Maintaining Speed

R.R. Reno traces the evolution of the Democratic Party from its segregationist, nativist, blue-collar roots to the political home of upscale white progressives that it is today. The key to the party's success, Reno asserts, has been the promotion of a sense of "solidarity-in-marginality" in which disparate groups comprised of individuals who see themselves as living outside the socio-cultural mainstream coalesce out of a shared sense of their own marginality.

In order to keep this coalition together, though, liberal progressives must constantly be producing new demons, bigots, and oppressors against which they can fight the good fight. When they run out of such targets they must invent issues to bait their foes into coming out of the woodwork - transgender bathrooms for example. Reno calls this "bigot-baiting."

He has some interesting things to say about it. Here are a few:

The problem, of course, is that a solidarity-in-­marginality coalition capable of commanding electoral majorities has an increasingly hard time maintaining its plausibility. How long can a coalition that wins elections and exercises power pose as the party of the marginalized? At some point, political success undermines the urgency of a rainbow coalition. The tensions between the One Percent focus of feminism and the LGBT movements and the interests of immigrants and African Americans becomes more visible, to say nothing of the disconnect between the base of the Democratic party from the economic and cultural interests of those who fund and run it.

To motivate their voter base, liberals have invested a great deal in identifying ever-new patterns of discrimination. Notions such as “microaggression” and “intersectionality” reflect second-wave (or is it third-wave?) liberation politics. They gain currency because of the law of political supply and demand. The twenty-first-century Democratic solidarity-in-marginality coalition is held together by anxieties about exclusion and domination by the “other,” which is to say by Republican voters. This ­creates a strong political demand for narratives of oppression, which liberal intellectuals are happy to supply.

This dynamic operates most visibly at our universities, where well-off, mostly white liberals—the post-Protestant WASPs—rule. The legitimacy of this elite depends upon its commitment to “include” the “excluded.” It goes without saying that an Ivy League administrator must manage the optics very carefully to sustain “marginality” among the talented students who have gained admission. “Microaggression” and other key terms in the ever-­evolving scholasticism of discrimination thus play very useful roles. They renew the threats of discrimination and exclusion, and this reinforces the power of liberal elites.

Their institutional ascendancy is necessary to protect and provide patronage to the “excluded.” I’m quite certain that if political correctness succeeds in suppressing “microaggressions,” we’ll soon hear about “nano-­aggressions.” The logic of solidarity in marginality requires oppression, and solidarity in marginality is necessary in order to sustain liberal power.

Outside our universities, life is less theoretical and the rhetoric more demotic. The standard approach has been to renew solidarity in marginality by demonizing conservatives as racists, xenophobes, and “haters.” To maintain loyalty, the Democratic party incites anxiety about discrimination and exclusion. A form of reverse race-baiting, perhaps best thought of as bigot-baiting, has become crucial for sustaining the Democratic coalition, which is why we hear so much about “hate” these days. At the recent gay pride parade in New York, a few weeks after the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, marchers held aloft an avenue-wide banner that read, “Republican Hate Kills!”

It’s important to remember a first law of politics for solidarity in marginality: Political success makes it harder and harder to sustain solidarity in marginality, and this leads to bigot-baiting. We’ve seen an increase of harsh denunciations, not in spite of progressive victories on issues like gay marriage, but because of them. When Obama became president, a superficial observer might have con­cluded that the election of a black man to the nation’s highest office would diminish the political currency of anti-­racist rhetoric. But this ignores the symbolic needs of the Democratic party. Black Lives Matter and redoubled attacks on discrimination are demanded by racial pro­gress. Solidarity in marginality needs to be renewed, especially when the marginal gain access to power.

This pattern of rhetorical escalation because of pro­gress in the fight against discrimination is also evident in characterizations of Trump voters as racists and bigots. Leon Wieseltier says of them, “They kindle, in the myopia of their pain, to racism and nativism and xenophobia and misogyny and homophobia and anti-Semitism.” No mainstream figure talked this way when I was young—and when these descriptions were much more plausible. Incendiary, denunciatory rhetoric was characteristic of a marginal figure like George Wallace, who spoke of “sissy-britches welfare people” and called civil-rights protesters “anarchists.”

It’s commonplace now for liberals to talk this way. This is not because America has become more racially, ethnically, religiously, or sexually divided. All the indicators suggest otherwise. It’s because the Democratic party depends on a constant bombardment of denunciation to gin up fear. That someone as intelligent as Wieseltier participates in bigot-baiting in such blatant ways indicates how indispensable it has become for maintaining liberal power.

Reading Reno's column I thought of the movie Speed. In the film a disgruntled explosives expert has rigged a bomb to a bus in such a way that if the speed of the bus drops below 50 mph the bomb will go off, destroy the bus, and kill all aboard.

Progressivism is a bit like that bus. It can't slow down, much less stop. It has to keep finding new sources of hate and bigotry to battle against or else it'll perish of ideological inanition. If it can't find these bugaboos in a society which has largely eradicated the old bigotries then it has to manufacture new ones. In any case, progressivism, by its nature, can never reach a point where it can say that we have finally achieved a satisfactory society. Were progressives ever to acknowledge that we've finally attained the ideal society they'd no longer be progressives, they'd be conservatives, and that would be unendurable for them.

Reno closes with this:

The present crusade for transgender bathroom privileges in high schools, like so much of the progressive agenda in recent years, is not about civil rights. It’s about renewing the symbolism of oppression and finding the “haters” that rich, mostly white liberals need to sustain their political power.

Should they fail to come up with something, anything, to point to as yet another example of oppression it'd be like the speed of the bus falling below 50 mph and would be the death of progressivism.

China's Christian Future

Chinese writer and dissident Yu Jie gives us a fascinating glimpse of the relationship between Christianity and the the Chinese government in an essay at First Things.

His column is a bit lengthy, so I'll just hit some of the highlights and urge you to read the whole thing for yourself at the link. He begins by citing an astonishing statistic:

At the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, when the Communist party defeated the Nationalists and founded the People’s Republic of China, Christians in China numbered half a million. Yet almost seventy years later, under the Chinese government’s harsh suppression, that population has reached more than sixty million, according to Fenggang Yang, a sociologist at Purdue University. The number grows by several million each year, a phenomenon some have described as a gushing well or geyser. At this rate, by 2030, Christians in China will exceed 200 million, surpassing the United States and making China the country with the largest Christian population in the world.

The beginnings of this immense growth can be traced back to two moments in contemporary Chinese history: the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 and the Tiananmen Square massacre instigated by Deng Xiaoping in 1989. Countless innocent lives were lost as a result of these two cataclysms, and the people’s belief in Marxism-Leninism and Maoism was destroyed. These events opened up a great spiritual void, and the Chinese began searching for a new faith.

Jie goes on to describe how these two events changed his parents' views and his own of the Chinese government and system. He also discusses in some detail how the government is seeking to rehabilitate Confucianism and simultaneously harass and persecute Christians. Here's some of what he writes about the latter:

In China, home churches outnumber government-sponsored churches three to one. Against home churches that refuse to cooperate, the government has waged a large-scale cleansing campaign in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, particularly in the city of Wenzhou, known as “China’s Jerusalem,” where 15 percent of the population is Christian.

In two years, more than two hundred churches in Zhejiang have been demolished, over two thousand crosses removed. The scene of the cross being removed from a church in Ya village, Huzhou city, on August 7, 2015, was typical. Migrant workers hired by government officials flipped over the parish car, then the police came.

They arrested the pastor, intimidated parishioners, sequestered church grounds, and pepper-sprayed protesters. They charged into the church with dogs. Buddhist monks and Taoist priests hired by the officials came to chant and perform rites in front of the church. Dozens, including the church attorney, were detained and interrogated.

Zhang Kai, a human rights lawyer who had been providing legal support to churches in Zhejiang province, was taken into custody on August 25, 2015, the day before he was due to meet David Saperstein, United States ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom.

Six months later Zhang was forced to go on television, stating: “I have broken the law, disturbed the peace, endangered national security, and violated the ethics of my profession. I deeply regret my actions.” Emaciated, his body cruelly bent by torture, he was virtually unrecognizable. In Xi’s China, television has replaced courts of law. Televised confessions are the fashion of the day.

Sadly, the Obama administration sits and watches, reluctant to put more pressure on the Chinese government and push for reform. Despite the oppression and repression, the Chinese church is determined to weather the tyranny.

However, Chinese Christians have refused to give in. One of the phrases I have heard most often among them is: “The greater the persecution, the greater the revival.”...They talk about how during the Cultural Revolution, the Christian population in Wenzhou actually grew many times over.

Nor is the growth of Christianity occurring only among the poor and uneducated:

Since the dawn of the new millennium, Christianity in China has redirected its growth toward a hundred or so central cities throughout the country. Groups of young, well-educated, active professionals have gathered in urban churches, smashing the stereotype in many Chinese people’s minds of Christians as elderly, infirm, sick, or disabled.

These churches are unable to register with the Ministry of Civil Affairs and acquire legal status, but they are a first step toward Christians assuming leadership in the development of a Chinese civil society independent of government control. They have websites, assembly locations, schedules, listservs, communiqués, and even publications, which cannot be sold but can be circulated among church members.

Jie was himself heavily influenced by Reformers like John Calvin and the philosophical/political consequences of Reformed theology:

Reading Calvin, the theologian of total depravity and predestination, I have come to see him as a more important Founding Father of the United States than Washington himself. General election, habeas corpus, freedom of contract, equality before the law, jury trial, common law, open market, freedom of speech and press, freedom of religion—these are all reinforced by Calvin’s legacy and the legacy of the Bible.

Thus I became a classical liberal or, in American parlance today, a conservative — a rarity among my Chinese peers. Calvin, Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, von Mises, and Hayek are all formative for me, though some are not Christian in the ­traditional sense.

No one’s influence, though, has been greater on me than Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s.... Bonhoeffer also perceived that Nazism has its roots in man’s betrayal of God and his worship of himself. The same could be said of Communism. Solzhenitsyn has called atheism the central pivot of Communism, and a hatred of God the principal driving force behind Marxist thought.

When man displaces God he puts himself in God's place. Thus atheistic assumptions almost invariably undergird tyrannies. Here's Jie's account of the price he had to pay for his political activism:

On the night of December 10, 2010, as the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony honoring [my dear friend Liu Xiaobo, the courageous human rights activist] was taking place in Oslo, I was kidnapped by the secret police and taken to the outskirts of Beijing.

They beat and tortured me for hours, breaking my fingers one by one. I blacked out and was taken to a hospital. A hospital in Changping, a suburb of Beijing, refused to take me, saying I was “hopeless.” Then I was taken to a hospital in Beijing.

My life was saved. For days my wife was under house arrest and did not know my whereabouts, or even if I was alive. She was seized by a sinking feeling and could not eat or sleep. In a few days most of her hair fell out. Before I lost consciousness, I prayed: “Lord, if you take me, then make me a martyr. I am not worthy, but I am willing.”

In that moment, I clearly heard his voice: “As surely as I live, not a hair of your head will fall to the ground.” And: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” God let me live, for he has greater plans for me.

On January 11, 2012, as he did for the Israelites in Egypt, God led my family out of China, on to the capital of the United States of America.

Yu Jie with wife and son (2012)

The secret police had warned me: You are number one on the personal list of “two hundred intellectuals to bury alive” kept by Zhou Yongkang, then secretary of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission. Who would have imagined that today I would be writing freely, praying freely, breathing freely, standing on free soil, while Zhou, once nicknamed China’s “security tsar,” would be sentenced to life in prison for corruption by his political enemies? In God’s plan, tyrants count for little.

Jie's is a wonderful, inspiring story. Read it all at the link.

How Will the French People Respond?

M.G. Oprea explains in a piece at The Federalist why yesterday's attack in Nice portends social upheaval in France. Here's part of her column:

As France absorbs the shock of another mass-casualty attack, something dangerous is stirring in the heart of the republic. France’s chief of intelligence, Patrick Calvar, warned members of a French parliamentary commission earlier this week that if another terror attack were to happen in France, or something akin to the New Year’s Eve mass sexual assaults in Germany, it could spark a “civil war.”

Calvar expressed concern about a populist backlash that would lead to a “confrontation” between ultra-right groups, such as Bloc Identitaire, and the rest of the country—especially Arab and North African immigrants.

With the revelation this week, due to a botched cover-up, that far more women were sexually assaulted in Germany on New Year’s Eve than was previously known, and the latest tragic terrorist attack in Nice, the possibility of major destabilization in the country seems all the more likely.

But a revolt in France wouldn’t just be a reaction to outside events. It would also come from deep within France’s unique culture and history. Indeed, France is likely to be the first European country to experience societal upheaval and a radical reordering as a result of immigration. There are signs such an upheaval is already underway.

The revelation Oprea was referring to regarding the sexual assaults in Germany were contained in a recent article in the Washington Post which revealed that the New Year's eve assaults in Cologne and Hamburg were far more numerous and widespread than had been previously reported. Over two thousand women were assaulted by approximately 1200 men, most of whom were apparently Middle Eastern or North African. One wonders how close Germans are to the tipping point in their tolerance of refugees.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. Hillary Clinton has opined that we're not bringing enough refugees into the country and that if she's elected president she'll raise the number by some 550%.

The Trump people are doubtless going to be turning that into a devastating campaign ad along the lines, perhaps, of this:

Violent Crime at Historic Lows

Amidst all the depressing news of the day there's a bit of good news to share, although you may have trouble believing it. David Harsanyi, senior editor at The Federalist, makes the case that violent crime is lower today than at any time in the last fifty years.

You'll have to follow the link to Harsanyi's essay to see all his graphs, but here's some of his argument:

Homicide rates, for example, have been falling to the point where in 2014 — the last year of FBI data offered — it was at 4.5 per 100,000 people, which is the lowest rate recorded since 1963, when it was at 4.6 per 100,000 people. We know there was a slight uptick in violent crime in 2015, probably making it the second lowest year for homicides in the past 50.

Put it this way: In 1990, in New York City there were 2,245 homicides. In 2015, there were 355. In 1992, Los Angeles County had a record high of 2,589 homicides. There were 655 over the last 12 months. In 1992, Chicago saw 943 murders, or a rate of 34 murders per 100,000 citizens. Although it still owns a far higher murder rate than most major cities, in 2014 there were 432 murders and in 2015 488. Last year, Dallas saw a spike in murders, yet the 10.7 homicides per 100,000 residents was the city’s fourth-lowest total since police started keeping track in 1930. In Denver 95 people were murdered in 1992, 34 in 2014, and 50 (a nine-year high) in 2015.

The graph Harsanyi uses in his essay to illustrate this is remarkable in how vividly it represents this drop. He goes on to talk about gun violence:

After the Dallas shooting of five officers, President Obama, as he always does, talked about more gun control. “We must take a hard look at the ease with which wrongdoers can get their hands on deadly weapons and the frequency with which they use them,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch insisted.

So it’s worth mentioning that this drop in violence has coincided with a spike in the number of guns Americans have purchased. We are told that the availability of guns (not the amount of people who buy them, but the guns themselves) is the problem because they are bought in places with relaxed laws and sold to criminals and terrorists in places with stricter gun control laws.

The graph showing this data is so stunning that I want to share it:

Harsanyi writes:

Despite this reality, according to a 2013 Pew poll, 56 percent of Americans believe gun crimes have risen compared to 20 years ago. This even though overall gun death rates have declined — and let’s include homicides and suicides (most gun deaths are suicide) — by 31 percent over that period.

His next claim, perhaps, may also seem counterintuitive to a lot of African-Americans, particularly young men, so many of whom believe that they're less safe now than ever:

The recent deaths of a number of African Americans at cops’ hands is also highly troubling, but .... [w]hile that debate rages, it’s important to note that African Americans are not only safer today than they were 20 years ago (and certainly 50 years ago), they have benefited tremendously from lower crime rates. Over the last 20 years, crime among African-American youth has fallen by 47 percent.

So why do we have the sense that things are much worse than Harsanyi's data warrant? Perhaps one reason is that the liberal media, eager to confirm the narrative that the U.S. is a violent, racist country, hypes any violence that's gun-related or race-related, feeding it to us 24/7 on cable and creating the impression that things are much more dire than they really are. Perhaps, too, social media reinforces the narrative by showing us actual episodes of violence that we'd never have seen and never have been more than vaguely aware of a few years ago. Finally, there are too many politicians who wish to exploit the occurrence of violent crimes to push their political agendas and who distort and misrepresent statistics in ways that mislead and misinform the public.

It's important that when an incident first occurs we remind ourselves that there's almost certainly more to it than what we see on a video and that it's irresponsible to draw conclusions about the incident until we have a reasonable grasp of the relevant facts. It's crucial that we strive to assess these incidents critically, objectively, and fairly, basing our judgments upon the facts and not upon our prejudices.

When we fail in this basic moral and intellectual duty and allow our emotions to rule our judgment, the initial tragedy is often compounded by even more tragedy as we've seen in Ferguson, Baltimore, and too many other cities.

Playing Dice with the Universe

From time to time we've talked about the argument for an intelligent designer of the universe based on cosmic fine-tuning (okay, maybe a little more often than just "from time to time"). Anyway, here's a four minute video by Justin Brierly on the subject that serves as a nice primer for those not wishing to get too bogged down in technical aspects of the argument:

Brierly is the host of the weekly British radio show Unbelievable which is available on podcast. Each week Justin brings together believers and unbelievers to talk about some issue related to matters of faith. The discussions are almost always pleasant, informative, and Justin does an excellent job moderating them. They're usually what such conversations should be like, but too often aren't.

If you'd like to sign up for the podcast or browse the archives of past shows which have featured discussions on almost every topic related to religious belief you can go to the Unbelievable website here. For those readers who might prefer a slightly more elaborate explication try this post and the debate it links to.

Black Rhetoric Matters

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has dared to go where most politicians have feared to tread. In a recent CBS interview the mayor got on a roll about the race problem in America and said a lot that's hard to deny but doesn't often get said:

It's hard to believe that John Dickerson, the CBS interviewer, isn't aware of the rhetoric at some of the Black Lives Matter rallies. Here, for example, are BLM demonstrators demanding dead cops:

Here are BLM demonstrators chanting "Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon."

And then there are people like this woman calling for the murder of whites:

As Jonah Goldberg writes at National Review:

[T]here is something particularly vile and disgusting in the way many of the leading masters of sanctimony keep changing their standards. When a registered Democrat and Muslim murdered people in Orlando in the name of ISIS, it was outrageous to suggest that maybe we shouldn’t point fingers at Christian conservatives or the NRA.

When Gabby Giffords was shot by an utterly apolitical schizophrenic, Paul Krugman blamed it on Michele Bachmann’s “eliminationist rhetoric.” The Democratic party almost en masse blamed it on some crosshairs on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page. The Orwellians leapt out of their bunkers and started memory-holing martial metaphors.

But now, I gather, any suggestion that rhetoric from Black Lives Matter influenced these murderers is beyond the pale.

Barack Obama does nothing to help matters whenever he cites statistics like these:

According to various studies — not just one but a wide range of studies that have been carried out over a number of years — African-Americans are 30 percent more likely than whites to be pulled over.

After being pulled over African-Americans and Hispanics are three times more likely to be searched.

Last year African-Americans were shot by police at more than twice the rate of whites.

African-Americans are arrested at twice the rate of whites.

African-American defendants are 75 percent more likely to be charged with offenses carrying mandatory minimums. They receive sentences that are almost 10 percent longer than comparable whites arrested for the same crime.

So that if you add it all up, the African-American and Hispanic population, who make up only 30 percent of the general population, make up more than half of the incarcerated population.

The problem is not that his numbers are wrong, but that he misleads by neglecting to give them any context. The sentencing stats, for example, make no mention of the circumstances of the arrest, whether the suspect was cooperative or defiant, whether he had a prior record, or any of the other factors taken into account when a sentence is handed down.

In any case, BLM, or at least a lot of people who associate with them, have blood on their hands, five good men are dead in Dallas as a result of rhetoric like theirs, and Giuliani is correct to identify them as haters.

Hillary's Racial Pandering

Hillary Clinton's recent comments in the wake of the Dallas murders seem bizarrely beside the point. She told Wolf Blitzer at CNN that:

I will call for white people, like myself, to put ourselves in the shoes of those African-American families who fear every time their children go somewhere, who have to have ‘The Talk,’ about, you now, how to really protect themselves [from police], when they’re the ones who should be expecting protection from encounters with police.

Despite the impression created by the media, a relative handful of innocent blacks are killed by police each year, and few of these killings rise to the level of deliberate murder. As discussed last week almost twice as many whites are killed each year by police as are blacks. Meanwhile, five hundred blacks, including a lot of children, are murdered annually by other blacks just in the city of Chicago, and if it weren't for the police that number would be far higher. The point is, black parents who fear for their children's safety have much more to fear from other blacks than they do from the police. For Ms. Clinton to suggest otherwise, is demagoguery.

She goes on to say:

I’m going to be talking to white people, we’re the ones who have to start listening to the legitimate cries coming from our African-American fellow citizens.

Unfortunately, she doesn't explain exactly why whites have to listen to blacks or how listening will solve any of the intractable problems blacks face in their lives. How will white attentiveness solve the problem of fatherlessness in the black community, or poor school performance and drop-out rates, or drug and alcohol abuse? What can whites do to bring jobs to inner cities or motivate blacks to take what jobs there are and to stick with them? How can white people listening to black concerns do anything to fill the spiritual emptiness in many black lives?

These are the problems which, when they go unmet, lead to despair, degradation, and crime, but nothing whites can do will solve those problems. Only blacks themselves can solve them, and it's condescending of Ms. Clinton to suggest that blacks are unable to reverse these dysfunctions without white intervention.

She has a history of patronizing blacks, of course. Here she is, for example, evidently of the mind that unless she adopts a black tone of voice her audience won't listen to her:

Hillary's just pandering to the African American community to gin up votes, but set that aside. Let's all, white and black, watch and listen to a talk show host named Stacey Washington. She makes a lot more sense, and says a lot more of value, than does Ms. Clinton.

Racism Is Not Racially Endemic

One meme that the Dallas shooting should put to rest (but won't since ideologues are impervious to falsification) is that racism is a uniquely white vice.

It's common, especially in the halls of the university, to hear racism defined as a form of oppression wielded by those with economic power over those who lack it. Since whites have all the economic power in our society, or so the argument goes, only whites can be racist.

This is, of course, a remarkably tendentious and self-serving definition of racism. A more realistic definition would be something like: Contempt for, hatred of, or bias against someone based upon his or her race. It actually has nothing to do with the particular race of the hater or the hated. Indeed, the two can even be of the same race.

One reason this definition is not accepted by those who adopt the first version is that, if it were, then by all appearances racism would appear to be more rampant in the black community than in the white, and that would be counterproductive to the narrative that racism is not only endemic to whites but also the cause of all the problems in the black community.

Individual examples of black racism may not add up to a valid conclusion that it's a rampant phenomenon, but nevertheless examples are disturbingly plentiful. There are morons, of course, who can be found in any racial group, but aside from them, consider what is taken as normal discourse by educated black professionals:

• A black professor claimed that whites are programmed to commit mass murder.
• Another avers that the lesson of Huckleberry Finn is that white people are the problem.
• Actor Jamie Foxx riffed on how great it is to play in a movie, Django Unchained, in which he gets to butcher white people.
• Then there are guys like this fellow who simply declares that he hates whites.

Every one of the foregoing would rightly be deemed an instance of racism had the races been reversed, and they're no less racist, or offensive, because they're manifested by a black person.

But more to the present point the Dallas cop-killer told police before they "neutralized" him that he hated white people and wanted to kill whites, especially white cops, which he did. If that's not racism nothing is, and it's too easy to find in the black community people who hate whites because they're white, and worse, are prepared to hurt people just because they're white.

Black racism is a serious social problem, one that needs to be addressed and suppressed, and we do the cause of race relations no favors by pretending it doesn't exist while magnifying every example of white racism that we can find. Indeed, most whites know black racism exists, and it simply embitters people when they're told by their supposed betters that it doesn't, but that they themselves are racist just by virtue of being white.

Dallas

In the wake of last night's horror in Dallas there's a temptation to indulge in finger-pointing, recriminations, and political blame-casting. These activities are therapeutic, perhaps, and indeed necessary, but they're also inappropriate so soon after the events which elicit them.

On the other hand, it also seems inappropriate to ignore the tragedy altogether, so I thought it'd be good to shine a light on the racial mythology that apparently motivated last night's ambush in Dallas.

Last spring, in response to the widespread belief that blacks are being mowed down by racist white cops like harvested wheat, I cited research done by the Washington Post and ran this post on April 20th:

If a visitor from Mars were to listen to media chatter they might think that young, unarmed black men are being slaughtered in the streets by racist white cops with alarming regularity. The facts, though, are otherwise as a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post study reveals.

The WaPo's data is displayed on a chart that reveals a number of facts about police shootings that may come as a surprise to some who take the trouble to check out their findings.

For example: In 2015 there were 990 people shot and killed by police. The overwhelming majority of those killed by police were armed and white. Four hundred ninety four of the dead were white and 258 were black (Hispanics and other races made up the balance). Most of the deceased were showing a weapon, but 93 were unarmed, 32 of whom were white and 38 black.

Among these unarmed individuals 14 of the whites and 15 of the blacks who were killed were attacking, or in some way threatening, the police officer. Of those who were unarmed and not attacking the officer, several of them were shot accidentally, or they brandished a device that was mistaken for a weapon, etc.

In short, there may be a problem with police sometimes using excessive force, but the idea perpetuated by Black Lives Matter and others that African Americans are a deliberate target of racist cops is simply not born out by the facts.

Since posting the above I also came across more data in the WaPo that shows that white cops are murdered by Blacks disproportionately to their numbers in the overall population. Forty one percent of white cops murdered in the line of duty are murdered by black males, a demographic which comprises only 6% of Americans.

That's not a statistic that we hear very often in the media, but it certainly might go a long way toward elucidating, though not excusing, what's in the mind of cops who may be a little quicker on the trigger when they're encountering a recalcitrant black male suspect.

In any case, our prayers go out on behalf of the families of those officers who lost their lives last night because some racist, ignorant of the facts, felt he had a grievance which justified murder.

Of Felonies and Frigate Birds

Since everyone with a computer or a phone is talking about the FBI's inscrutable decision to not recommend indictment for Hillary Clinton, I thought I'd talk about something else instead.

That is, after I say this about that: It's mystifying how FBI Director James Comey could meticulously enumerate a lengthy list of laws violated by Ms Clinton and then deliver himself of the complete non-sequitur that the agency has decided there's no crime being committed because they can't prove Ms Clinton intended to break the law. Yet as numerous experts have pointed out intent isn't even necessary for the law to be broken. It's not even mentioned in the relevant statute.

Even Comey's good friends are saying that the case he made at the recent press conference is utterly nonsensical.

Comey implied at that presser that what Ms. Clinton did with her email server could result in her having her security clearance yanked. But she's running for president of the United States, for heaven's sake. How can someone who shouldn't have a security clearance to review classified information get nominated to run for president? What sort of people are they who'll continue to support her candidacy after this?

As a friend of mine suggested on his Facebook page, her campaign should change their slogan from "I'm with Her" to "I'm with Careless."

When the people are apathetic or morally indifferent the government inevitably becomes corrupt, and when government is corrupt the corruption spreads like a metastasizing cancer to every agency in it, even one as supposedly competent and honest as the FBI.

Anyway, I don't want to give readers rhetorical whiplash, but I actually wanted to talk in this post about frigate birds. These magnificent creatures (The species found in the western hemisphere is even named the magnificent frigate bird) are extraordinary fliers. They're seabirds which, unlike any other bird, can remain aloft for months without ever touching down on land or sea. They sleep in snatches of two to twelve minutes while soaring the on motionless outstretched wings. Their long wings and deeply forked tails give them a majestic appearance as they soar at great altitudes, as high as 13,000 feet, on the thermal updrafts along the coast.

Biologists have been studying a species of these birds off the coast of Madagascar, and have put together a short film that highlights some of the unique capabilities of these birds. I thought I'd like to share it with you:

I've had the experience of watching magnificent frigate birds, which are larger and more graceful than the Madagascar species, in Florida and Central America and watching them soar so effortlessly is like watching the law of gravity being flouted.

Sort of like watching the laws of our nation be so effortlessly flouted by the Clintons and their cronies, now that I think of it.

Tour on Abiogenesis

I filched some of the following post from philosopher VJ Torley at Uncommon Descent. He has some interesting things to say about Dr. James Tour's work and views on the origin of life that I'd like to pass on to you.

The technical name for the origin of life is abiogenesis, the emergence of living cells from non-living material precursors. Abiogenesis is a necessary first step for the evolution of higher life forms. Until there was life there was no evolution.

Interestingly, all theories of naturalistic abiogenesis entail mind-blowingly improbabilities, which means that it's highly probable that naturalism, the belief that everything is explicable in terms of natural processes and forces, is false.

Torley introduces us to Dr. Tour who is nothing if not an expert witness:

Professor James M. Tour, a synthetic organic chemist, specializing in nanotechnology, who is also is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, and Professor of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas. In addition to holding more than 120 United States patents, as well as many non-US patents, Professor Tour has authored more than 600 research publications. He was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors in 2015, and he was named among “The 50 most Influential Scientists in the World Today” by TheBestSchools.org in 2014. Tour was named “Scientist of the Year” by R&D Magazine in 2013, and he won the ACS Nano Lectureship Award from the American Chemical Society in 2012. As if that were not enough, Tour was ranked one of the top 10 chemists in the world over the past decade by Thomson Reuters in 2009.

So how does Dr. Tour say that unaided nature produced the first living cell? He states emphatically that we have no idea whatsoever:

We have no idea how the molecules that compose living systems could have been devised such that they would work in concert to fulfill biology’s functions. We have no idea how the basic set of molecules, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids and proteins, were made and how they could have coupled in proper sequences, and then transformed into the ordered assemblies until there was the construction of a complex system, and eventually to that first cell. Nobody has any idea on how this was done when using our commonly understood mechanisms of chemical science. Those who say that they understand are generally wholly uninformed regarding chemical synthesis.

From a synthetic chemical perspective, neither I nor any of my colleagues can fathom a prebiotic molecular route to construction of a complex system. We cannot even figure out the prebiotic routes to the basic building blocks of life: carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids and proteins. Chemists are collectively bewildered. Hence I say that no chemist understands prebiotic synthesis of the requisite building blocks, let alone assembly into a complex system.

That’s how clueless we are. I’ve asked all of my colleagues: National Academy members, Nobel Prize winners. I sit with them in offices. Nobody understands this. So if your professor says, “It’s all worked out,” [or] your teachers say, “It’s all worked out,” they don’t know what they’re talking about. It is not worked out.

In other words, all those people who tell us that the naturalistic evolution of life is a fact and that only nincompoops, Trump voters, and Westboro Baptists are skeptical of its efficacy, are in fact clueless as to how the first step in the process could have ever been taken.

Torley quotes Tour some more:

Let us assume that all the building blocks of life, not just their precursors, could be made in high degrees of purity, including homochirality where applicable, for all the carbohydrates, all the amino acids, all the nucleic acids and all the lipids. And let us further assume that they are comfortably stored in cool caves, away from sunlight, and away from oxygen, so as to be stable against environmental degradation. And let us further assume that they all existed in one corner of the earth, and not separated by thousands of kilometers or on different planets. And that they all existed not just in the same square kilometer, but in neighboring pools where they can conveniently and selectively mix with each other as needed.

Now what? How do they assemble? Without enzymes, the mechanisms do not exist for their assembly. It will not happen and there is no synthetic chemist that would claim differently because to do so would take enormous stretches of conjecturing beyond any that is realized in the field of chemical sciences…

I just saw a presentation by a Nobel prize winner modeling the action of enzymes, and I walked up to him afterward, and I said to him, “I’m writing an article entitled: ‘Abiogenesis: Nightmare.’ Where do these enzymes come from? Since these things are synthesized, … starting from the beginning, where did these things come from?” He says, “What did you write in your article?” I said, “I said, ‘It’s a mystery.’” He said, “That’s exactly what it is: it’s a mystery.”

It's a mystery, he says. If a theist were to give this answer in reply to some question about God the skeptic community would suffer collective side-stitches from laughing so hard, but the cornerstone of naturalism, the belief that life arose from non-life without any intelligent intervention or direction, is an inexplicable mystery. Yet naturalists insist that it's rational to believe in an inexplicable mystery, no matter how improbable it may be, and that it's irrational to believe that somehow life arose as a consequence of intelligent agency.

Let's put this a different way. Which is more probable, that a functioning computer was produced by a series of highly improbable physical accidents or that a functioning computer was produced by an intelligent engineer? We have lots of experience of engineers producing amazingly complex structures which contain high information loads, but we have little or no experience of such things being produced by the random action of natural processes. As with computers so, too, with the first cell.

Thus, the existence of a first cell is more probable given the existence of an intelligent agent than it would be if no such agent exists, and since it's more rational to believe what's more probable than to believe what's less probable, it's more rational to believe that life arose as a result of intelligent agency.

If you've a background in cellular chemistry or an interest in the topic and would like to watch Tour's entire lecture it's here.

The Deportation Revolving Door

As Congress returns to session after the July 4th break there's some question as to whether the Democrats will renew their sit-in on the floor of the House to try to get some form of gun control legislation passed.

Indeed, many people in both parties are angry that we don't have stricter gun laws to protect innocent people from the deranged and the hateful who walk our streets.

Yet they seem insouciant about the horrors being inflicted upon innocent people by illegal immigrants who've been repeatedly deported and yet, because of lax enforcement under both the Bush and Obama administration, are able to keep re-entering the country. Would that Congress and others were as concerned about keeping us safe from people who are in this country illegally as they are about keeping us safe from guns.

An illegal alien in Oregon recently murdered three people and and wounded a fourth. He had been deported six times since 2003.

An illegal alien who had been deported five times and was then residing in a sanctuary city (San Francisco) where he was safe from arrest for his immigration status, shot a young woman named Katie Steinle in the back on July 1st a year ago. She died in her father's harms pleading with him to help her.

Katie Steinle

Examples of felons committing horrible acts, inflicting immeasurable grief on American citizens, after having already been deported multiple times could be cited indefinitely, but though there's plenty of political will in the White House to get rid of guns there's no political will in the White House to keep out of the country those who have shown they are a danger to the rest of us.

Now we read that violent gangs like MS-13 are recruiting heavily among the thousands of unaccompanied minors that President Obama has welcomed into the country. These young gang members are raping, beheading and stoning their victims, but still the Obama administration waves them in.

Back in 2004 Heather MacDonald wrote an excellent piece on the asininity of our immigration policy at City Journal. As bad as it was then, after four more years of Bush and eight years of Obama the situation is much worse. She opened that essay by noting that:

In Los Angeles ... dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country is a felony. Yet should a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is he who will be treated as a criminal, for violating the LAPD’s rule against enforcing immigration law.

She goes on to write that at that time in LA,

Ninety five percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.

The world is a dangerous enough place without our politicians making it more hazardous for our citizens by importing all the dysfunctions, not to mention diseases, that plague the third world.

Both Republican and Democratic administrations have knowingly adopted immigration policies that are overwhelming the ability of our police and social services to cope with them. Moreover, as more Hispanic immigrants flood our nation's cities the political pressure they exert against any meaningful reform becomes inexorable making it politically impossible to do anything to stop the flood.

If you want an answer to the question why people support Donald Trump, just ask yourself which of the candidates in the upcoming election is most likely to allow the hemorrhaging along our borders to continue? Hillary has already said she wants to open the borders even more. Trump has said he'll stop it. It's hard to believe either one of them, but in this case there's a chance that Trump will try to return us to a common sense immigration policy. By her own admission there's little chance that Clinton would.

America Is My Home

James Brown's Living in America was one of his best known songs, but the lesser known America Is My Home (1968) seems particularly appropriate for the 4th of July. Brown lays on some truth, and his message, produced at the height of the Vietnam war, is still relevant today, even if a lot of people don't want to hear it:

Happy Independence Day to all our readers. Let's hope and pray that there'll be many more such days in the future on which we and our children still have an independence and liberty worth celebrating.

Recusal Refusal

By now you're probably familiar with the latest of a long string of scandals besetting the Obama administration - the administration, we might recall, which promised it would be the most open and transparent in history.

In the event, however, that you haven't been following the latest, former President Bill Clinton, whose wife is embroiled in a criminal investigation conducted by the FBI and who is himself on the hook for possible illicit dealings with his charitable foundation, just happened to be arriving in Phoenix recently to play some golf and who should he find on the tarmac getting ready to depart but no less a personage than the Attorney General of the United States, Loretta Lynch. What a coincidence! So the affable former president rung up the putatively impeccable Attorney General and invited himself over to her plane to talk about...golf and their grandkids. Happens every day.

Well, the official account of the meeting is this: The two discoursed for thirty minutes or so in private (Ms Lynch has been careful to note, Mr. Clinton's reputation for lechery doubtless being on her mind, that her husband was present) concerning several innocuous topics, and then the former president deplaned. Nothing at all, we are to believe, was said about Mr. and Mrs. Clinton's legal jeopardy, despite the fact that these matters must surely press hard on Mr. Clinton's mind.

There are several things about this official account which give pause. First, no one but the most gullible, credulous Clinton- worshipper believes that the topic of conversation was unrelated to any of the several investigations involving the Clintons' chronic malfeasances. Why go to all the trouble to choreograph a thirty minute audience with the AG, on the tarmac, no less, just to talk about grandchildren?

Second, even in the highly improbable event that social chitchat was indeed the topic of conversation, it's a serious breach of ethics for the AG to have a personal contact, or worse, a thirty minute conversation with a man hip-deep in the slop that is being investigated by her department.

That she would risk her professional reputation for ethical rectitude to meet Clinton for any reason whatsoever is astonishing, much more is it astonishing to admit him to her plane for such a banal reason.

Democrats have admitted that this was indeed "bad optics," but as David Harsanyi remarks at The Federalist the Democrats don't have an "optics" problem, they have a corruption problem:

Rather than conceding that such a private encounter is at the very least a conflict of interest, Democrats preemptively complained about the “optics.”

Do [these] ... politicians “groaning” about the optics of the meeting understand that they’re arguing for Lynch to recuse herself from the Clinton investigation? As Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), who’s been pushing for a special counsel for a while, pointed out, there is a clear ethical duty for an Attorney General to recuse herself at the mere appearance of impartiality—a standard this little meeting clearly meets.

From the U.S. Attorneys’ Manual: "The requirement of recusal does not arise in every instance, but only where a conflict of interest exists or there is an appearance of a conflict of interest or loss of impartiality."

If ever an incident gave the appearance of a conflict of interest or loss of impartiality this one does, as a piece at the Daily Caller makes clear:

Former U.S. Attorney Joseph DiGenova told the Daily Caller News Foundation the former President “is at least a witness in two criminal investigations, probably a subject in two criminal investigations. He is a person of interest officially to the Department of Justice,” he said flatly.

Both the FBI and Justice Department have launched investigations into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server and email address for official U.S. government business during her tenure as the nation’s chief diplomat.

But investigators also are reportedly investigating “public corruption” links between Hillary’s work at the State Department with large foreign donors to the Clinton Foundation, many of which were orchestrated by her husband.

DiGenova said the problem with the secretive meeting at the private aircraft section of the Phoenix airport had nothing to do with appearances, but was a violation of the Justice Department’s policies.

“It’s very important to realize this isn’t just a question of her judgment. The question is the Department of Justice policy on communicating with a side in a case,” DiGenova told The DCNF.

Given Bill Clinton’s legal status as a party to the federal investigations, DiGenova said Lynch should not, under any circumstances, have met with him because strict Justice Department rules require impartiality among federal prosecutors and department officials. As AG, Lynch is the nation’s top law enforcement official.

“Bill Clinton, according to the department is a person of interest. What... is she doing meeting with a person of interest, no matter what the reason,” DiGenova said. “There is no reason to believe her representation about what transpired in that conversation. The whole set of circumstances surrounding how they met on the tarmac, in a plane with no witnesses, is simply appalling.”

DiGenova added that Lynch “cannot be that unaware of who she is and what her role is. It’s beyond belief. There is no reason to believe her representation about what transpired in that conversation.”

“There’s no good reason for her to have met with him. None. Zip,” he said.

Ms Lynch, however, has subsequently announced that she's not going to recuse herself at all from the Hillary Clinton legal imbroglio. Instead she's going to accept the recommendation of the FBI Director and career prosecutors as to whether to proceed with an indictment. Of course, career prosecutors are her employees and, if Hillary Clinton wins in November, will also be Ms. Clinton's employees. What are the chances they'll risk their government salaries to bring an indictment against the woman who may well determine their future in the DOJ?

Harsanyi writes:

This will give millions of Americans who already assume the Department of Justice will let Hillary slide no matter where the evidence leads quite a bit of evidence of corruption in the Obama DOJ. If you’re Hillary Clinton and you’re truly innocent, Bill’s little get-together creates even more questions about your shady conduct. Mostly, though, if you want to know why Americans don’t trust their government, this meeting is a pristine example of why.

Sweden's Suicide

James Traub has an essay at Foreign Policy that's must reading for everyone in Europe and North America concerned about the future of their respective countries. Traub's column paints a gloomy picture of that future in one of the most prosperous, most generous nations in Europe - Sweden. The article is titled The Death of the Most Generous Nation on Earth and the proximate cause of Sweden's demise is their open door policy toward refugees. In short, Traub seems to conclude that Sweden's liberal idealism is both culturally and economically suicidal.

Readers might question this somber conclusion so perhaps it's worth posting some excerpts:

When the refugee crisis began last summer, about 1,500 people were coming to Sweden every week seeking asylum. By August, the number had doubled. In September, it doubled again. In October, it hit 10,000 a week, and stayed there even as the weather grew colder. A nation of 9.5 million, Sweden expected to take as many as 190,000 refugees, or 2 percent of the population — double the per capita figure projected by Germany, which has taken the lead in absorbing the vast tide of people fleeing the wars in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere.

That afternoon, in the cafeteria in the back of the Migration Agency building, I met with Karima Abou-Gabal, an agency official responsible for the orderly flow of people into and out of Malmo. I asked where the new refugees would go. “As of now,” she said wearily, “we have no accommodation. We have nothing.” The private placement agencies with whom the migration agency contracts all over the country could not offer so much as a bed. In Malmo itself, the tents were full. So, too, the auditorium and hotels. Sweden had, at that very moment, reached the limits of its absorptive capacity.

Nothing about this grim denouement was unforeseeable — or, for that matter, unforeseen. Vast numbers of asylum-seekers had been pouring into Sweden both because officials put no obstacles in their way and because the Swedes were far more generous to newcomers than were other European countries. A few weeks earlier, Sweden’s foreign minister, Margot Wallstrom, had declared that if the rest of Europe continued to turn its back on the migrants, “in the long run our system will collapse.” The collapse came faster than she had imagined.

The 160,000 asylum-seekers who came to Sweden last year is double the number it has ever accepted before. I met many critics who were prepared to raise impolite questions about whether Sweden could afford to lavish generous benefits on so large a population, whether it could integrate so many new arrivals with low levels of skills, whether a progressive and extremely secular country could socialize a generation of conservative Muslim newcomers.

Diana Janse, a former diplomat and now the senior foreign policy advisor to the Moderate Party (which Swedes view as “conservative”), pointed out to me that some recent generations of Swedish refugees, including Somalis, had been notably unsuccessful joining the job market. How, she wondered, will the 10,000-20,000 young Afghan men who had entered Sweden as “unaccompanied minors” fare? How would they behave in the virtual absence of young Afghan women? But she could barely raise these questions in political debate. “We have this expression in Swedish, asiktskorridor,” she said. “It means ‘opinion corridor’ — the views you can’t move outside of.” Merely to ask whether Sweden could integrate Afghans today as it had Bosnians two decades before was to risk accusations of racism.

Sweden has promised to take care of every refugee while their application for asylum is pending; the backlog has grown to a point that that process can take over a year. During that period, according to the Migration Agency’s website, “the applicant is entitled to accommodation if they cannot arrange it themselves, financial support if they have no money, and access to emergency medical and dental care and to health care that cannot be postponed.” Their children have the same access to education and health care that Swedish children enjoy.

Afghanistan poses a particularly thorny problem. Afghans have lately swelled the great river of refuge-seekers. The country is so profoundly insecure that many of its 32 million citizens might have a colorable claim to asylum. ...By the end of 2015, far more Afghans than Iraqis were applying for asylum in Sweden; many were unaccompanied minors, placing them in a specially protected category. Sweden has extraordinary laws protecting minors: Refugees who arrive without parents are taken into the country’s social services bureaucracy, operated by each municipality though financed by the federal government.

Back at the Red Cross station, opinion was surprisingly anti-refugee, including among volunteers. The translator said that he did not believe many of the new arrivals would ever be able to integrate into Sweden’s liberal, individualistic society. A border policeman told me, “Last summer, my grandmother almost starved to death in the hospital, but the migrants get free food and medical care. I think a government’s job is to take care of its own people first, and then, if there’s anything left over, you help other people.” I had heard the same view a few months earlier in Hungary, the country in Europe most outspokenly hostile to refugees — the anti-Sweden. Europe has not experienced economic growth in almost a decade. One could hardly think of a worse moment to ask citizens to make sacrifices on behalf of outsiders.

I had, it turned out, arrived in Sweden at the very moment when the supply of goodwill was petering out. A poll in early November found that 41 percent of Swedes thought the country was taking too many refugees, up from 29 percent in September.

a sharp increase in welfare payments, 60 percent of which go to immigrants. ...Despite widespread reports that Syrian refugees are drawn largely from the educated middle class, statistics compiled by the Swedish Migration Agency show that half the new arrivals do not have a high-school degree, and one-third have not progressed beyond ninth grade. The figures are yet higher for the Afghan unaccompanied minors.

I often asked what this new generation of newcomers was going to do for work. Sweden has virtually no space for unskilled workers;

Even before Sweden slammed on the brakes, it seemed that the country had posed for itself a test that it could not pass, and could not acknowledge that it could not pass. The financial costs, even for one of Europe’s richest countries, were daunting. Sweden expects to spend about 7 percent of its $100 billion budget next year on refugees. The real number is somewhat higher, since the costs of educating and training those who have already received asylum are not included in that figure. It is, in any case, double the 2015 budget. Where will the additional funds come from? It’s not clear yet, but since the cost of caring for refugees is considered a form of development assistance, Sweden has already cut 30 percent of its very generous foreign aid budget, which largely goes to fortify the very countries from which people are now fleeing, to help make up the difference.

It is very hard to find a middle ground between “we must” and “we can’t.” One of the few people I spoke to who was seeking one was Diana Janse of the Moderates. I asked her if she feared that Sweden was in the process of committing suicide. “It’s an open question,” Janse replied. She worried that the costs of Sweden’s generosity were only beginning to come due, and no one cared to tally them. She had just learned that since the right to 450 days of parental leave per child enshrined in Swedish laws also applies to women who arrive in the country with children under seven, refugees could qualify for several years’ worth of paid leave — even without working, since unemployed women also receive maternal benefits. She was convinced that Sweden needed to end the practice of giving Swedish social payments to refugees, not only because it was unaffordable, but because Sweden had no interest in out-bidding its neighbors to woo refugees.

Anyone who wonders why so many Brits voted to leave the EU and so many Americans are alarmed at Mr. Obama's open-door immigration policy might find reading Traub's article helpfully instructive.

The State of the War Against ISIS in Iraq

An article by Doug Burton of the Washington Free Beacon gives us some insight into what's happening in the war against ISIS in Iraq.

Fallujah has already been largely liberated by Iraqi forces and Mosul is next on the agenda, but meanwhile ISIS is being harassed by Mosul residents fed up with the ISIS fighters who've taken over their city, but worse for ISIS is the plummeting morale of their troops:

There are also reports of firefights within the ISIS police force as tension mounts and morale for the ISIS soldiers plummets. According to a Friday report by the Iraqi newspaper Mada, seven Daesh terrorists were killed in internal clashes between Daesh’s Islamic rules police, the hisbah, and security members.

ISIS executed four of its top commanders in a public square in Mosul on Wednesday, according to multiple sources, including Bas News, a Kurdish news site. The commanders reportedly were convicted by a Sharia Court for high treason on June 22nd and hanged in Mosul the same day, according to media reports. The executions follow the hanging or beheading of 21 ISIS commanders since April and the executions of scores of ISIS fighters charged with desertion or collaborating with Iraqi Army agents.

The Mosul incidents happened as major battles were underway in the northwestern tip of Saladin Province 140 miles north of Baghdad. The Iraqi Army’s elite counter-terrorism units are pressing into the city of Shirqat, an ISIS stronghold. They are supported by the 4,000-man 92nd Brigade, an armored unit including tanks and infantry composed of predominately Turkmen volunteers from Tel Afar, according to Dr. Ali Al Bayati of the Turkmen Rescue Foundation.

There's more at the link. When the occupying force is killing its own leaders it's a good sign that things are spiraling out of control.

To make matters worse for ISIS there was a report out today that a large convoy of trucks transporting ISIS fighters near Fallujah were caught by U.S. and Iraqi air forces, and 250 of the terrorists were killed. There's gun cam video of the attack at the link.

Coincidentally, the aid workers mentioned by reporter Martha Raddatz in the video were affiliated with Preemptive Love, the organization I wrote about on June 6. You can read their account of how close they came to being killed by the airstrikes here.

The House Report on Benghazi, Etc.

The House Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi released yesterday the report on their hearings into the attack on the American consulate in which four Americans died.

Mollie Hemmingway summarizes the report at The Federalist and lists five "takeaways," all of which are such serious indictments of the incompetence of the current administration and of Hillary Clinton that, were this a Republican administration, the media would be hammering away on it 24/7.

Here are Hemmingway's five points:

1. The Administration deliberately misled the American public immediately and continually
2. Inadequate Benghazi security was due to Clinton’s political considerations
3. The military never sent men or machines to help even though it was requested
4. Despite Obama's promises to thew nation the terrorists were never brought to justice
5. The Administration did all it could to obstruct the investigation

Hemmingway explains each point in lucid detail and interested readers are urged to check out her column. A one sentence adumbration might be that the Obama administration in general, and Secretary Clinton in particular, lied repeatedly to the American people about Benghazi in order to protect themselves politically and to deflect attention from their own incompetence.

It's remarkable that some Americans are actually enthusiastic about the prospect of Hillary Clinton being handed complete control of this nation's foreign policy given her utter failure to demonstrate any competence in this area as Secretary of State.

In other news concerning the Clinton campaign Senator Elizabeth Warren has wholly discredited herself by coming out in energetic support of Ms Clinton's candidacy. Warren's political career has been devoted to emasculating the very Wall Street banks and financial institutions that have been Hillary's BFFs for the last twenty years. How Ms Warren can now, with sincerity, embrace Ms Clinton is mystifying.

One can understand why someone would not want to see Donald Trump as president. One can even understand, maybe, why someone might hold her nose and vote for Hillary to avoid having Trump as president. What passes understanding, though, is how anyone who has spent her political life fighting Wall Street's depredations, influence, and economic power, and who has a shred of integrity, can be excited about voting for a woman who has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from those same Wall Street fat cats and praise her as good for America and Americans. It's as if the head of Planned Parenthood were running for president and a prominent pro-lifer offered her her passionate support.

For Elizabeth Warren to enthusiastically endorse Hillary Clinton is to admit that everything Warren has stood for as a professor and a senator has been a sham. Such is the state of American politics today.

Sure, Blame the Old Guys

In an outpouring of left-wing ageism and sexism the older white men of the UK are being blamed and pilloried for the United Kingdom's decision to exit the European Union.

The older generation is comprised of racist xenophobes, so go the allegations, who are robbing the young of their future, etc., and they have no right to do that:

Hard to argue with that, I guess. After all, why should the people who've paid taxes all their lives, fought in their country's wars, built the nation's economy and infrastructure, are presumably wiser and more experienced in life, and, indeed, made the decision to enter the EU in the first place, think they have the right to decide whether they want to yield their nation's sovereignty, the sovereignty of the nation they've built, to some faceless, anonymous bureaucrats in Brussels? Don't they realize they have a duty to defer to the petulant will of pampered young socialists who have yet to do much of anything for their country?

It's perhaps noteworthy that when the election of Mr. Obama was essentially determined by the support of two demographics comprising the least educated, least invested, and most apathetic segments of the American population - young people and minorities - this was seen as presaging the coming of the Age of Aquarius, but when a demographic in the UK that's accused of being uneducated and uninformed (though it might well be the most well-informed, best educated, and most psychically and economically invested in the country) - i.e. seniors - decide they want to rescue their independence from the globalists intent on building a European superstate somehow that's regarded as an injustice.

Maybe instead of blaming their elders for depriving them of their "future" they should be thanking them for saving them from a future of tyrannical servitude to anonymous, unaccountable bureaucrats.

A Debate on the Existence of God

There was an interesting debate in London recently between a rabbi, Daniel Rowe, and one of the premier atheist philosophers in the world, A.C. Grayling, on the topic of the existence of God.

Grayling's performance deeply disappointed at least some of his fellow atheists. Jerry Coyne offers a sympathetic critique at his blog where he records the dismay expressed by one of his readers:

[R]eader Mark...made this comment: "I have to admit to finding the prospect of an orthodox rabbi holding his own in a debate with Dr. Grayling on God’s existence rather disheartening, but I’m afraid that’s exactly what went down the other night in London."

Knowing Anthony [Grayling], I was dubious, but I have to say that having watched the debate, I see that Mark is right.

Coyne goes on to observe that the argument that gave Grayling the most difficulty was the argument from cosmic fine-tuning, to which Coyne acknowledges at the end that atheists have to find a better answer. His own suggested counters to Rowe's arguments don't seem to me to be much better than Grayling's, but readers can judge for themselves.

Here's the debate:

Much of Grayling's response to the arguments with which Rowe confronts him was quite irrelevant to the topic, and his rather blithe dismissal of Rowe's claim that the exquisitely precise calibration of the cosmic forces and parameters is prohibitively improbable just doesn't work. Grayling argued (37:45) that, like the existence of the universe, his own existence is also incredibly improbable since it's based on highly improbable fortuitous events such as the unions of all of his ancestors, yet here he is. Likewise, the high improbability of a universe like ours is no reason to think that God must have created it.

Rowe replied (43:15) with a good illustration of why Grayling's analogy fails which you might wish to check out.

Here's another way of looking at the problem with Grayling's analogy:

Almost all of the universes that could possibly exist are life-prohibiting universes, universes in which there is no carbon, or no stars, or in which gravity is too strong, etc. The number of possible life-prohibiting universes is nearly infinite. On the other hand, only a relative few possible universes have the necessary conditions to allow for the emergence of life, especially conscious life. Thus, it's far more likely that chance would produce a universe that's life-prohibiting than that it would produce one that's life-permitting. The fact that the odds against a life-permitting universe existing are so unimaginably high (see video below), yet nevertheless such a world exists, demands an explanation.

A more apposite analogy than the one Grayling employs might go like this: Imagine a large barrel filled with a million dice which are then poured out over the floor of an airplane hangar. There would be six to the millionth power possible patterns of numbers the dice could show, each of which is equally likely (or unlikely).

Suppose now we specify before doing the experiment that the pattern of every single die showing a six will represent a life-permitting universe and every other pattern represents some form of life-prohibiting universe. It's unimaginably more likely that, when the barrel is emptied, we would get some pattern other than all sixes from this experiment than that we would get all sixes. Getting all sixes is no less probable than any other specific outcome would be, but the point is that getting all sixes is extraordinarily less likely than getting some pattern that is other than all sixes.

Likewise, it's far more likely that chance would produce a universe that's life-prohibiting than that it would produce one that's life-permitting.

Since we obviously live in a life-permitting universe, one which is far less probable than even the all-sixes result of the dice experiment, we're justified in believing that something more intentional than chance was at work in producing it.

Indeed, since a life-permitting universe could actually be expected if the universe were intelligently designed, the astronomical improbability of our life-permitting universe existing counts as evidence that it is in fact intentionally designed.

Coyne is right. this is a very compelling argument, and naturalists need to come up with a more convincing way to address it, if indeed there is such a way, than they have heretofore.

Some Identity Claims Are More Acceptable Than Others

The Daily Caller's Christopher Bedford makes a clever point. It's easier nowadays for a man to convince liberals that he's a woman, Bedford observes, than it is for a terrorist to convince liberals that he's a Muslim.

Despite repeated insistence by Omar Mateen that he was acting on behalf of Islam when he murdered 49 people in an Orlando night club, folks on the left just refuse to believe him, but if he had insisted to the media or government bureaucrats that he be considered a female they would've tripped all over themselves to accommodate him:

The federal government is clear on identity: “Managers, supervisors, and coworkers should use the name and pronouns appropriate to the gender the employee is now presenting at work.”

The New York Times style guide demands that reporters, “Use the name and pronouns (he, his, she, her, hers) preferred by the transgender person.”

The Associated Press agrees: “Use the pronoun preferred by the individuals.”

So why did reporters across the media, as well as the head of the Department of Justice, spend so much energy questioning the “preferred” and “appropriate” identity of that coward in Orlando?

The shooter called 911 the night he murdered 49 people at a gay club in Orlando to identify as a killer for the Islamic State carrying out its leader’s will. He also called a television station that night, once again identifying as a killer for the Islamic State carrying out its leader’s will.

“I did it for ISIS. I did it for the Islamic State,” he told the station.

“I pledge my alliance to [Islamic State leader] abu bakr al Baghdadi...may Allah accept me,” he wrote on Facebook as the shooting went on.

One wonders what more he has to do to convince people that he is what he says he is, yet his choice to identify as a terrorist was given less credence than if he’d declared himself to be a woman.

Examples of this willful blindness abound and Bedford describes a lot of them in the rest of his column:

“What motivated a killer?” CNN asked one day after the shooting. The article took 19 paragraphs to mention ISIS, has no mention of “Muslim,” and only includes the word “Islam” once– as part of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which called the attacks “a hate crime.”

Two days after the shooting, AP reported that Orlando was mourning “as possible motives emerge for club gunman.”

“Despite Mateen’s pledge of support to the Islamic State,” the article goes, “other possible explanations emerged.”

“While the precise motivation for the rampage remains unclear, it is evident that Mr. Mateen was driven by hatred toward gays and lesbians,” The New York Times editorial board opined three days after the shooting. “Hate crimes don’t happen in a vacuum. They occur where bigotry is allowed to fester, where minorities are vilified and where people are scapegoated for political gain.”

The editorial does not use the words “Islam,” “Muslim,” or even “ISIS,” but blames Republicans and Donald Trump four and two times, respectively, for contributing to apparently negative discourse.

Four days after the shooting, in an article entitled, “Toxic Masculinity and Murder: Can we talk about men,” a writer at The Atlantic opined that, “The Orlando murderer appears to have been a violent bro who, in the moments before his death, bizarrely identified with the Boston Marathon murderers, with whom he had nothing apparent in common but a violent quest for self-actualization.”

That same day, a frightened luminary at Vox wrote, “I don’t believe we can blame the Orlando shooting on ‘radical Islam,'” instead choosing to ponder the shooter as “a product of America’s hypermasculine, police-worshiping society that screamed at him from all directions to stay in the closet, to hide any sort of mental illness, or risk not being a ‘real man.'”

“Islamist ideology … [is] almost like an afterthought,” a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center is quoted under a Miami Herald headline that asks, “What motivated Orlando killer?” The article was published five days after the shooting.

“We know that he apparently had some concerns or issues with the LGBT community,” Attorney General Lorretta Lynch said one week after the shooting. “It was also Latin night at the club. So again, we’re very concerned about the motivations that led him to that particular club at that particular place.”

“It’s really too early to talk about other individuals in the investigation,” she later added, “except to say that we are talking to everyone who had a connection to this killer.”

“We do want to be as transparent as possible in this investigation so people can see not only what he was thinking, what he was doing,” Lynch said Sunday, “but also the kind of information that we’re looking at.”

Links to all these quotes can be found in Bedford's piece at The Daily Caller. It's hard to determine exactly why it is that this White House and those who take their cues from the administration are so loath to identify, not just Mateen, but numerous other mass killers, as Islamists. It certainly seems that Mr. Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and those who think like they do will go to any lengths, no matter how absurd, to see the world the way they wish it to be and not the way it is.

Self-delusion must be a powerful drug because it appears to have a large percentage of both our population and our leadership in its grip.