stuxnet, and appears to have been written by different programmers, its complexity, the geographic scope of its infections and its behavior indicate strongly that a nation-state is behind Flame, rather than common cyber-criminals — marking it as yet another tool in the growing arsenal of cyberweaponry.

The researchers say that Flame may be part of a parallel project created by contractors who were hired by the same nation-state team that was behind Stuxnet and its sister malware, DuQu.

Early analysis of Flame by the Lab indicates that it’s designed primarily to spy on the users of infected computers and steal data from them, including documents, recorded conversations and keystrokes. It also opens a backdoor to infected systems to allow the attackers to tweak the toolkit and add new functionality.

The malware, which is 20 megabytes when all of its modules are installed, contains multiple libraries, SQLite3 databases, various levels of encryption — some strong, some weak — and 20 plug-ins that can be swapped in and out to provide various functionality for the attackers. It even contains some code that is written in the LUA programming language — an uncommon choice for malware.

Kaspersky Lab is calling it “one of the most complex threats ever discovered.”

There's much more on Flame in the Wired article. It's fascinating what's going on behind the scenes to try to avoid open war with Iran. It's also fascinating to think that we probably don't know the half of it.

Romney's Commencement Address

Columnist Dennis Prager examines a speech given by Mitt Romney at Liberty University's Commencement and notes that the speech tells us something about Mitt Romney's view of America. He also opines that the speech is not one that President Obama would give. I don't know if that's true, but read Prager's column and see what you think. Here are the highlights:

Romney: "You know who you are. And you know whom you will serve. Not all colleges instill that kind of confidence . . . ." This is a truism. Most American universities seek to graduate men and women who are as committed to secularism as nearly all the members of faculty are. In contrast, at traditional Christian and Jewish schools, the aim is, as Romney said, to produce students who know "whom [they] will serve."

What Romney is asking is this: If one is not morally accountable to God, to whom or what is one morally accountable? Most universities will respond: to one's conscience. But those who adhere to Judeo-Christian values do not trust the conscience alone. What Nazi or Communist mass murderer was not at peace with his conscience? The conscience is as easily manipulated as the heart (the heart being the other guide to behavior among most college graduates).

Romney: "Moral certainty, clear standards, and a commitment to spiritual ideals will set you apart in a world that searches for meaning...."

The death of God has not only led to moral uncertainty; the secular left actually boasts of its moral uncertainty. Unlike the religious, who have a black and white view of moral issues (so the left tells us), those on the left struggle with moral complexity. But this is self-delusion. The left is as morally certain about its positions as the most fundamentalist Christian. Where is the left's moral uncertainty about same-sex marriage? About abolishing capital punishment? About race-based affirmative action? About higher taxes? Indeed, about anything the left believes in?

Romney: "That said, your values will not always be the object of public admiration. In fact, the more you live by your beliefs, the more you will endure the censure of the world."

Is that ever true. Those of us who adhere to Judeo-Christian values and live a religious life are mocked as fools when not dismissed as dangerous. If you believe that nature was designed by a Creator, you are regarded as an anti-science buffoon. If you get your values from the Bible, you are considered a living anachronism.

Romney: "Harvard historian David Landes devoted his lifelong study to understanding why some civilizations rise, and why others falter. His conclusion: Culture makes all the difference. Not natural resources, not geography, but what people believe and value. . . . For those who graduate from high school, get a full-time job, and marry before they have their first child, the probability that they will be poor is 2 percent. But, if those things are absent, 76 percent will be poor. Culture matters...."

This is the key to understanding the underclass here and in Europe. But it is the antithesis of what is taught at American universities. They -- and the rest of the left -- teach that it is not values or culture that most determines human behavior. Violent crime is not caused by a murderer's lack of moral values, father, self-discipline, church life, or marriage, but by poverty and/or racism.

Romney: "Central to America's rise to global leadership is our Judeo-Christian tradition . . . ."

Exactly right. Every free country on earth was formed by Christianity or shaped by a Christian country that imposed it (India and Japan, for example). And the freest of them all, America, has been the most Judeo-based Christian country in the world.

Romney: "The American culture promotes personal responsibility, the dignity of work, the value of education, the merit of service, devotion to a purpose greater than self, and, at the foundation, the pre-eminence of the family...."

And each one of these values has been under siege by the left. The left undermines personal responsibility by excusing the irresponsibility of all but white Christian males; undermines the dignity of work with ever-increasing entitlements; shifts "the merit of service" from individuals and communal institutions to the state; and weakens the family by strengthening people's reliance on the government, and by removing all stigma to unwed motherhood.

Prager closes with his assertion that Mr. Obama would not have given this speech. What do you think?

Fishtown and Belmont

City Journal's Clark Whelton talks about Charles Murray's new book Coming Apart in which Murray describes a deterioration of the moral character of the white working class. It's Murray's prescription for this deterioration that Whelton focuses on:

Murray blames a deterioration of shared values such as honesty, hard work, marriage, and religion, a decline especially damaging to working-class Americans. For this cultural malaise, Murray proposes a cultural cure:

The prerequisite for any eventual policy solution consists of a simple cultural change: It must once again be taken for granted that a male in the prime of life who isn’t even looking for work is behaving badly.

There can be exceptions for those who are genuinely unable to work or are house-husbands. But reasonably healthy working-age males who aren’t working or even looking for work, who live off their girlfriends, families or the state, must once again be openly regarded by their fellow citizens as lazy, irresponsible and unmanly. Whatever their social class, they are, for want of a better word, bums.

It’s startling to see “bums”—a word rarely heard now outside the world of baseball—in cold print. But that’s just Murray’s point: “We need to drop our nonjudgmentalism.” If men of disreputable conduct are treated respectfully, Murray says, they will never abandon their bad habits.

This is exactly right, and it applies to women as well as men. When women choose to have children out of wedlock, for example, they should not be condemned but neither should they be cooed over and congratulated. To do so not only evinces an appalling lack of understanding of the difficulties the child will face, but it also sends exactly the wrong message to other girls in the young mother's ambit. It tells them that unwed motherhood is a wonderful thing.

Nothing could be further from the truth for most women and their children (or society). Unwed motherhood frequently results in diminished prospects and increased likelihood of poverty for both mother and child, especially if there are no grandparents in the picture to provide support.

To bring to life this wealth of disturbing data on white America, Murray creates two theoretical communities: an upper-class town he calls “Belmont” and an urban working-class neighborhood called “Fishtown.” Though both of his constructs are fictional, they are also the names of real places: Belmont, Massachusetts, is a pleasant, well-to-do suburb just west of Boston, while Fishtown is a lower-income neighborhood in northeastern Philadelphia.

Murray’s task is to persuade the successful residents of the real Belmont and similar communities that they can help repair America’s damaged culture if they show some constructive disdain toward feckless men who live in the real Fishtown....some men in Fishtown have steady jobs. But many others are not steadily employed and not necessarily looking for work, either.

These men get by thanks to a combination of government programs and a variety of personal-subsistence strategies: food stamps, Medicaid, welfare, unemployment checks, manipulating the disability and foster-care systems, pushing a little dope, scavenging, misdemeanors, working off the books, hustling odd jobs, vending their blood, and attaching themselves to working women in the classic style that’s been part of urban America for decades.

Murray calls this way of life unmanly, and indeed it is, but Whelton has a different word for it. He calls these feckless men "remittance" men after the 19th century British practice of paying the family ne'er-do-wells to stay away:

In nineteenth-century Britain, sons, brothers, and uncles whose disreputable conduct made them an embarrassment to their families sometimes received an offer they couldn’t refuse: “Move to Capetown, Jamaica, or Tasmania, and—provided you never come back to England — we will send you a monthly remittance. It won’t be a lot, but you’ll be able to live without working.”

Today we do the same. We in essence pay taxes to keep Fishtown's denizens from overflowing into Belmont. Our entitlement programs are a way of buying off the lower classes, of bribing them to not riot and to confine their slothful, violent, and morally improvident lifestyles to Fishtown:

Do the residents of Belmont (median household income $95,000) and countless other communities like it have a similar understanding of Fishtown’s feckless men? The Belmonts of America help fund the various government payments that keep neighborhoods like Fishtown afloat. In return for remitting to the tax man, Belmont, Massachusetts (83.5 percent white, 11.1 percent Asian, 3 percent Hispanic, and 1.8 percent black) gets a measure of isolation from the troubles and failures of urban neighborhoods....For years Murray warned that anti-poverty programs can become traps, with “perverse incentives” that lure the poor into lives of permanent dependence.

Perverse incentives create perverse cultures: in ours, being a moral person means a willingness to send money. Belmont expresses moral concern for Fishtown the way that Victorian remittance-payers dealt with Uncle Henry: by sending cash. Did relatives in England really care if Henry blew his stipend in a Hong Kong [casino]? Or if he got mixed up in shady schemes in Calcutta? Did they call him a bum for not marrying the women who bore his children? Everyone understood that Henry’s job was not to lead an exemplary life. His job was to take the remittance money and stay away.

This is, of course, what our modern welfare system does. Whether the recipients are white or black, they're given enough to pacify them. No one really thinks that anyone is actually helped by these programs, no one thinks that a government handout improves anyone's moral fiber. The only purpose, other than to allow ourselves to feel good about not letting the indigent starve, is to serve as a bribe. If our largesse only serves to perpetuate their dysfunctionality, well, that's too bad but at least we're "doing something."

Whelton concludes with this:

In remittance culture, morality equals money. Raising taxes, therefore, becomes a moral crusade. New sources of revenue must be found, and quickly. If the remittance dries up, remittance men might come home. This lesson has not been lost on Occupy Wall Street. They will continue to play Uncle Henry until someone remits.

Indeed. Entitlement programs are, to a large extent, a kind of protection payment we make to keep those who lack the virtues necessary to earn an honest living in society from showing up at our front door. Whelton's essay and Murray's book are both very much worth reading.

Remembering Our Heroes

These are the sort of men we honor on Memorial Day. Take a little time to read through their stories and thank God that our nation can still produce such valor.

To all who have served our country in uniform, and especially to those who are combat veterans, we at Viewpoint offer you our profoundest gratitude.

The End of Women's Rights?

Fay Voshell argues that women's rights are endangered in America but the threat doesn't come from any of the usual suspects, in fact it comes from quite an unexpected source - radical feminists. Here's the crux of Voshell's column:

The signature achievement of radical feminists agitating during the 1960s and early '70s was 1973's Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision, which essentially legitimized abortion on demand throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy.

Since that time, leftist feminists have clung to the absolute right to abortion, tolerating no exceptions to what they consider an inviolable right. The fact is that no argument on behalf of the unborn human being has been deemed a reason to curb abortion rights. Any woman in the U.S. can walk into an abortion clinic and be rid of her unborn baby for any or no reason at all.

How ironic is it, then, that absolutism concerning abortion may prove to be the Achilles heel of the entire leftist feminist movement? That Achilles heel is sex-selective abortion, which is gaining a foothold in Canada and the United States.

According to Adam Cassandra, a Canadian author writing for Life News, a recent study reveals that third-world immigrants from the East, especially those from India and China, are bringing to the West their preference for male babies. Women are using sex-selective abortions to get rid of female babies in order to try again for the male infants they crave.

The widespread gendercide of the East has now immigrated to the West. Little girls in the free West, where equal rights for boys and girls, men and women have largely been achieved after centuries of struggle, are now in jeopardy because of the absolutist interpretation of abortion rights.

The tragedy of female feticide and the inevitable erosion of women's rights is amplified by the noted absence of a megaphone from those who make themselves out to be defenders of women.

As Patrick B. Craine of LifeSiteNews noted in his article entitled "Woman-killing in the name of women's rights," abortion rights activists such as Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada have come out in favor of sex-selective abortions, claiming that restrictions on sex-selective abortions would be a "dangerous road to go down" because "women have the right to decide" even if they want to get rid of a girl-baby.

So there we have it. In the opinion of leftist feminists, it is better to stick to the ideological absolute of abortion on demand -- no matter the consequences -- than it is to rise to the defense of unborn girls in the name of women's rights.... How can any woman claim to be a defender of the female sex in any respect when she advocates choices that exterminate unborn little girls?

Feminists have embraced an ideological construct which declares loudly and clearly that any woman can decide that her unborn little girl is worth less than a little boy. They have gone along with the worst of third-world ethics, declaring female feticide a "choice" they can live with.

There's more to Voshell's argument, but she makes a convincing point in the part I've quoted. Sex-selection abortion essentially discriminates against females and the feminists are just fine with that, but if women can be treated unequally as infants in the womb, what logical argument do the feminists have for opposing other kinds of discriminatory conduct? If the law favors boys in the womb what rationale is there for opposing such favoritism outside the womb? It's a good question.

Thanks to BillT for the link.

Blackout

There's been an eerie silence in the media concerning one of the biggest news stories of the year, a story that is, at least in terms of jurisprudence, historic. Forty three Catholic dioceses and organizations are suing the Obama administration in federal court over the attempt to force religious institutions to provide contraceptive and abortifacients with all of their health insurance.

Despite this unprecedented, massive legal pressure religious institutions are bringing to bear on the Obama administration there's been scarcely a peep about it in the major media. Brent Bozell of Media Research Center compares the blackout to the Chinese communists withholding news for 20 years that the United States landed on the moon because our achievement reflected poorly on their government.

Here's Bozell:

ABC's World News and NBC's Nightly News completely failed to report this historic event! CBS Evening News only dedicated a brief 19 seconds to the story and framed it as a birth control debate. By contrast, ABC led their evening broadcast with the sentencing of the Rutgers student who spied on his gay roommate with a web camera. That story received three minutes and 30 seconds of coverage at the top of the newscast.

This is not a mistake or an editorial oversight by the broadcast networks. This is a deliberate and insidious withholding of national news to protect the 'Chosen One' who ABC, CBS and NBC have worked so hard to elect and are now abusing their journalistic influence to reelect. Even when a network like CBS mentions the suit ever-so-briefly, they botch the issue by framing it as a contraception lawsuit instead of what they know it to be: a religious freedom issue. It's bogus, dishonest ‒ a flat out lie.

The fact is that the Catholic Church has unleashed legal Armageddon on the administration, promising 'we will not comply' with a health law that strips Catholics of their religious liberty. If this isn't 'news' then there's no such thing as news. This should be leading newscasts and the subject of special, in-depth reports. Instead, these networks are sending a clear message to all Americans that the networks will go to any lengths ‒ even censoring from the public an event of this historic magnitude ‒ to prevent the release of any information that will hurt Obama's chances of re-election.

Elizabeth Scalia at The Anchoress largely agrees with Bozell but thinks that the real reason for spiking the story has more to do with fear:

Well, that [Bozell's interpretation] might be the message they are sending. But I think the larger message that perhaps they hadn’t meant to transmit is one of stark terror. Like the kid who hides under the blanket figuring the boogeyman won’t see him, the mainstream media has decided that if they just ignore the 12 lawsuits launched against the Obama administration by 43 Catholic entities, the reality of them will go away; they simply won’t exist, and the Supreme Court won’t see them, either!

Glen Foden also adds his thoughts on the mysterious media silence:

In any case, it's little wonder that no one really trusts the mainstream media to give us an accurate picture of what's going on in the world.

Caring About Kids

When next the president pontificates on how we all need to do more to raise the educational achievement of our nation's children perhaps someone in the audience will burst out in a good horselaugh. Mr. Obama might care about children, but he appears to care much more about the opinion of the nation's teachers unions.

For example, Washington D.C., perhaps the most distressed city in the United States in terms of education - its schools rank 51st in state rankings for academic achievement, but first for school violence - has a federally funded scholarship program which provides the wherewithal for poor parents to send their children to private schools where they can learn without having to spend the entire day fearing for their safety. These are the schools the children of most Washington politicians, including the Obamas, attend.

According to columnist Mona Charen the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program is a small federal outlay that provides scholarships to some 1,600 students to attend private or parochial schools. Since the program’s inception in 2004, more than 10,000 families have applied to participate. The average income of OSP participants is $24,000.

It's a great chance for kids who want to succeed to be given a decent chance to escape the asylums to which they would otherwise be condemned, but Mr. Obama is trying to kill it. He did the same thing in 2011, but House Speaker John Boehner, one of those racist Republicans, managed to save it. Now Mr. Obama is again trying to deprive thousands of poor young black kids a chance to go to a school of the same quality as the one his own daughters attend.

Here's Charen on the administration's reasoning:

The administration claims that it “strongly opposes” the OSP because it “has not yielded improved student achievement.” But as the Black Alliance for Educational Options reports:

The most recent federal evaluation of the OSP showed that students who used their scholarships had a 91 percent graduation rate — 21 percent higher than those who were offered but did not use scholarships and more than 30 points higher than D.C. public school students. The program has also produced gains in reading.

Like a black Bull Conner, Mr. Obama is standing in the doorway of D.C. public schools, only instead of keeping black kids out he's keeping them in. As is his custom he proposes increasing spending on public schools, but as Charen points out, this is just a waste of money:

The District now spends $18,000 per student. More than 60 percent of District fourth-graders cannot read at grade level. Only 14 percent of eighth-graders are proficient in reading. The Washington Post reports that in math, the District has, “by a wide margin, the nation’s highest proportion of fourth and eighth graders in the ‘below basic’ category — and the lowest in proficient/advanced.” During the 2007/2008 academic year, police received more than 3,500 calls from public schools, 900 of them for violent incidents.

Mr. Obama seems unfazed. Teachers oppose private education. Teachers want the money for their schools and for themselves, and teachers vote. That seems to be the long and short of it.

Perhaps I'm too cynical, but if Mr. Obama really cared about kids he'd move heaven and earth to get them out of the hell-holes to which the Democratic party has condemned them.

Whenever I write about this I urge readers to watch the documentary titled Waiting for Superman. It's a vivid picture of how desperate some of these kids are to get scholarships like the OSP and to get a seat in a private school.