Plantinga v. Dennet

Here are the notes of the interaction between Alvin Plantinga, a leading Theist philosopher, and one of the "Four Horseman of the New Atheism, Daniel Dennet, , which were provided anonymously by an analytic philosopher who fears that if his identity and his pro-theism viewpoint are revealed, his career could be hurt.

So much for all the whining from atheists about the discrimination they face.

It sounds like Dennet immolated himself by immersing himself too long in the echo chamber of atheism. Here is part of the correspondent's description of Dennet's argument:

3:27 pm - Contemporary evolutionary theory can't rule out ID. "Except on grounds that it is an entirely gratuitous fantasy." Is the punchline an insult?! I am concerned that Dennett is not yet addressing Plantinga's argument.

3:29 pm - Sure, the intelligent theist can keep going on believing. He calls theistic belief a fairy tale. Now he's getting explicitly insulting. He thinks theistic belief can corrupt our common epistemological fabric and involve theism into politics. He shows a slide mocking the eschatological views of Christians. He calls theism an unrespectable position, and compares it to astrology. He says it is irrational and doesn't deserve respect. He gets laughs. He doesn't look good to the theists. Once he got nasty, a cold pall covered the room. He compares theism to holocaust deniers and things have gone off the rails. This is outrageous. All Plantinga must do to beat Dennett now is to reply with grace. For Plantingian dry wit, this is easy.

3:32 pm - "Is Plantinga's theism in any better position than these other fantasies?" He's going to create a Plantinga-guided natural selection. It is hard to explain, but the argument basically mocks Plantinga. I am incensed. The response is a long string of insults, and little more. This is pathetic. I had more faith in Dennett. He is just making the Flying Spaghetti Monster argument and getting laughs from real, intolerant jerks. It is going on and on. Sigh. I wanted this to be interesting! Dennett does not understand what a disservice he does his cause by not taking his smartest opponents seriously. He will lose thoughtful acolytes as a result.

I wonder what Dennet's strategy would have been if he had been in a debate with Holocaust Deniers: would he have attempt the "poison the well" ad hominem strategy by comparing them to Christians? In other words, Dennet's "arguments" seem to have a foundation in the first principle that "what I don't agree with is wrong."

Hardly philosophical.

Then there is this:

3:43 pm - Dennett is going after Plantinga by means of Behe. Dennett is now going after Plantinga's view that he has the mental ability to make the relevant probabilistic judgment about the probabilities of the cells. Dennett thinks that he is making Plantinga look very, very bad. But this is far from clear. For those on the fence, they will likely think Dennett is being a serious jerk.

I've listened to Dennet lecture and debate, and being a jerk seems to be one of his vices. He presents the other sides argument from its worst perspective as if it was the best, and then basis his argument on his caricature. This is debate stuff - sophomoric debate stuff - not real argument, and sarcasm makes the sarcastic person look like a "serious jerk."

Truth in pictures

Check out Across the Street's update of M.C. Escher:

Raising taxes during a recession

Isn't that counterproductive to all this "stimulus" we've been hearing about?

The Housing-Bubble blog points out that with the increased tax rates on high income charitable deductions, this is going to be a good time for wealthy people - who presumably give more to charity than those who need the money to pay the bills...unless, of course, they are Democrat politicians - to put their money to other uses.

There are other tax increases in the Obama plan. For example, the Feds are giving money to the state while phasing out income tax deductions on state taxes. That plan amounts to nothing less than a disguised increase in state taxes, run through the federal government, which has the effect of both raising taxes in a recession and centralizing power in the federal government.

Prediction: this recession is going to last longer than it should.

Cal Supreme Court Modifies Episcopal Decision

The Anglican Curmudgeon has been following this case.

Tip of the iceberg

From the Central Valley Business Times - Straw buyer sentenced in mortgage fraud case:

Manpreet Singh, 25, of Stockton has been sentenced to six months of home detention and five years’ probation for mail fraud for her part in a mortgage fraud scheme, according to Acting U.S. Attorney Lawrence Brown.

She has also been ordered to pay $1,000 a month in restitution to the victim of her mortgage fraud scam, as well as paying $163,500 in restitution.

Ms. Singh pleaded guilty on March 31, 2008.

Ms. Singh purchased two homes as a “straw buyer” for Ifthikar Ahmad, a co-defendant in the case, federal prosecutors say.

Straw buyers are loan applicants who buy homes on behalf of others with no intention of actually occupying the property they are purchasing. In exchange for the use of their name and credit information, straw buyers are often compensated.

In this case, Ms. Singh received $15,000 from Mr. Ahmad for her role in signing falsified loan documents, court documents show.

In the first transaction, Ms. Singh stated that she earned more than $5,500 per month and in the second, she stated that she earned $8,500. In truth, Ms. Singh worked at Alfalfa’s Pizza in Stockton and made approximately $8 an hour.

As a result of her fraudulent transactions, the homes purchased with Ms. Singh as the straw buyer were foreclosed on, causing a loss to the lender of $163,500, prosecutors say.

How crafty of Singh and Ahmad to pull the wool over the eyes of the bank with such a well-honed scheme of lying about their income. And, of course, the banks did nothing to verify that what they were told was true.

Multiply this by a million and the economy of Iceland implodes.

But it's not like public virtue matters.

Does the lady really turn counter-clockwise

She's going clockwise to me, which contradicts the personality descriptions.

"Wars are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women."

Spengler on Iranian whores and why Iran is passing as a nation.

Fascinating.

Here's Spengler's latest contrarian essay, which describes why a nuclear armed Iran is so very dangerous:

Their efforts to isolate Iran from the cultural degradation of the American "great Satan" have produced social pathologies worse than those in any Western country. With oil at barely one-fifth of its 2008 peak price, they will run out of money some time in late 2009 or early 2010. Game theory would predict that Iran's leaders will gamble on a strategic long shot. That is not a comforting thought for Iran's neighbors.

Two indicators of Iranian morale are worth citing.

First, prostitution has become a career of choice among educated Iranian women. On February 3, the Austrian daily Der Standard published the results of two investigations conducted by the Tehran police, suppressed by the Iranian media. [1]

"More than 90% of Tehran's prostitutes have passed the university entrance exam, according to the results of one study, and more than 30% of them are registered at a university or studying," reports Der Standard. "The study was assigned to the Tehran Police Department and the Ministry of Health, and when the results were tabulated in early January no local newspaper dared to so much as mention them."

The Austrian newspaper added, "Eighty percent of the Tehran sex workers maintained that they pursue this career voluntarily and temporarily. The educated ones are waiting for better jobs. Those with university qualifications intend to study later, and the ones who already are registered at university mention the high tuition [fees] as their motive for prostitution ... they are content with their occupation and do not consider it a sin according to Islamic law."

There is an extensive trade in poor Iranian women who are trafficked to the Gulf states in huge numbers, as well as to Europe and Japan. "A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women," I wrote in a 2006 study of Iranian prostitution, Jihads and whores.

Prostitution as a response to poverty and abuse is one thing, but the results of this new study reflect something quite different. The educated women of Tehran choose prostitution in pursuit of upward mobility, as a way of sharing in the oil-based potlatch that made Tehran the world's hottest real estate market during 2006 and 2007.

A country is beaten when it sells its women, but it is damned when its women sell themselves. The popular image of the Iranian sex trade portrays tearful teenagers abused and cast out by impoverished parents. Such victims doubtless abound, but the majority of Tehran's prostitutes are educated women seeking affluence.

Only in the former Soviet Union after the collapse of communism in 1990 did educated women choose prostitution on a comparable scale, but under very different circumstances. Russians went hungry during the early 1990s as the Soviet economy dissolved and the currency collapsed. Today's Iranians suffer from shortages, but the data suggest that Tehran's prostitutes are not so much pushed into the trade by poverty as pulled into it by wealth.

A year ago I observed that prices for Tehran luxury apartments exceeded those in Paris, as Iran's kleptocracy distributed the oil windfall to tens of thousands of hangers-on of the revolution. $35 billion went missing from state oil funds, opposition newspapers charged at the time. Corruption evidently has made whores of Tehran's educated women. (Please see Worst of times for Iran, June 24, 2008.)

But, hey, public virtue doesn't matter that much, does it?

If they can work in a subplot about gay-marriage, this is Oscar material




[Via Mark Shea]

St. Damien of Molokai

Father Damien of Molokai will be canonized on October 11.

The lepers of Molokai were true outcasts. Once they were diagnosed, they were immediately bundled off to the colony and no one ever spoke of them again. The colony was primitive and hopeless.

Father Damien ministry was Christ-like in every sense of the word.

Joyful news.

Update: This essay by Tom Piatek provides some backstory on Blessed Damien:

That Damien was chosen to represent Hawaii on Capitol Hill is no surprise. Although he worked in Hawaii before it became part of the United States, he has long been a hero to Hawaiians of all religious backgrounds. In the mid 19th century, Hawaii saw a large outbreak of leprosy, and the Hawaiian authorities responded by creating a leper colony at Kalaupapa on remote Molokai. Although this was not the intention of the Hawaiian government, the leper colony on Molokai soon became little more than a place people went to die, in isolation and poverty and a condition approaching anarchy. When the Bishop of Honolulu asked for a volunteer to go to Molokai to minister to the lepers for a few months, Damien went, and stayed for the rest of his 16 years. Damien cared for the lepers in every aspect of their being, cleansing their wounds and bandaging their sores, building coffins so they could have a decent burial (he built some 2,000 by hand), offering Mass and hearing their confessions, and attempting to model for them the love of Christ. He also brought some much needed order, building a home for children and organizing a variety of activities that helped bring hope and purpose to the people exiled on Kalaupapa. Damien identified completely with those in his care, referring to “we lepers” in his sermons long before he contracted leprosy himself. Damien’s example attracted other volunteers and more advanced medical care, so that slowly Kalaupapa was transformed for the benefit of those who lived there.

Damien did have detractors, including Rev. Hyde, a Presbyterian clergyman in Honolulu who wrote to a colleague in Australia following Damien’s death dismissing him as a “coarse, dirty man, head-strong and bigoted.” After Hyde’s remarks were published by his colleague in Australia, Robert Louis Stevenson, who had visited both Hyde in his comfortable Honolulu home and Molokai after Damien’s death, and who was also a Presbyterian, wrote a masterful open letter refuting each of Hyde’s charges and defending the dead priest: “But, sir, when we have failed, and another has succeeded; when we have stood by, and another has stepped in; when we sit and grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a plain, uncouth peasant steps into the battle, under the eyes of God, and succours the afflicted, and consoles the dying, and is himself afflicted in his turn, and dies upon the field of honour - the battle cannot be retrieved as your unhappy irritation has suggested. It is a lost battle, and lost for ever. One thing remained to you in your defeat - some rags of common honour; and these you have made haste to cast away.” Stevenson accurately predicted to Rev. Hyde that “if that world at all remember you, on the day when Damien of Molokai shall be named a Saint, it will be in virtue of one work: your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage.” Stevenson also precisely delineated the point that separated him from Hyde: “you are one of those who have an eye for faults and failures; that you take a pleasure to find and publish them; and that, having found them, you make haste to forget the overvailing virtues and the real success which had alone introduced them to your knowledge. It is a dangerous frame of mind.” Indeed it is. One wishes that Christopher Hitchens had pondered Stevenson’s words before he embarked on his journalistic jihad against Mother Teresa, who, like Damien, won the respect of the country in which she worked by caring for lepers. One wishes the new atheists would ponder those words today, as they set about attempting to tear down what Christianity has contributed to our civilization.

In fact, it is clear that what motivated Damien to do what no one else was willing to do was his desire to emulate Christ. The definitive biography of Damien is Gavan Daws’ Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai. Daws describes Damien as “an ordinary man who made the most extraordinary moral choices again and again and again.” When asked by a PBS interviewer about writing the book, Daws noted that he had come to believe that Damien was a saint, even though “I’m not a practicing Christian, and I’m by definition not a Catholic.” But, Daws added, “look what he did. Time and time again, he does things that nobody else is prepared to do, at the risk of his physical life, in the interest of what he always called the imitation of Christ. That’s what he did.” And that’s why all Americans can be glad that there soon will be a saint on Capitol Hill.

Great points.

Mismatch

Who thought it was a good idea to match up flat-lining Joy Behar against Ann Coulter? Check out the clips and see how often Behar trotted out cliche and non-sequiturs as real arguments.

I like the part where Behar interrogates Coulter for saying that Barbara Walters was reading her book like she was reading from "Mein Kampf" because "wasn't it insensitive" for her to say that to a Jewish interviewer. Coulter's response was to point out that her latest book was intended to puncture the Left's tactic of appealing to such "victim cards" when it is in fact acting as the victimizer.

The unpopularity of Obama's lifting of oversea's abortion restrictions

Gallup has this poll showing the relative popularity of Obama's early decisions:



The unpopular decisions cater to his base, and may spell trouble for him in the future.

Well, as I always say, if we're discussing indulgences, we are not discussing the ordination of active homosexual bishops.

I like it that we set the tripwire of controversy at the 16th Century.

Here is a round-up of views on the so-called re-emergence of indulgences.

Needless to say, the most critical voice was the "professor of Catholic Thought" who clearly stakes out a "liberal" and "progressive" position. He must have been a young man at the time of Vatican II.

It's ironic how many "progressives" seem to judge everything by the prejudices they formed in 1963.

Words to live by

Hanlon's razor:

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

I hadn't realized the idea was institutionalized. For years one of my operative rules for analyzing cases has been something like, "when a fact pattern can be explained by willful conspiratorial malice bordering on genius or negligent stupidity, assume the latter, but keep an open mind."

According to Wiki, it all goes back to Heinlein, which is probably where I first got it:

A similar quotation appears in Robert A. Heinlein's 1941 short story "Logic of Empire" ("You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity"); this was noticed in 1996 (five years before Bigler identified the Robert J. Hanlon citation) and first referenced in version 4.0.0 of the Jargon File,[3] with speculation that Hanlon's Razor might be a corruption of "Heinlein's Razor". "Heinlein's Razor" has since been defined as variations on Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice. or ... but keep your eyes open.[citation needed] A variant, Grey's Law (influenced, no doubt, by Clarke's third law), posits "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

Also Napoleon gets an entry:

A similar epigram has been widely attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte ("Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.").

Back at'cha, Barry

Congressman Schock's explains why he won't vote for the Porkulus Bill despite the President's sophomoric grandstanding.

Generation Narcissus: the Worthless Generation

The ever-discriminating attention of Cranky Greg has alighted on this article about the fall of another Boomer pleasure palace. This one is a Las Vegas site called "The Great Indoors," which is rapidly turning into the desert it once was.

The author, H. Lee Barnes, writes this about Generation Narcissus:

I’m reminded of Guy de Maupassant’s story The Necklace, in which Mademoiselle Mathilde, given the choice of Madam Losell’s finest gems, chooses instead a necklace of paste. Her inability to distinguish between what is genuine and what is fake leads to her downfall. Fast food. Image. Glitter. Pick the downfall. Here’s what few “get” and why the demise of The Great Indoors speaks to so much about America’s current situation—inevitable given all the predictors no one seemed to see. This nation fell prey to Mathilde’s fate.

Much of what was on the shelves at The Great Indoors was paste in the first place, faux stuff with “Made in China” taped on it somewhere. If not China, Indonesia or India. A lot of glitter. For a while, the price reductions on items ranged from 10-30 percent, but eventually the scavenger hunt began in earnest, and the store was invaded by lollygagging credit-card parasites who pawed over the once-precious merchandise and wrung out last-gasp discounts from department managers.

Who’s responsible?

Some blame Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae; others, the banks or the global market. That’s because the analysts are looking at the hands on the clock of fate. I say, look at the face of the clock. If you look closely, you’ll see the face of the Baby Boomer. Yes, Dr. Spock’s generation, the generation that was rarely held accountable; the generation that embraced sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll; the generation that got naked at Woodstock; the one that protested the Vietnam War; the one that created the hippie movement that in a decade transformed into the yuppie movement (if you can call opening a wallet and thumbing through credit cards a movement); the generation reared on television, and consumption, and pleasure, and vanity and vanity and vanity; the generation of readers who drove Look, a magazine about people, off the shelves and made a success of People, a magazine not about people (unless you believe celebrities are human people); the generation that promoted the fast-food culture, the know-it-all culture, the a-pill-will-fix-everything culture; the generation enslaved to fad and pop culture; the one whose parents won a war against fascism and endured the hardships of the Great Depression.

How, you may ask, can a writer make such a sweeping indictment, especially without offering an array of studies and statistics? It’s easy. The writer is an observer and a participant and has been since that wonderfully self-centered generation emerged. Herein lies the basis for my thesis. What generation produced the current leaders in business, industry and politics, those who have held the reins of power for the past decade and a half? We need look no further than the last 16 years in the White House, the terms of Clinton, who represents his generation at its hedonistic best, and Bush, who represents the same generation at its my-way-or-the-highway best. Still, I’m a touch less cynical about them than the media who reported on their administrations. I see neither man as motivated by evil intentions. How can we blame Clinton for saying he “never had sex with that woman” or Bush for his weapons-of-mass-destruction argument for invading Iraq? After all, both were part of the generation reared on Dr. Benjamin Spock’s grand theories, children counseled and coddled, rarely punished for being wrong or irresponsible or held accountable for lying.

I can’t pin dates of birth on all the leaders of industry and finance, but the current CEOs of the big three in Detroit were born post-WWII, as were Jeff Skilling, Michael Milken and the guy who ran Home Depot into the ground and walked away tens of millions richer. Governor Rod Blagojevich, that Baby Boomer wunderkind from Illinois, took office in his late 40s and by his early 50s wore waders in his office to navigate the swamp of corruption he’d built. Boards of directors hand out bonuses to CEOs for demonstrating ineptitude, engaging in irresponsibility or practicing outright deceit. Did I mention the ends-justify-the-means generation?

But the leaders are only partially to blame. Baby Boomers, look in the mirror. What do you see? Someone figuring out how to turn a house after two years into a 50 percent profit? Or use its equity as an ATM? Someone who borrows against his home to pay cash for that BMW in the driveway, the one he really doesn’t need? Our system of politics and business encourages self-serving irresponsibility by rewarding it.

True, the Boomer generation gave us its share of accomplished, legitimate entrepreneurs, artists, musicians and inventors, but even achievements such as “Hotel California” and the wonders of the dot-com aren’t enough to overcome the vapid aspirations of those who idolize Madonna and her ilk. Now that they have plunged the country into a financial crisis that may end up as epic as the Great Depression, the Boomers can hand matters over to their offspring, who hopefully will be prove themselves the next great (well, good) generation.

Even as one of their own, Barack Obama, prepares to tackle this economic crisis, don’t be optimistic those in their early 40s will do better. They have been long misguided, ferried as they were from school to soccer games to karate lessons. The wisdom best passed on to Gen X is that there is no Great Indoors and never was. Not even the bones of a Swell Indoors will be left as a metaphor for Baby Boomer failure. Start change by ridding the language of the word “great,” discard it along with “awesome” and all words associated with the Dr. Spock syndrome. Revive the language of the generation that won WWII. Restore humble words such as “grit,” “integrity,” “diligence,” “honor,” “responsibility,” “sacrifice” and especially “accountability” to the social vocabulary. Let Boomer hyperbole vanish along with the merchandise the scavengers fled with when The Great Indoors finally closed.

Look on my works, yea mighty, and despair.

Generation Jones Update:

This is interesting. I've never felt particularly akin to the Boomer generation, notwithstanding the fact that my birth year - 1959 - falls within the purported time period for the post-war baby boom.

The reason for this is that by the time I came of cultural awareness the revolution had been won. People my age were growing up with the effects of the divorce culture, the sex culture, the youth culture, etc. Vietnam and the draft were a distant memory by the time I was in high school, meaning more than 4 years had passed, but such is the memory of teenagers. I remember watching the student protests as a child and wondering how adults - i.e., 18 through 24 year olds - could act like spoiled children.

I've always accepted that there was a later cohort of the Boomer generation that did not share the formative experience of the true boomers. People my age grew up hearing how bad America was, and we reacted against the earlier boomers and voted for Ronald Reagan. As was noted at the time, Reagan captured the votes of most new voters, which definitely included me since 1980 was my first presidential election.

In any event, this Wiki article describes as "Generation Jones," the later cohort of the Boomer generation, i.e., those born between 1954 and 1965:

American social commentator Jonathan Pontell defined this generation and coined the term naming it.[4] Prior to the popularization of Pontell’s theory, its members were identified with either Baby Boomers or GenerationX'ers.

The name “Generation Jones” has several connotations, including: a large anonymous generation, and a “Keeping up with the Joneses” competitiveness borne from this generation’s populous birth years. The connotation, however, which is perhaps best known stems from the slang word "jones" or “jonesing”, which means a yearning or craving. Jonesers were the people who as teens in the 1970’s made this slang word popular, but beyond this historical claim, many believe the concept of jonesing is among this generation’s key collective personality traits. Jonesers were given huge expectations as children in the optimistic 1960’s, and then confronted with a different reality as they came of age in the pessimistic 1970’s, leaving them with a certain unrequited, jonesing quality.

In demographic terms, Generation Jones was part of the baby boom which ended in the early 1960s. However, the events stereotypically associated with generational discussion of Boomers, including protests over civil rights and the Vietnam war and the emergence of rock music took place while the members of Generation Jones were unborn, still children or early teenagers. This is the situation described by Sex Pistols bass player Sid Vicious, who said that he had missed the Summer of Love because he was too busy playing with his Action Man. Thus the early life experience of this group was more similar, in many respects, to that commonly imputed to Generation X. Generation Jones is thus associated with pop icons such as Pong, Rubik's Cube, and MTV.

This age group became politically active in the United States during the Presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan, who was extremely popular among people of this age group.[5] "The turn toward the Republicans was based very much on how the young felt about Ronald Reagan's performance in office," said Helmut Norpoth, a political scientist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In the 2008 election, surveys found that fans of classic rock music, popular during this period, tended to favor the Republicans.[6]

Interesting.

Not in your textbooks

Don McLaren at American Catholic shares this anecdote about Lincoln and "separation of church and state":

It's so good, I'm going to cut and paste most of it:

On July 4, 1864 Abraham Lincoln had much to pre-occupy his mind. Grant’s drive on Richmond had bogged down into a stalemated siege to the south of Richmond around the city of Petersburg. Grant, due to the appalling Union casualties of the campaign, was routinely denounced as a butcher in Northern newspapers, a charge echoed privately by Mary Todd Lincoln. On June 27 Sherman had been bloodily repulsed at Kennesaw Mountain, and his campaign against Atlanta appeared to be very much in doubt. Lincoln suspected that he would not be re-elected and that the Union might very well lose the war. So what did he do on July 4? He, along with Mrs. Lincoln and most of his cabinet, attended a fundraiser held on the White House lawn to build a Catholic church!


In June of 1864, a group of black men, residents of Washington, knocked on the White House door and asked to present a petition to President Lincoln. In those simpler times they were ushered in after a short wait to see Mr Lincoln. Their spokesman, Gabriel Coakley, told the President that they were Catholics and that they wished to obtain permission to hold a lawn party on the white house lawn in order to build a Catholic church in Washington to serve the black Catholic population in the capital. Lincoln agreed immediately and told them to go to see General French, the commissioner of public buildings, and to tell him that he had given his permission for the function. A permit was issued by General French on June 30, 1864. It required the signature of the President, and Gabriel Coakley waited outside a cabinet meeting for several hours until the President came out. Lincoln saw him, was advised that the permit needed his signature, signed it, and told Coakley that he hoped the event would be a success.

Lincoln helped ensure the event was a success on July 4, by attending. The event raised over $1,000.00, a very large sum at a time when a private soldier earned $14.00 per month.

In the mania for a chemically pure standard of separation of church and state, we forget that the government can - and should - stitch together the various "small platoons" of society into a "community." We lose that ability if religion is excommunicated from the public square.

Also, as I recall, Lincoln was responsible for returning the California missions to the Catholic church.

All of this, of course, ought to cause "separationists" to question their origin myth that the Constitution intended that the government would pretend that religious communities did not exist.

Why should we be surprised about this from a guy who has never held a job for as long as four years?

Or who spent more time campaigning for President than working as Senator?

Mark Steyn writes on the "Obamateur Hour":

It suggests a perverse kind of genius that the 44th president did not wait for a single “event” to throw him off course. Instead he threw himself off: “Is Obama tanking already?” (Congressional Quarterly); “Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed?” (the Financial Times). Whether or not it’s “already” failed or tanked, the monthly magazines still gazing out from their newsstands with their glossy inaugural covers of a smiling Barack and Michelle waltzing on the audacity of hope seem like musty historical artifacts from a lost age. The ship didn’t need to hit an iceberg; it stalled halfway down the slipway. This is still the phase before “events” come into play, when an incoming president has nothing to get in the way of his judgment and executive competence. President Obama chose to nominate Tim “Indispensable” Geithner and Tom “Home, James!” Daschle, men whose enthusiasm for the size of the federal budget is in inverse proportion to their urge to contribute to it. He chose to nominate as commerce secretary first the scandal-afflicted Bill Richardson and then the freakishly scandal-free Judd Gregg, and wound up losing both.

To be sure, the present state of the economy is an “event,” and has blown many governments around the world off course. But again: The hideous drooling blob of toxic pustules dignified as “stimulus” is something the incoming Obama had months to prepare for, with oodles of bipartisan goodwill and fawning press coverage to waft him along. Instead he chose to outsource it to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barney Frank, and the rest of the congressional pork barons. So that too is not an “event” but merely, like his cabinet picks, a matter of judgment and executive competence.

That last part sounds like Obama's modus operandi. When has he ever done the hard work himself, as opposed to leaving it up to some mentor to run interference for him?

And there is this:

The “buy American” provisions in the “stimulus” will invite certain retaliation around the world, wrote Jagdish Bhagwati, the Columbia economics prof, in the New York Times. This is presumably the same Jagdish Bhagwati who reassured a Toronto audience last year that he was endorsing Obama despite the senator’s anti-NAFTA, anti-free-trade rhetoric because he didn’t think Obama really believed it. Today it’s even less clear what, if anything, Obama believes — and, even more critically, whether he has the wit or authority to impose those beliefs on a Congress whose operating procedure for the new era seems to be business as usual with three extra zeroes on the end.

This is the scary part:

Someday soon this inaugural Obamateur Hour (as one of my correspondents, John Gross, calls it) will end and the “events” phase will begin. Back last spring, some gloomy reflections of mine on multiculturalism prompted a reader to advise me to lighten up: “We’re rich enough that we can afford to be stupid.” A mere nine months later, the first part of that equation no longer seems quite so obvious. The market value of the U.S. banking sector is worth barely a quarter of what it was two years ago — from just north of $1.4 trillion in February 2007 to under $400 billion at the beginning of this month, and that due only to the “bailout.” The so-called Wall Street fat cats are, in fact, emaciated cadavers in the late stages of that feline version of HIV.
On the other hand, U.S. mortgage debt has more than quadrupled since 1990, from $2.5 trillion to over $10 trillion. On the other other hand — you may be running out of fingers by now — the IMF has increased its calculation of potential losses on U.S.-originated credit assets from $1.4 trillion last October to $2.2 trillion today, and that’s at the lowball end of estimates (others figure closer to $4 trillion). If you stick the community-organizer-in-chief in a room with Henrietta Hughes, he can play Bob Barker and tell her to “come on down!” But it’s not obvious that that technique will be quite so effective back in the Oval Office, poring over the smoldering ledgers.

2008: We’re rich enough that we can afford to be stupid.

2009: We’re not so rich so let’s be even more stupid.

Our nation was very fortunate to have the mediocre Bill Clinton as President when it did - during a period of peace and economic growth. Clinton was kind of the Warren Harding of the late 20th Century.

We are going to find out if we can afford the 'on the job' training that Obama will require.

Where's the outrage?

Mark Shea has this tagged under "If only teachers could marry" and gets some worthy insights about the human condition out of it.

According to This article, teachers and coaches in the Chicago school system have been documened as engagung in physical abuse of children without job termination:

CBS 2 informed former Chicago Public School CEO Arne Duncan of our investigative findings shortly before he was promoted to U.S. Secretary of Education.

"If someone hits a student, they are going to be fired. It's very, very simple," Duncan said.

Before heading to Washington, he vowed to take action.

"Any founded allegation where an adult is hitting a child, hitting a student - they're going to be gone," Duncan said.

But that's not what happened under Duncan's watch. Of the 568 verified cases, only 24 led to termination. Records show one teacher who quote "battered students for several years" was simply given a "warning" by the Board of Education.

And another student was given "100 licks with a belt." The abuse was substantiated, but the records show the teacher was not terminated.

Of course, let it this kind of thing be linked to a Catholic priest and there is no end to the moral outrage.

Shea also links to this story about Portland's gay mayor who was involved with a bit of gay jailbait. The Slate article points to all of the tribal protection going on in the progressive/GBLT/Democrat community for the mayor and asks if there isn't a double-standard that doesn't treat gay pedophiles as harsly as hetero pedophiles, since, after all, the target of the pedophilia was a boy, which is way different than if the target was a girl, which would be creepy.

Except, of course, this convenient rationale doesn't work if it's a Catholic priest.

The point is not to exonerate priests that break their vows and break the law, but can we lose the moral posturing and preening that tars all priests and Catholics with the sins of a few?

What the hey???

I've been puzzled by the interest in Nadya Suleman - the woman who has 14 children by in vitro fertilization - particularly the part about the state investigating the clinic responsible.

Suleman doesn't strike me as a model for responsible motherhood, being unmarried without a husband or father to help in a herculian task of child-rearing. Suleman strikes me as exactly the kind of dysfunction that happens when sex gets separated from procreation, and procreation gets separated from marriage.

But given the mantra of "choice," shouldn't it be her business? And it's not like the fertility clinic slit the throat of a prematurely born baby, like happens with abortion clinics.

The answer, though, is that a lot of people hate large families with an irrational passion. Check out this post on the Psychology Today blog:

Want to hear an unpopular opinion: I think we should put Nadya Suleman in jail. Perhaps you don’t recall the name. Perhaps you don’t even believe a crime has been committed. Perhaps you think I should be locked up along the way. Fine. But someone has to start saying things aloud, so here goes:

STOP HAVING CHILDREN.

Nadya Suleman had 14. And they should all be taken from her and raised by fit parents. Seriously, I could care less about the fact that she’s unmarried, unemployed, unable to convince herself that she’s not Angelina Jolie.

She’s a criminal. She’s a murderer. She’s not only guaranteeing her kids a very hard life, she’s killing all of us.

Here’s the truth: we are running out of resources and we are running out of time. The International Committee on Climate Change has said we have thee to five years to curb our ways or the current environmental disaster is irreversible. Irreversible means that the little economic hiccup we’re feeling today isn’t even the warn up round. It’s T-ball compared to the major leagues.

You think the economy is bad now—wait a few years. Wait until we’re almost completely out of oil and food and water and available land and really I could go on for two more pages listing everything we’re running out of. Why? Because we are quite literally running out of everything.

So how long do you have to wait to be starving, thirsty, and all the rest?

Truthfully, it shouldn’t be long now.

Dude, take a breath.

On the other hand, if it's that bad, desparate measures are necessary. Let's ramp up the death camps and reduce that population NOW! Who is to say that 1 Billion is enough; maybe we ought to be safe and shoot for 2 Billion.

*Sheesh*

Or start with yourself and like-believers.

Mark Shea nails a basic dysfunction of this kind of hysterical intellectual:

Now the curious thing is that the most devout believers in the Darwin Mythos, the ones who see it is as the all-explaining Theory of Everything, tend to simultaneously invoke it as an explanation for religion, as the founding myth of atheism, and as the Telos toward which all things are tending. So they naturally look on their own atheism as the Next Phase In Evolution. Yet they never seem to notice that The Next Phase in Evolution is utterly dominated by the sort of hand-wringing anal retentives who feel a moral obligation to the Planet to make themselves extinct. That's just one of the reasons I feel compelled to ask these self-appointed members of the Vanguard of Natural History if they are really so sure they are Where Human Evolution is Going and not simply genetic freaks as doomed to extinction as the dodo.

Good question.

The Return of Welfare

Obama's bill calls for weakening work requirements and doubling welfare rolls.

Generations of Democrat voters are waiting to be made.

Be like an atheist...





...and make your own bus sign.

Great moments in Freedom of Thought

Ben Stein, who was involved in a movie about the academic suppression of those who dissent of Darwinian orthodoxy, has been disinvited from giving a commencement address because of his involvement in a movie about the academic suppression of those who dissent from Darwinian orthodoxy.

You can't pile the irony any higher than that.

Here's the letter on his withdrawal from the commencement address from Daniel Mark Fogel of the University of Vermont:

I am writing to inform you that Ben Stein, a renowned economist and pub-lic personality, has informed me of his decision to withdraw from our Commencement ceremonies in May.
As you may know, Mr. Stein delivered an excellent Kalkin lecture on our campus last year, focused primarily on economic issues, to which our stu-dents responded warmly and enthusiastically. It was on the basis of that experience that I extended him an invitation to be our Commencement speaker.
Mr. Stein has also expressed opinions on subjects unrelated to economics, most notably with respect to evolutionary theory, intelligent design, and the role of science in the Holocaust. Those views are highly controversial, to say the least. Following the announcement of Mr. Stein as Commence-ment speaker, profound concerns have been expressed to me by persons both internal and external to the University about his selection. Once I ap-prised Mr. Stein of these communications, he immediately and most gra-ciously declined our Commencement invitation.
We will identify another Commencement speaker in the weeks ahead. In the future, I plan to use a more consultative process to identify Com-mencement speakers who, as part of their involvement, receive honorary degrees from UVM as part of the ceremony.
In retrospect, I am sorry that I did not anticipate the breadth and intensity of the concerns expressed in this instance. Although I am firm in my be-lief—profoundly held—that, as a university, UVM is and must remain a marketplace of ideas, I also recognize that Commencement should be a time when our community gathers inclusively, not divisively, in full cele-bration of the achievements of our graduates, of the families who join us to honor them, and of the institution itself and our academic values as a scholarly, scientific, and creative community.

It's strange, but how often do we hear academics defending the invitation of some radical leftist murderer, dictator or advocate/apologist of the same on the grounds of academic freedom? Apparently, that kind of thing falls within the ambit of "academic freedom," but let someone argue that academics should be allowed to dissent from a scientific theory and that's going to far.

"Everybody's against abortion."

At least that is what Candidate Obama said when he was never forced to answer why he had voted legislation that would have prevented this kind of atrocity:

Eighteen and pregnant, Sycloria Williams went to an abortion clinic outside Miami and paid $1,200 for Dr. Pierre Jean-Jacque Renelique to terminate her 23-week pregnancy.
Three days later, she sat in a reclining chair, medicated to dilate her cervix and otherwise get her ready for the procedure.

Only Renelique didn't arrive in time. According to Williams and the Florida Department of Health, she went into labor and delivered a live baby girl.

What Williams and the Health Department say happened next has shocked people on both sides of the abortion debate: One of the clinic's owners, who has no medical license, cut the infant's umbilical cord. Williams says the woman placed the baby in a plastic biohazard bag and threw it out.

How can abortion advocates claim that "everybody is against abortion"?

It doesn't look like "everyone" is even against baby-killing.

Satanic

There just doesn't seem to be any other way to describe the way that Al Quaeda is allegedly using rape as a way of ensuring its supply of suicide bombers.

"Al-Qaeda accused of using male rape to 'create' suicide bombers":

The Sun quotes Algerian militant Abu Baçir El Assimi:

"The sexual act on young recruits aged between 16 to 19 was a means to urge them to commit suicide operations."

The paper claims that "intense social stigma and fear of more gay sex attacks leaves Muslims prepared to die."

Rape and homosexual acts are punishable by death under Sharia law.

A suspected terrorist bomber killed in an attempted attack on a security installation in the Tizi Ouzou province of Algeria last month may have been raped, an autopsy revealed.

News source Ennahar Online said there was "a large tear in the anus of the terrorist, which confirms the sexual abuse. In addition, semen analysis is underway to determine the perpetrator.

"The young terrorist subject of sexual abuse, was aged 22, from Diar El Djemaâ, ElHarrach. He would have joined terrorist groups in March 2008.

And this New York Times article one on a Muslim woman who recruits other Muslim women as sucide bombers:

She went by the code name “the mother of believers,” Samira Ahmed Jassim al-Azzawi confessed. Ms. Jassim recruited women to join extremists in Diyala Province, escorting them to a farm for training and ultimately to their targets.

Samira Ahmed Jassim in a detention facility in Baghdad last week. She is suspected of recruiting more than 80 female suicide bombers and has admitted masterminding 28 bombings.

Speaking stiffly in a crude police video, Ms. Jassim recounted the fate of a woman she called only Um Huda, whom she had led to a neighborhood bank that served as her rendezvous point. “When I was talking to her, she was not answering or looking at me,” Ms. Jassim said. “She was mumbling verses of the Koran.”

“I got her to the bank and left her there,” she went on, unemotionally. “She detonated herself at a police station in Muqdadiya.”

The attack she described appeared to be a suicide bombing in August 2007 that killed 12, most of them police recruits.

Her account, which could not be independently confirmed, came in a confession that the Iraqi authorities showed on Tuesday as they belatedly announced Ms. Jassim’s arrest and claimed that she had been involved in recruiting 80 women to carry out suicide bombings in Diyala and Baghdad, though in her own words she recruited only 28 women, “maybe a bit more or less than that.”

And:

According to her account, she met Shakir Hamid Malik, a leader of Ansar al-Sunna, a Sunni insurgent group in Diyala believed to have links to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and joined the group as a recruiter. Her remarks suggested that she had to work diligently to persuade women to become bombers, speaking to them many times.

James Geraghty points out that the NYT's use of the term "work diligently to persuade women to become bombers" hides the use of rape as a tool of "persuasion, which is discussed in this London Times article:

The arrest of a woman suspected of grooming rape victims to become female suicide bombers in Iraq has dealt a blow to the network of extremists that orchestrates such attacks, a senior Iraqi official said yesterday.

Samira Ahmed Jassim, 51, is accused of recruiting more than 80 women to become human bombs, including 28 who actually carried out attacks.

She has apparently confessed to helping to organise the rape of young Iraqi women.

She would then play on the shame associated with victims of rape in Iraqi society to convince the women to become suicide bombers as their only means of escape.

Nice of the New York Times to have such a rigorous standard of sourcing on the subject of creating terrorist bombers through rape; pity that they don't apply the same standard to allegations against Republicans, like the claim that John McCain was engaged in an adulterous affair.

But back to the main issue: what could be more devil-inspired than raping one's own people to induce them to murder themselves while killing defenseless civilians?

Great Moments in Policing

Another example of how any interaction with the police can be life or death for civilians.

It's pretty amazing how the police officer thinks that ramming the guy - who had three small children in the car - when he was obviously pulling over makes sense.

Vox Day writes:

NWA was right. Police in the USA are little more than a gang armed with guns and badges, roaming the streets demanding "respect" from the public as they collect the protection money known as "fines". Rindal should be immediately removed from the force for her poor judgment and incompetence as well as her demonstrated predilection for turning a routine traffic stop into a potentially lethal situation.

Well, it's not like she didn't have probable cause to light him up and make him pull over on the narrow side of an icy freeway. I mean, the driver was driving on New Years Eve near midnight. Obviously, he must have been intoxicated.

And, so, we have another satisfied taxpayer.

Tragedy

Tragedy is the father of young children dying untimely.

Please pray for the soul and family of Michael Dubriel, writer and husband of Amy Welborn, who passed away unexpectedly today at the age of 50.

Judge refuses to protect Prop 8 donor names; voter intimidation campaign spreads

Check out this story.

Supporters of Proposition 8, the California constitutional amendment that banned gay marriage in the state in November, say they expect discrimination, harassment and intimidation to continue after a federal judge denied a request to keep private the names of donors to the initiative.

Douglas McDermott, president of McDermott Financial and Insurance in Sacramento, donated $15,000 to the Prop. 8 campaign in September. While his business hasn't been targeted, McDermott said some angry callers have left threatening messages.

"You get telephone calls, you get threats," McDermott told FOXNews.com. "Ask anyone — If you've donated, your name is published everywhere, all over California. That's what's happening."

"They come all day and night," he said.

Another donor, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, said employees at his California real estate development and investment company received an anonymous e-mail in October outing him as someone who gave $30,000 to support Prop 8.

"Did you know you work for a judgmental bigot? I know I could not work for someone who encourages bigotry and hate," the e-mail read.

"Something like that isn't the nicest thing to get when you come into the office on a Monday," the executive told FOXNews.com. "Another fellow left a message on my voicemail saying, 'What goes around comes around, and now you're going to experience the comes around part. Have fun.'"

Both men said they're worried that the harassment will continue in the wake of Thursday's ruling by U.S. District Judge Morrison England. Attorneys for the Prop 8 campaign have indicated they plan to appeal. An official for the Yes on 8 campaign has said another 1,600 donors will be put at risk with the release of the reports on Monday.

"You don't know in today's world where threats will lead," the real estate executive told FOXNews.com. "There's a delicate balance between the rights of an individual and disclosure."

The judge's ruling upheld California's campaign finance law, which specifies that information on political campaign donations be made public. Nationwide, such laws aim for transparency in the political process by shining a light on where the money is coming from and where it's going.

I've always been in favor of disclosure laws, but this kind of thing makes me wonder how such laws would have fared in the 1960s when supporters of Civil Rights laws could get targeted by racists. In that kind of case, I think that disclosure laws wouldn't have lasted five seconds.

The people subject to this kind of fascist tactics should network and start hitting their tormenters with some Unruh Act lawsuits.

[Via Mark Shea.]

Lileks is on a Roll

James Lileks takes on some official Brit dandy who thinks that the government should be more actively involved in aborting more British babies. The whole thing is good, but this part is exceptional:

Porritt, a former chairman of the Green party, says the government must improve family planning, even if it means shifting money from curing illness to increasing contraception and abortion.

You thought I was exaggerating by saying that curing disease only prolongs the problem, eh? I’d like to know which diseases he prefers to underfund so the state can shower the land with more condoms. I can’t imagine price is what keeps people from using a French letter, after all. It’s the lack of education, perhaps where does this go? Or the fact that scientists have not yet invented spring-loaded knickers that shoot out condoms the moment you tug on the elastic.

He said: “We still have one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancies in Europe and we still have relatively high levels of pregnancies going to birth, often among women who are not convinced they want to become mothers.”

So the role of the state should be to convince ambivalent mothers to abort, then. Possibly by showing them cartoons of polar bears marooned on ice floes and letting them draw the obvious conclusion. But why are two kids okay? Perhaps because the fellow speaking has two of his own, and couldn’t bear to think of choosing which one he’d have culled for Gaia’s sake. Well, I say the limit should be one, and that this fellow is to be roundly pilloried for the metaphorical Forest of Trafalgar Square his excess kin will immolate. He might argue that two are necessary to keep the population going and the economy intact, but of course population and the economy are the twin engines of our destruction, and people seem mulishly unwilling to part with either. If you’re really concerned - if you are a good person - then your heart cannot help but sink when you hear the phrase “There’ll always be an England.” That’s the problem.

Not to say there won’t always be an England - the physical place, which no doubt is called something else by native fauna in a language made of barks and spoor-scattering - will always be there, if we act now. There’s only one kind of sea-level rise that’s acceptable, and that’s because everyone jumped en masse into the water to drown themselves.

There are narratives and there are narratives

Where's Obama during the Midwestern ice storm? More importantly, why isn't the media hanging this around Obama's neck, given what they did during the Bush administration?

California Dreamin'

Well, what does happen when the Left gets control.

According to Victor Davis Hanson the result is social dysfunction:

For years the open borders lobby accused “them” (whites? The establishment? Conservatives? etc.) of racism in wanting the border with Mexico closed, an end to state entitlements to illegal aliens (remember the Satanic Prop 187?), and deportations of thousands of aliens in state prisons (a cost nearing $1 billion per annum). But now the state legislature is largely controlled by those who in the past argued for de facto open borders and an expansion, not a curtailment, of entitlements for those without legal residence. So whom to blame? There is no “they” anymore. The outsiders are insiders and own the state—and its contradictions they once helped to ensure.

Ditto environmentalism. “They” (fill in the blanks: right-wing employers, CEOs, national companies, etc.) were the villains to be overcome in order to stop drilling off our shores, and to put ever more of our timber and recreational and scenic areas into no-use wilderness areas. We were not to build dams. No more canals. Put aside more farm land. No more nuclear plants. Forget coal. Tax gasoline and make it expensive to refine. It is fair to say now that the environmentalist agenda runs the state, and so there likewise is no more “them” to blame—and we must live with the results. I cannot begin to count in my own personal realm of knowledge the farmers who went broke, the high-tech engineers who moved to Nevada, the small business owners who shut down or moved out of state.

Anyone with capital who wants to start business X, knows that he can be put out of business by one supposed sexual harassment suit, a racial discrimination complaint, trying to fathom 500 pages of state EPA applications, a 10% income tax rate, and now a 9% sales tax to come. In California we hunt out the misdemeanor and ignore the felonies. Drive down my avenue, drop five trash bags of wet garbage on the side of the road, and the chances are great you will never be held accountable (even if your receipts are found in the trash and turned over to the sheriff), but please don’t wire an outdoor light in the barnyard without a permit. You see, anyone who nods and obeys the law and pays, we hound; anyone who simply won’t or can’t, or causes too much trouble, we the state employee simply ignore.

That last is a keen observation. Fresno has instituted a practice of staking out north end bars and following drivers leaving those bars home until - some two or three miles down the road - the police can intuit some reason for pulling the driver over. This guarantees a trip downtown, the collection of fines and fees to release the vehicle and the payment of thousands of dollars in attorney fees. Although the odds are that most such drivers may be above .08, a lot won't, but will still have to pay the fines (and, in one case, lose his job of thirty years.) Clearly, there are a lot of costs and externalities associated with this approach, but one thing definitely justifies the cost - revenue enhancement - which only works if the police fish in waters where people can and will pay the fines.

Likewise, in the course of a couple of months, I was amazed with the efficiency and tenacity of the Fresno "garbage SS", which makes sure that garbage can cannot be viewed from the street. There were fines associated with that, and I'm sure that enforcement was undoubtedly emphasized in the north end of town, where people have been disciplined to pay their bills. Admittedly, I instinctively felt that I should obey the law and, apparently, having the garbage can pushed back to the side of the house behind some trees was not in compliance, so I built a fence to shield the delicate vision of the roving garbage can compliance patrol from the site of the city-issued garbage can. On the other hand, I felt harassed over trivialities and had to wonder if there weren't more important things that the City should be resolving like cracking down on gangs and meth labs.

Strangely, the net result for this has been to undercut my previously unquestioned support for the police and local government. When enough people like me - who pay the taxes and obey the laws - start feeling that we are the ones being exploited, what then?

Being the fruit of the vine which is Obama

Can you imagine Bush/a Republican getting away/doing this?

But will we see movies about "Rendition" under Obama?

Obama keeps the rendition policy.

Crickets Chirping

Liz Trota on Fox points out the absence of media interest or comment on the election of the Republican party's first African-American chairman, Michael Steele.

Interestingly, Steele outreach to minorities isn't limited to African-American; as a devout Catholic, he may be able to reach out to ethnic Catholics. From this 2004 NRO article:

Other important influences, he says, include Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Frederick Douglass. Steele, who is Catholic, also names Pope John Paul II as a figure who has inspired him.

Catholicism explains two of the issues — abortion and the death penalty — on which Steele has disagreed publicly with Ehrlich. Whereas the governor is pro-choice, Steele is pro-life, even to the point of having qualms about rape and incest exceptions (which is the place where all principled pro-lifers find themselves, though most pro-life politicians have cut corners in order to make their commitments more palatable to voters). And whereas Ehrlich is a death-penalty proponent, Steele has announced grave concerns over its use.

Yet the man is also a team player. He agrees with Ehrlich on just about every other key issue, most notably Ehrlich's desire to increase state revenues with slot machines.