Women and Minorities

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I was recently forwarded an academic job announcement that began with the following preliminary note:

I am writing to you because I hope you will bring the job advertisement below to the attention of qualified women and minorities who work in 18th and 19th century history of philosophy.

Sheesh, that might as well say: "Don't bother forwarding this announcement to white males; we're not interested in them, no matter how qualified they are." The note definitely says more than the standard boilerplate at the end of job announcements to the effect that women and minorities are encouraged to apply. I still object to that version, particularly since it reflects academia's now-standard reverse racism and sexism in hiring. Still, it doesn't convey the impression that white males are unwelcome, as the above note does.

Oh, but just imagine the uproar that this version would create: "I am writing to you because I hope you will bring the job advertisement below to the attention of qualified white males who work in 18th and 19th century history of philosophy."

Of Ghosts and Governments

By Edward Cline from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Out of curiosity, I clicked on the link to an Islamic blog that had replied to a commentator on my last post, "Islam and Greens Go Postal" (December 22). The blog is "Mainstream Mujahida." The anonymous Mujahida commentator's remarks were snide and completely irrelevant, were not even remotely critical of the "Postal" piece, and so won't be discussed here.

What I discovered on the Mainstream Mujahida site was a kind of "Islam for Idiots" question and answer format. The blog's hostess asks transparently leading questions, and then gives soft-pedaled, rationalistic answers. The "questions" are purportedly "quotes" from some unnamed blog reader or subscriber. Here are some examples:

"Quote: I don't understand how the pope has offended Muslims, he wasn't even talking to any Moslems that I know of."

Answer: "When you say that the beliefs brought by a Prophet beloved by nearly 3 billion people are 'evil and inhumane' and when you say that he spread this religion 'by the sword'...it's kind of hard to deny that he was being offensive...."

The hostess then claims, among other things, that Islam was spread by only a handful of adherents in a mere eleven years to create an empire stretching from Saudi Arabia to Spain and Africa, and that only about five hundred people died in the conquest. "Islam and the Islamic Empire were in fact the most peaceful religious and social revolutions/expansions in the history of the world," characterized, moreover, "by the overwhelming message of tolerance and compassion taught by the Prophet Mohammad."

If you believe such a patently absurd claim, you can be persuaded that Attila and Hitler were just over-zealous missionaries and that only an insignificant number of people died in the course of their political experiments, chiefly from a coincidental outbreak of salmonella, which affected mostly soldiers fed bad fish in their mess halls.

"Quote: I see here that everyone is afraid to criticize the religion of Islam."

Answer: "From a fact based standpoint, can we really say this is true? In one year there have been numerous comics depicting the Prophet Muhammad as an evil, terroristic, mad man..." Then the hostess launches into a denial that Mohammad is evil, that nowhere in Islamic texts are mentioned 72 virgins, that Islam is a "peaceful" religion that doesn't lend itself to suicide bombers, and that CNN and ABC just lie repeatedly about how bad Islam and Muslims are.

Nowhere, however, does she mention Theodore van Gogh, or Ali Hirsi, or Nick Berg, or Salman Rushdie, or the brutalities of Sharia law, or the violent Muslim no-go areas of European cities, or the murderous strife between Sunnis and Shiites...and on and on. Instead, the hostess plays the "victim" card and throughout the question and answer exercise slickly employs the Islamic device of taqiya, or the art of religious dissimulation.

Taqiya is practiced on a much larger scale by Islamic organizations such as CAIR and its brother organizations around the globe. And the news media have largely maintained a politically correct silence about Islam, and cannot be accused of repeatedly denigrating it. I have never heard Brian Williams or Charles Gibson preface news of the latest Islamic outrage with "Those bastards have done it again!"

This is an interesting site to peruse (if you can get onto it), if only to observe the psychology and mental gymnastics of someone whose mind is content to defer to a faceless father figure that tells one what to think and what to do, a figure, moreover, that commands repeated gratitude. Allah is nearly always connected with "merciful," while mention of Mohammad is usually followed by the expression, "blessings and/or peace be upon him."

One minor difference between the exactions of these two species of religious and secular totalitarianism is that neither Allah nor Mohammad is permitted to be concretized in any human form. Winston Smith, in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, was watched by Big Brother every minute, and wherever Smith turned in his waking hours, he could not escape Big Brother's face. But the face is inanimate; Big Brother never appears as a living person in the story, even though he is an entity that governs men by awe and fear.

A commonality exists between the kinds of minds that are comfortable with either religious or secular totalitarian authorities. When Winston Smith is "converted" by terrorism and torture into submitting to Big Brother and the Party, he ends up by expressing gratitude - "But it was all right...the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother" - a gratitude for having been relieved of the responsibility of maintaining an independent mind.

A Muslim is also tested by a personal "jihad" or struggle to resist the temptations of the temporal world - including the application in it of reason itself, there is an important point to O'Brien's insistence that Smith believe that two plus two can equal five - and his inclination to surrender to them to attain a state of spiritual purity not dissimilar from Smith's at the end of Orwell's novel. A Muslim wins a "victory over himself" by submitting body and soul to the will of Allah and the commandments of Mohammad. Further, there are marked similarities in their methods and ends to enforce submission between Allah and Mohammad and the Party and O'Brien, Smith's tormenter.

It is irrelevant here whether Nineteen Eighty-Four was arguably Orwell's embittered allegory on Stalinist Russia or the leviathan state. What he did was capture the nature of totalitarianism and portray the necessary complete submission of the individual to it and his absorption by it for such a system to function. And in doing so he provided an invaluable insight into the requisite voluntary enslavement of the individual by religious or secular totalitarianism.

The blog hostess even quotes from the Koran, Chapter 5, Verse 8: "Oh ye who believe! Stand out firmly for Allah, as witnesses to fair dealing, and let not the hatred of others to you make you swerve to wrong and depart from justice. Be just: that is next to piety; and fear Allah. For Allah is well-acquainted with all that ye do."

At the beginning of Orwell's novel, Smith, a low-ranking Party member, hates Big Brother, and "swerves" from loyalty to the Party and Big Brother by hoping to join an underground movement that will ultimately destroy them, knowing that the penalty for such a betrayal is death and that too likely Big Brother is also "well-acquainted" with his actions. But, at the end, Smith the apostate is reclaimed.

Christianity also claims that God is "all knowing, all seeing, and all powerful." Without discussing here the inherent contradictions in these attributes, the alleged ubiquitous presence of this entity in one's personal life is much more pronounced in Islam. As I remarked elsewhere, a Christian can go to church one day and for the rest of the week live on earth (or try to). Islam, like Big Brother or Nazism, requires that the faithful live the creed all their waking hours.

I think that one important step in understanding and combating Islam is to grasp what the creed requires of its adherents, which is the development in an individual of a psychology of selflessness that is compatible and comfortable with totalitarianism. The starting point of its appeal in individuals is the ingredient of selflessness stemming from a fear of developing and maintaining a self independent of ghosts and omnipotent government and the morality of living for others.

The commandments of Allah by way of Mohammad are just as baseless and arbitrary as the ten of God by way of Moses. "Thou shalt not kill." On what moral principle is this one founded? None, except perhaps that men are God's creations and it is "wrong" to destroy or harm them. "Thou shalt not steal." Why not? Isn't all property theft, or merely a form of stewardship of it granted by society? Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have certainly acknowledged that "truism." And that particular commandment doesn't restrain legislators, presumably sworn into office on their Bibles, from enacting tax laws or condoning the seizure of private property for pubic or other private use. One supposes that since the theft is for the "public good," God permits it and the legislators feel exonerated.

Grasping the relationship between selflessness and totalitarianism is also necessary to combat Christianity and any other form of mysticism, including the "secular" collectivist kind. At the moment, it is a question of which form today is rearing its irrational head more virulently, given the revival of religion especially in the U.S.: evangelical Christianity or Islam or environmentalism. Our schools for decades have been indoctrinating children from grade school on up through college on the alleged virtues of selflessness and sacrifice.

So it comes to no surprise to me that more and more high school and college students are "finding God" - to "stand out firmly" for something other than one's self - and dedicating themselves to some form of service; whether to society or to environmentalism or to God or to Allah or to some other ghost or icon of mysticism, it makes no difference, as long as it is selfless. It is a generation of "gentle" monsters that advocates of reason and liberty must contend with now and in the future, monsters willing to sacrifice themselves as well as everyone else in selfless pursuits of the irrational.

But, grasping the nature of that enemy is a necessary task to perform if we are ever to make any progress in preserving or reinstating our shrinking liberties.

Divine Command Theory

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

As much reading as I've done on religious conservatism of late, I must admit that I'm still shocked to see a leading conservative intellectual -- Dinesh D'Souza -- openly defend divine command theory. (Divine command theory is the moral view on which God's will determines right and wrong. On that view, if God commands rape, pillage, and murder, then rape, pillage, and murder are morally obligatory.) In the course of his argument that the crimes of atheistic totalitarian governments vastly outstrip those of religious governments, D'Souza writes (with my emphasis added):

The crimes of atheism have generally been perpetrated through a hubristic ideology that sees man, not God, as the creator of values. Using the latest techniques of science and technology, man seeks to displace God and create a secular utopia here on earth. Of course if some people -- the Jews, the landowners, the unfit, or the handicapped -- have to be eliminated in order to achieve this utopia, this is a price the atheist tyrants and their apologists have shown themselves quite willing to pay. Thus they confirm the truth of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's dictum, "If God is not, everything is permitted."

Without a doubt, communists slaughtered millions of people -- due to their communism, not their atheism. The slaughter was made possible by the idea that individuals can and ought to be sacrificed for the sake of the "higher ideal" of the collective. Notably, serious religionists share the same basic view, although their "higher ideal" is the Kingdom of God. If they fully accept that the good is defined by God's arbitrary will, they will commit any atrocity to achieve it, so long as they can find some rationalization in their barbaric holy texts. (Given what the Bible actually says, that's easy enough!)

Arrian on Justice

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I recently read Arrian's The Campaigns of Alexander. I enjoyed it immensely, particularly for Arrian's concern to clearly portray Alexander's moral qualities, for better and for worse. I found much to admire, both in Alexander and Arrian.

The following story is just a small example, at least of what I found admirable in Arrian. The basic context is that Arrian has just told the chilling tale of Alexander's murder of his beloved friend Cleitus in a drunken rage for insulting him. (Cleitus himself was justly peeved by the fawning flattery heaped upon Alexander by others in his entourage.) Alexander was immediately horrified by his action, so much so that he reportedly considered suicide in the moments immediately thereafter. He was disconsolate in his grief and guilt for many days, even refusing food and drink. Arrian then says:

There is a story that Alexander sent for the sophist Anaxarchus, in the hope he might give him comfort, and was still on his bed, bewailing his fate, when he came in.

Anaxarchus laughed. "Don't you know," he said, "why the wise men of old made justice to sit by the side of Zeus? It was to show that whatever Zeus may do is justly done. In the same way all the acts of a great king should be considered just, first by himself, then by the rest of us."

This was some consolation, at any rate for a time--though in my opinion he did Alexander a wrong more grievous than his grief, if he seriously, as a philosopher, put forward the view that a king need not act justly, or labor, to the best of his ability, to distinguish between right and wrong--if he really meant that whatever a king does, by whatever means, should be considered right.

That's a rather different view of justice in governance than found in the New Testament. For example, Paul writes:

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake. For for this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God's ministers, attending continually upon this very thing. Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour. Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. (Romans 13:1-8).

For Paul, subjection and obedience are themselves good. The rulers need not act justly; they need not earn obedience by governing well. God is in charge of such matters, since rulers only rule by His will. Moreover, according to Christian principles of judgment, mere mortals ought not dare judge the fitness of their rulers, lest they be judged for their inevitable faults in return. (On that point, see Matthew 18, for example.)

Given these ideas, it's little wonder that Christian rule in Europe entailed a reversion to the very kinds of despotic and arbitrary rule so reviled in the Greco-Roman world.

Islam and Greens Go Postal

By Edward Cline from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

At the end of my last commentary, I quoted from Sparrowhawk Virginia burgess Patrick Henry prefacing his introduction of the Stamp Act Resolves in May 1765, then remarked:

The historical irony is that when Henry made his speech, the Wahhabist Saudis were engaged in the conquest of the Arabian Peninsula, which they completed in 1806. Who could have predicted then that their descendents and their hired fellaheen would invade America two and half centuries later with the express purpose of gagging the likes of Henry in the name of Allah?

That was in relation to the request of CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) that the Fox TV network disclaim any "negative" portrayal of Muslims in its popular program "24."

CAIR, as I discussed in that commentary, has been busy with legal activism in the spirit of the ACLU. As though to underscore my Patrick Henry remarks, on December 19th the Muslim "civil liberties" organization has demanded that Republican representative Virgil Goode of Virginia apologize to "members of the Muslim community in his district" for "anti-Muslim" remarks in a private letter to the head of the local Sierra Club. (See CAIR's website under "news releases.")

Goode wrote, in reaction to the expressed wish of newly elected Muslim representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota to be sworn into office on a Koran:

"I do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way. The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran."

That is Virgil Goode's position, and he may say what he pleases. He is probably one of those who believe that America was founded on Christian principles, and that any elected official, in any level of government, should be sworn into office with a hand on a Bible. In practice, it may as well be a chunk of the Blarney Stone. I don't believe any elected or appointed official over the last century has ever strictly "upheld the Constitution." If any had, would we be saddled with a wealth-consuming, rights-violating welfare state that is drifting towards out-and-out statism?

Ideally, if some document is required to ritually sanctify an oath of office, elected officials and justices should be sworn in on a copy of the Ten Amendments, not on a tract containing the Ten Commandments or the ravings of any creed's "prophet."

But, there are two things wrong about this latest episode of Islamic arrogance. First, it is that CAIR is demanding an apology for a private opinion stated in a private letter. Although Goode is an elected representative, his letter doubtless expressed something he dare not say in Congress.

Second, there is the question of how that private letter came to the attention of the whirling, scimitar-wielding dervishes of CAIR. Is the head of the local chapter of the Sierra Club a Muslim, or sympathetic to Islam? Did another employee of Sierra send CAIR a copy of the letter? Or did someone in Goode's own office purloin it? Someone turned informer on Goode. From what motive?

On December 21, NBC's Brian Williams claimed that Goode sent the letter to his constituents. Which obfuscated version of the event has any grounding in reality? The network's coverage of the flap was subtly biased in favor of Ellison. It even concluded with a smarmy Nihad Awad, executive director of CAIR, who said:

"In the spirit of the season, I am sending Mr. Goode a Christmas present - a copy of the Constitution."

This is the same Nihad Awad who said a few years ago that he wouldn't mind seeing the Constitution some day replaced with the Koran.

Someone fingered Goode to CAIR. Regardless of how the deed was done, however, CAIR's action will send a chilling message to anyone - politician or private citizen - to keep his mouth shut and his thoughts to himself if he has nothing good to say about Muslims or Islam.

"Representative Goode's Islamphobic remarks send a message of intolerance that is unworthy of anyone elected to public office," said CAIR National Legislative Director Corey Saylor on CAIR's website. "There can be no reasonable defense for such bigotry."

It is a moot point whether or not Goode's remarks were bigoted. Criticism of Islam or of any Muslim should not automatically be deemed indicative of a dangerous and irrational psychological disorder, which is what the term "Islamophobia" implies. Islam and all Muslims are fair critical game, just as are Christianity and all Christians, and any other religion and its followers one cares to name. No religion is founded on reason, and all religions are legitimate subjects of rational scrutiny, caricature, and lampooning.

This is the true target of CAIR's accusation: not bigots or the xenophobic, but any person who subjects Islam to rational scrutiny and has the moral certitude to speak publicly on the matter.

To date, and to his credit, Representative Goode has refused to apologize.

CAIR is expanding its attention to toys, in this instance, video games. CAIR further reports on its website of December 19th:

"CAIR today asked Wal-Mart to stop selling a video game that glorifies religious violence and may harm interfaith relations....CAIR says it has received complaints about the game 'Left Behind: Eternal Forces,' produced by Left Behind Games Inc. the game reportedly rewards players for either converting or killing people of other faiths....The game's enemy team includes people with Muslim-sounding names...."

"We also believe that as a company that prides itself in hiring and offering services to a diverse group of people, it is Wal-Mart's corporate social responsibility to take into account the potential social impact of its decision to sell this harmful game. We, therefore, respectfully request the removal of the video game...from your selves."

I am no fan of the "Left Behind" series of novels - it is, after all, an apocalyptic Christian story - but if CAIR is so concerned about the "negative images" such games and rhetoric promote or perpetuate, it can do something about the violence of Islam's practitioners in the Mideast.

A companion incident occurred when two U.S. senators, Olympia Snowe (R-MA) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) sent the chairman of ExxonMobil a letter dated October 27 castigating the oil company for siding with "global warming deniers" and funding their research.

"We are convinced that ExxonMobil's longstanding support of a small cadre of global climate change skeptics...have made it increasingly difficult for the United States to demonstrate the moral clarity it needs across all facets of its diplomacy." For an excellent analysis of the possible ramifications of the letter, see Tom DeWeese's article, "The Real Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming: Skeptics Have Valid Arguments" on Capitalism Magazine (December 19). Among other things, DeWeese reveals just how "small" that cadre of "skeptics" is.

What concerns this writer is the veiled threat of punishment with special taxes and more regulation if ExxonMobil does not withdraw support from scientists who are either critical of global warming goodthink or who have burst its balloon. This is attempted censorship by the back door. And the only public official who has had the courage to name it comes from an unlikely quarter, Britain.

Lord Monckton, former policy adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, sent Rockefeller and Snowe a stinging letter that upbraided them for playing teeth-baring thugs. (For the full article, go to the PRNewswire, December 18.)

"You defy every tenet of democracy when you invite ExxonMobil to deny itself the right to provide information to 'senior elected and appointed government officials,' who disagree with your opinion," wrote Monckton.

"Skeptics and those who have the courage to support them are actually helpful in getting the science right. They do not, as you improperly suggest, 'obfuscate' the issue: they assist in clarifying it by challenging weaknesses in the 'consensus' argument and they compel necessary corrections."

His letter to Rockefeller and Snowe concludes:

"I challenge you to withdraw [the assertions that ExxonMobil is engaging in fraud and disinformation] or resign because your letter is the latest in what appears to be an internationally-coordinated series of maladroit and malevolent attempts to silence the voices of scientists and others who have sound grounds, rooted firmly in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, to question what you would have us believe is the unanimous agreement of scientists worldwide that global warming will lead to what you excitedly but unjustifiably called 'disastrous' and 'calamitous' consequences."

Or, as Ayn Rand once put it: Fifty million Frenchmen can be as wrong as one - in this instance, innumerable and noisy computer-model obsessed nerds who prefer verisimilitude over reality. His letter would have been faultlessly perfect if Monckton had further stated in it that it is global warming advocates (such as the "Gorebies") and environmentalists who engage in fraud and disinformation. It would be refreshing to hear someone say that the exponents of global warming's alleged disastrous and calamitous consequences and of environmental catastrophe fall into one of two categories: uncritical dupes, and power-lusting, man-hating political opportunists to whom truth is not only irrelevant, but the enemy.

It would be apropos to quote John Milton here, in regards to both Islam and the global warming alarmists and to the subject of the shutting up of their critics, from his Areopagitica (1644), one of the most perceptive political tracts ever written:

"Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?"

It is a free and open encounter that is the nemesis of the religious and environmental totalitarians among us and which they wish to suppress. In a culture of consensus and political power to enforce it, it is Truth that is "out."

Naked Animals

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Wow, I must admit that I never imagined the following scenario as a consequence of the claim of equality between humans and other animals.

DEAR ABBY: Am I a "sicko" because I step out of the shower naked in front of our dog? My wife thinks so. The trouble started when we got a female dog, "Taffy," from the local animal shelter. Taffy sleeps in our bedroom and is there in the morning when I take my shower.

My wife insists that I cover up in front of the dog and that Taffy is no different from a child. This has created a lot of stress between us because, to me, a dog is a dog. Is it wrong to be naked in front of a dog? -- IN THE DOGHOUSE, TEMECULA, CALIF.

DEAR IN THE DOGHOUSE: Even though many people treat their dogs like children, the fact remains that dogs are canines -- not homo sapiens. Your wife appears to be either jealous or have an overactive imagination. It is no more wrong for a human to be naked in the presence of a dog than it is for a dog to be naked in the presence of a human.

Really, that's just freaky.

Booming Iraq: Cause vs. Effect

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Ascetic Power-Lusters

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I've been a bit sparse in my blogging of late due to the temporary death of our high speed internet connection for almost two weeks. (A second story on a house was added in the very line of sight required for the neighborhood wireless. Understandably, it took a bit of time to identify and then fix the problem. Thankfully, it is now solved.) It's been hard enough just to publish the short posts in my queue -- and impossible to write anything new or check on suggestions from others.

So in the interests of efficiency, I'm just going to directly quote this interesting tidbit from Jim May:

You might remember Ivy Starnes from Atlas. Ayn Rand drew her as an ascetic, disdaining material wealth, to illustrate the sort of greed that really IS the root of all evil: the lust for power.

I wonder if she knew that Stalin, too, fit that pattern.

"You know who we're talking about: the meanest, most dangerous criminal that lived on the face of the Earth. The one who built a kingdom around himself and possessed almost unlimited power.

"In his private life, however, he rarely used this power to get himself nicer things. His lifestyle was more of a soldier, of a man possessed... Except for a very few 'special' things, which he cherished almost to the point of a fetish."

Such ascetic power-lusters make the hedonistic power-lusters seem downright healthy! (Jim also said that the site has "a ton of interesting stuff.")

Honesty About Relationships

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In a recent blog post on Rule of Reason, Nick Provenzo notes that the op-eds of Robert Tracinski posted on ARI's web site now appear with the following note in the tagline: "Robert W. Tracinski is no longer associated with the Ayn Rand Institute--neither as a writer nor as a speaker."

I agree wholeheartedly with Nick's sentiments about the change:

Objectivists are often criticized for their public break-ups, but I think being forthright when a relationship ends is the more honest approach. Reality demands an unflinching dedication to the truth, including the fact that some relationships deserve to end.

In my opinion, Tracinski has publicly embraced a theory of history that rejects the importance of Objectivism and principled consistency in defining and defending the long term good. As such, it would be dishonest to claim that he continues to be a public advocate for Ayn Rand's philosophy. If the end of Tracinski's association with ARI was brought on by his recent thinking, I am glad for it, for it would be an honest end to recent events.

If I can manage the time, I'd like to write a post or two on Robert Tracinski's significant departures from basic principles of Objectivism in recent years. In particular, I have much to say about his switch from rationalism to empiricism in his view of the role of philosophy in human life found in his not-yet-finished "What Went Right" series. At the moment, however, I'm intensely busy with real work. If I can find the time though, I'll write what I can.

(And speaking of terminated relationships, I won't be posting further on SoloPassion for the reasons detailed in this post.)

Dear Virginia in the 21st Century

By Greg from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

[My own response to the Dear Virginia in the 19th Century challenge.]

In 1897, Virginia O'Hanlon wrote to the editor of The New York Sun:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says, "If you see it in the Sun, it's so."
Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

Dear Virginia,

Your eagerness to know is wonderful! Have you ever scooped up a lost nickel, only to discover that it is a quarter? Santa is like that, a thousand times over. No, there is no Santa outside imagination, but learning about him is greater than any gift he would bring were he really real.

Santa is a playful fantasy full of hope and happiness, inviting you down the challenging path to true adulthood. Yes, he embodies good will and generosity and inspires children everywhere to appreciate the difference between Naughty and Nice. But there is so much more that you and your friends are just now glimpsing, hidden behind the tale's knowing wink.

Santa helps us to learn the crucial lesson that sometimes what we are told just isn't so, no matter how splendid it sounds, who says it, or how tightly we might cling to the idea. He invites us to push through the veil of a child's blind acceptance to join the grown-up world of facts, thought, and independent understanding. Just as nobody can breathe for us, nobody can think for us -- not even The New York Sun. You have to see the truth of something to really know.

Now, do not let slip fantasy and imagination, for even grown-ups love to play! There will always be costumes and paintings and stories to delight. But we have to distinguish between make-believe and reality, and use our intelligence and creativity to understand the world and make our place in it. This is how we sustain all those things that motivate and fulfill us: love, art, play, hope, romance, achievement, joy.

The most exciting thing you can discover is that reality itself is infinitely more rich and interesting than our wildest fantasies. And Santa brings each of us a priceless gift: help in learning to face the vast wonder and glory of the universe like a hero, seeing by a light that is brighter than the brightest star, shaping and reshaping our world with a boundless engine of creation.

No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. But important lessons and a sweet tale that makes glad the heart of childhood live on, at least until our imagination creates something even better. So celebrate the flowering of your intellect and pass Santa forward to the next generation with love -- and a wink.

The Meaning of New Year's Resolutions

By Alex Epstein

Every New Year's Eve millions of
Americans make New Year's resolutions. Whether the resolution is to get out of
debt, to spend more time with loved ones, or to quit smoking, these resolutions
have one thing in common: they are goals to make our lives better.

Unfortunately, this ritual commitment to self-improvement is widely viewed as something of a joke--in part because New Year's resolutions go so notoriously unmet. After years of watching others--or themselves--excitedly commit to a new goal, only to abandon the quest by March, many come to conclude that New Year's resolutions are an exercise in futility that should not be taken seriously. "The silly season is upon us," writes a columnist for the Washington Post, "when people feel compelled to remake themselves with new year's resolutions."

But such a cynical attitude is false and self-destructive. Making New Year's resolutions does not have to be futile--and to make them is not silly; done seriously, it is an act of profound moral significance that embodies the essence of a life well-lived.

Consider what we do when we make a New Year's resolution: we look at where we are in some area of life, think about where we want to be, and then set ourselves a goal to get there. We are tired of feeling chubby and lethargic, say, and want the improved appearance and greater energy level that comes with greater fitness. So we resolve to take up a fun athletic activity--like tennis or a martial art--and plan to do it three times a week.

Is this a laughable act of self-delusion? Hardly. If it were, then how would anyone ever achieve anything in life? In fact, to make a New Year's resolution is to recognize the undeniable reality that successful goal-pursuit is possible--the reality that everyone at one time or another has set and achieved long-range goals, and profited from doing so. Indeed, not only is it possible to achieve long-range goals, it is necessary for success in life. To make a New Year's resolution is also to recognize the undeniable reality that rewarding careers and romances do not just happen automatically--that to get what we want in our lives, we must consciously choose and achieve the right goals. We must be goal-directed.

Unfortunately, a goal-directed orientation is missing to a large extent in too many lives. It is all too easy to live life passively, acting without carefully deciding what one is doing with one's life and why. How many people do you know who are in the career they fell into out of school, even if it is not very satisfying--or who have children at a certain age because that's what is expected, even if it's not what they really want--or who spend endless hours of "free time" in front of the TV, since that's the most readily available form of relaxation--or who follow a life routine that they never really chose and don't truly enjoy, but which has the force of habit?

Too often, the goal-directedness embodied by New Year's resolutions is the exception in lives ruled by passively accepted forces--unexamined routine, short-range desires, or alleged duties. It is the passive approach to happiness that makes so many resolutions peter out, lost in the shuffle of life or abandoned due to lost motivation. More broadly than its impact on New Year's resolutions, the passive approach to happiness is the reason that so many go through life without ever getting--or even knowing--what they really want.

It is a sad irony that those who write off New Year's resolutions because so many fail reinforces the passive approach to life that causes so many resolutions--and so many other dreams--to fail. The solution to failed New Year's resolutions is not to abandon the practice, but to supplement it with a broader resolution--a commitment to a goal-directed life.

This New Year's, resolve to think about how to make your life better, not just once a year, but every day. Resolve to set goals, not just in one or two aspects of life, but in every important aspect and in your life as a whole. Resolve to pursue the goals that will make you successful and happy, not as the exception in a life of passivity, but as the rule that becomes second-nature.

If you do this, you will be resolving to do the most important thing of all: to take your happiness seriously.

Alex Epstein is a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute (http://www.aynrand.org/) in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand--author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." Contact the writer at media@aynrand.org.

Review of Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Notre Dame Philosophical Review has a review of Tara Smith's new book, Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist. (I can't say anything about it at present: since I'm working on my own review, I don't want to read it yet. Still, that's no reason for you not to read it!)

Airlines Should Be Free to Merge

Irvine, CA:
In response to a proposed merger between United and Continental, as well as reports that US Airways is considering a merger with Delta, politicians criticized the companies and called on the Justice Department to block any consolidation in the airline industry.

House Representative James Oberstar, for example, says the government should not allow any airline mergers because they would only benefit stockholders and airline executives. Senator Frank Lautenberg, echoing the anti-merger sentiment in Congress, opposes any merger that the government deems not "good for the flying public."

"But politicians have no right to interfere with the mergers of airline companies--or any other companies," said Dr. Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute.

"Mergers are a legitimate business strategy used to cut costs, improve efficiency, gain customers, grow sales, and increase profits. All companies, including airlines, should be free to decide whether to merge or break up; if customers do not like the prices or practices of the merged company, they are free to take their money elsewhere."

Dear Virginia in the 19th Century

By Greg from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In 1897, Virginia O'Hanlon wrote to the editor of The New York Sun:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says, "If you see it in the Sun, it's so."
Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

Frank P. Church wrote The Sun's famous, oft-reprinted answer:

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be that is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.

Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We would have no enjoyment, except in the sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside the curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Church's popular answer represents and advocates an utterly mystical worldview -- one where man is low, little, helpless -- one where the universe of science is barren, while what is really real and truly valuable is hidden behind the veil of the supernatural, accessible only by faith and feelings. It is a sustained attack on reality and reason, including the genuine spiritual values important to human life.

Understandably, those lacking a mystical bent (like me!) do not smile on this answer to Virginia. Several years back, after seeing Church's response printed yet again, I thought about my young nieces and nephews and I wondered what better answer to Virginia I might send their way if the issue ever arose. Looking around the web, nothing I found fit the bill. Everything was either not focusing on the positive orientation to reason and reality that would be healthy, or was downright mean-spirited, and sometimes even destructive (as with those that urge Virginia to nurture thoughts of Santa as a vicious myth and sue her lying parents for deep psychic wounds caused by such child abuse).

So I decided to try my hand at an answer: same length, similar style and language, equivalent unapologetic advocacy of a worldview (but a healthy one this time) -- ostensibly directed to a child in that age, but really designed to spark adult understanding in any age.

How would you answer Virginia? (I'll share what I wrote next time.)

The Missing Variable: Philosophy

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Great. Thanks to sloppy journalism about a statistical study, everyone who knows a crusader for vegetarianism can look forward to being called an idiot. Again. And with "proof", this time. From the first linked article:

Frequently dismissed as cranks, their fussy eating habits tend to make them unpopular with dinner party hosts and guests alike.

But now it seems they may have the last laugh, with research showing vegetarians are more intelligent than their meat-eating friends.

Yep. These are the first two lines of the article: all many people will have time to read, all any leftist needs to know, and all that will fit into any of the sound bites we're all going to be subjected to non-stop from every direction in the broadcast media. Prepare to have it beaten into your skull that vegetarians have been proven, once and for all, to be more intelligent than everyone else.

And we all know that intelligence is exactly the same thing as infallibility.

Essentially, the news articles I have seen on this are fluff used to disguise one small detail about the study they are so busy touting: The study doesn't really prove anything about the intelligence of vegetarians or any implications about it concerning the alleged merits of vegetarianism.

There was no difference in IQ between strict vegetarians and those who classed themselves as veggie but still ate fish or chicken.

However, vegans - vegetarians who also avoid dairy products - scored significantly lower, averaging an IQ score of 95 at the age of 10.

Researcher Dr Catharine Gale said there could be several explanations for the findings, including intelligent people being more likely to consider both animal welfare issues and the possible health benefits of a vegetarian diet. [bold added]

Got that? All this study (third link) shows is that people who consider themselves vegetarians (even if they are not) scored a few points higher on IQ tests -- as children. We'll even ignore that pesky group of nine vegans who were below average intelligence overall.

And on top of that, the paper admits that:

[S]ome attrition has occurred in the cohort over time. The participants at the 30 year follow-up did gain significantly higher IQ scores at age 10 than those who did not take part, although the size of the differences was modest (0.3 of a standard deviation). Unless the relation between childhood mental ability and vegetarianism is in the opposite direction in non-participants, little bias will have been introduced in our study.

Given that "some attrition" means that over a third of the original 17,198 subjects did not report on vegetarian status as adults and that the article's own literature review admits that "Findings are mixed" in previous studies that attempted to link vegetarianism to educational attainment (which is a "strong correlate of mental ability"), this finding has to be viewed as a preliminary addition to "mixed" evidence at best.

But let's entertain the possibility for a moment that Gale et al. are right, as I suspect they are. Future studies vindicate them. What have they shown? We'll start with some of their own ruminations:

Although the vegetarians in this cohort were, on average, more intelligent, better educated, and of higher occupational social class than the non-vegetarians, these socioeconomic advantages were not reflected in their income. It may be that ethical considerations determined not just their diet but also their choice of employment. Compared with non-vegetarians, vegetarians were less likely to be working in the private sector and more likely to be working in charitable organisations, local government, or education: 17% of the vegetarians worked in education compared with 9% of non-vegetarians. When asked, as part of the follow-up survey, what they thought of the statement "The government should redistribute income," 50% of vegetarians said they agreed compared with 41% of nonvegetarians, and this proportion was even higher among male vegetarians (61% v 42%). Such views may not be compatible with a career in the more lucrative employment sectors. [bold added]

In other words, the vegetarians are more left-wing than non-vegetarians! This comes as no surprise since those who are more intelligent generally remain in school longer, where they are subjected to more of the same relentless left-wing indoctrination than their counterparts. I would have loved to see a statistical analysis of that! Or even the slightest acknowlegement of that fact in the news media.

Credit the scientists, at least, with providing what Paul Harvey would call, "the rest of the story". The paper openly admits the objections one might raise to its conclusions and even states several times that vegetarianism is often chosen for "ethical" (i.e., philosophical) reasons regardless of any alleged health benefits.

Although our results suggest that children who are more intelligent may be more likely to become vegetarian as adolescents or as young adults, it does not rule out the possibility that such a diet might have some beneficial effect on subsequent cognitive performance. Might the nature of the vegetarians' diet in this cohort have enhanced their apparently superior brain power? Was this the mechanism that helped them to achieve the disproportionate number of higher degrees? Benjamin Franklin and George Bernard Shaw, both ardent vegetarians, would have us believe so. According to Shaw in an article published in The Star in 1890, "A mind of the calibre of mine cannot derive its nutriment from cows."

...

Alternatively it is possible that the link between childhood IQ and vegetarianism in later life is not on a causal chain of mechanisms related to health. People with a higher IQ may well differ from those with less superior brain power in many of their lifestyle decisions: for instance, choice of newspaper, type of books read, preferred form of entertainment. The association between IQ and vegetarianism may be merely an example of many other lifestyle preferences that might be expected to vary with intelligence but which may or may not have implications for health. [bold added]

The bit about the study not "ruling out" an intelligence boost due to vegetarianism is worth noting. The study has nothing whatsoever to say about whether a vegetarian diet might yield the benefits to intelligence alleged by some famous vegetarians in the past: Those who called themselves vegetarians started out that way and there was no difference between real and fake vegetarians among that group!

In other words, this study reinforces the point that it is a person's philosophy that affects whether they make a lifestyle choice -- such as to become a vegetarian -- that may conflict with their own self-interest and whose benefits (if any) have not been firmly established.

It is too bad that the news media have chosen to pretend that science has vindicated vegetarianism. In fact, this study can only point to a correlation between a mildly higher IQ (whatever that means) and a desire to be known as a vegetarian! Not only can it merely "not rule out" the notion that vegetarianism enhances cognitive function, it cannot even state that actual vegetarians really did start out as more intelligent.

Journalism about science really makes me want to pull my hair out sometimes.

-- CAV

The Rise of Totalitarian Islam

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Dr. Yaron Brook's course The Rise of Totalitarian Islam is now available for sale from the Ayn Rand Bookstore. Some of you might remember that I blogged about the course earlier: first here and then here. The course was excellent; I highly recommend it, particularly as a follow-up to Dr. Brook's also-excellent course A Brief History of the Middle East.

Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The NY Sun recently published a nice article on Brad Thompson's founding of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. The quotes by various high-profile philosophers on the morality of capitalism were ... um ... interesting.

Something's not right here...

By David from Truth, Justice, and the American Way,cross-posted by MetaBlog

From the Center for Consumer Freedom:

Sweden's "soft dictatorship"

By David from Truth, Justice, and the American Way,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Bruce Bawer writes in the New York Sun about Sweden’s “soft dictatorship:”

. ...the official view was neatly captured in a post-September 11 editorial in the nation's largest newspaper, Aftonbladet, which assured readers that the terrorists who attacked New York and Washington weren't Sweden's enemies but simply hated " U.S. imperialism," a reasonable position given that "the U.S. is the greatest mass murderer of our time." Such views, taught in Sweden's classrooms and enshrined in Sweden's state-approved schoolbooks, are reiterated daily by Sweden's mainstream press organizations, all of which are either government-owned or government-subsidized.

In Sweden, whose murder rate is currently twice that of America and where Muslims now constitute over 10% of the population and are disproportionately unemployed and prone to violence, the Swedish press routinely depicts America as crime-ridden. Polls show that the majority of Swedes are deeply disturbed by their country's dramatic social changes and highly critical of the policies that brought them about. Yet the crime and violence generally go unreported, so only rarely does any of the criticism seep into the press.

Recently, the city of Stockholm carried out a survey of ninth-grade boys in the predominantly Muslim suburb of Rinkeby. The survey showed that in the last year, 17% of the boys had forced someone to have sex, 31% had hurt someone so badly that the victim required medical care, and 24% had committed burglary or broken into a car. Sensational statistics -- but in all of Sweden, they appear to have been published only in a daily newssheet that is distributed free on the subways.

When voices of dissent do break through in Sweden, they're often punished. During the runup to the Iraq war, the Swedish government censured the independent TV channel TV4 for running an "Oprah" episode that presented both pro- and anti-war arguments. TV4 was charged with violating press-balance guidelines when in fact its offense was being too balanced -- it had exposed Swedish viewers to ideas from which journalists had otherwise shielded them.

Earlier this year, for example, the government closed down the Sweden Democrats' Web site because it had published a cartoon of Muhammad... If the Bush administration had closed down a Democratic Party Web site¸ there would be scare headlines and editorials thundering about dictatorship -- and rightly so. But when Sweden's rulers did it, it was apparently acceptable -- because they did it in the name of political correctness.

Sweden (along with Cuba) has long been the darling welfare state of leftists everywhere. Do you think they would find the above facts shocking, or just brush them off, just as they have brushed off the millions of starving serfs and thousands of dissents murdered and imprisoned in Cuba?

Edit: I looked up some economist statistics for Sweden:

Sweden had a de facto unemployment rate of 20-25 percent…. Sweden has gone from being the fourth richest country in the world in 1970 to being the fourteenth richest in 2002. Today the average American has 37 percent higher purchasing power and almost twice as high private consumption as the average Swede… More than 30 percent of the Swedish population falls below the American poverty line.

Our Saudi Foes

By Edward Cline from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Enough about the Iranian bogeyman, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad! He is our certifiable enemy. Let's shift our focus for a moment to our venal ally in the "war on terror," Saudi Arabia, his chief rival in the conquest or destruction of the U.S.

Ahmadinejad, addressing a conference in Tehran a year ago, proclaimed that "those who doubt, to those who ask is it possible, or those who do not believe, I say accomplishment of a world without America and Israel is both possible and feasible." The Saudis agree with half that statement; for them, the eradication of Israel is a mutual goal, but it would rather convert the U.S. into an Islamic nation, instead of destroy it.

"Saudis and Iran prepare to do battle over corpse of Iraq," read the headline in the Sunday Telegraph (London, December 3), and in my previous commentary, "The Sandstorm of Western Confusion," I quoted one interesting paragraph from that article:

"Saudi Arabia, America's closest ally in the Arab world, is considering backing anti-U.S. insurgents because it is so alarmed that Sunnis in Iraq will be left to their fate - military and political - at the hands of the [Iranian-backed] Shia majority."

How would the Saudis accomplish such backing without alienating the prostituted affections of the Bush administration and the State Department? The Associated Press provided an answer in an article headlined, "Saudis reportedly funding Iraqi Sunnis." The report is that of the Iraq Study Group.

"Private Saudi citizens are giving millions of dollars to Sunni Muslim insurgents in Iraq, and much of it is used to buy weapons, including shoulder-fired [Russian Strela] anti-aircraft missiles, according to key Iraqi officials and others familiar with the flow of cash."

This is an interesting subject in the ISG's report that hasn't received the attention it deserves by the American news media, whose news anchors and Washington correspondents are barely able to contain their joy over the bipartisan recommendations that President Bush abandon the idea of victory in Iraq and begin talking with Iran and Syria with the goal of "stabilizing" the chaos in Iraq.

"Saudi government officials deny that any money from their country is being sent to Iraqis fighting the government and the U.S.-led coalition. But the ISG report said Saudis are a source of money for Sunni Arab insurgents. Several truck drivers interviewed by the Associated Press described carrying boxes of cash from Saudi Arabia into Iraq - money they said was headed for insurgents."

"Two high-ranking Iraqi officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity, told the AP most of the Saudi money came from private donations, called zaqat, collected for Islamic causes and charities."

The article reports that the Saudis claim to be tracking "suspicious financial operations." Tracking and policing such operations, however, are two distinct actions. The AP article continues, "The ISG report said that 'funding for the Sunni insurgency comes from private individuals within Saudi Arabia and other (Persian) Gulf states.'" Oman? Kuwait? Qatar? Bahrain? The United Arab Emirates?

In the moral dustbowls of all these medieval enclaves, such "private individuals" must have close political and economic connections to their royalist governments to be wealthy enough to indulge in such generosity. Their "charitable" donations must have the tacit approval and knowledge of the powers in the royal palaces and compounds.

As evil and perversely bizarre as the notion is that an alleged American ally would condone or sanction its citizens enabling "insurgents" to kill American soldiers - but not incite the rage of either the Bush administration or the news media or members of the ISG - the Saudis are also funding another kind of insurgency in the U.S. itself. Its chief front organization is the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

The goal of this "insurgency" is two-fold: to whitewash Islam by projecting it as a benign creed deserving of special dispensations and treatment vis-à-vis American law; and to insinuate the Islamic ethos into American society with the ultimate goal of transforming it from a secular to an Islamic society (which means discarding the Constitution and replacing it with the Koran). Its chief weapons until now have been lawsuits and press releases.

CAIR is a lobby-cum-"civil rights" organization that advances Saudi interests in the U.S. It is staffed by Wahhabists and financially supported by surreptitiously donated Saudi and other "Gulf" money. That is, by American motorists, without their knowledge, at the gas pump.

Now CAIR has allies in Congress. Up to now, it has counted on the gullibility and short-ranged mentalities of the news media and even the White House to lend it an air of innocence and concern. Up to now, the rule has been dinners for Muslim guests at the White House, receptions for them in swank hotels, and a congenial first-name-basis camaraderie.

When Congress reconvenes next year, CAIR and its phalanx of interlinked Muslim organizations in the U.S. will expect their leftist and Democratic allies in the Senate and House to work for and deliver legislation that will protect the Islamic beachhead in America. For a detailed summary of the goals and backgrounds of the "usual suspects" - Nancy Pelosi, John Conyers, and Keith Ellison - see Robert Spencer's article, "CAIR's Congress" in FrontPage Magazine of November 13, 2006; Robert Novak's article in the Chicago Sun-Times of December 10 on Zalmay Khalilzad, the outgoing U.S. ambassador to Iraq and a Muslim who will likely become the U.S. envoy at the United Nations; and "John Conyers and the Muslim Caucus" in the Investor's Business Daily of November 9.

More disturbing, however, is another article from the December 4th FrontPage Magazine, "CAIR KOs '24'," by Henry Mark Holzer.

"Early in 2005, CAIR met with representatives of the Fox television network and producers of the hit drama '24' to discuss concerns about the depiction of a 'Muslim' family at the heart of a terror plot on that popular program," cites Holzer from CAIR's Annual Report, titled "The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States 2006, The Struggle for Equality." "CAIR was concerned that the portrayal of the family as a terrorist 'sleeper cell' would cast suspicion over ordinary American Muslims and increase Islamophobia.

"Rabiah Ahmed, spokeswoman for CAIR, said that the show was 'taking everyday American Muslim families and making them suspects. It's very dangerous and very disturbing."

CAIR's Annual Report continues:

"At the meeting, which included CAIR and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), Fox officials agreed to distribute a CAIR public service announcement to network affiliates and ask that it be aired in proximity to '24.' Network officials also agreed to air a disclaimer stating the American Muslims reject terrorism."

Mr. Holzer writes:

"Although many Americans were rightly enraged at Fox's capitulation to CAIR, they wrongly complained of 'censorship.'" Holzer, Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn Law School, correctly counters that Fox's submission - and remember that "Islam" means "submission" - did not constitute censorship. "Only the government has the power to censor (subject to whatever protection that might be afforded by the federal First Amendment and state constitutions)."

What Fox's decision did constitute was: cowardice.

CAIR insisted that Kiefer Sutherland, who plays the intrepid Jack Bauer, a counter-terrorism agent, issue the politically correct version of a parental guidance warning: "...Now while terrorism is obviously one of the most critical challenges facing our nation and the world, is important to recognize that the American Muslim community stands firmly beside their fellow Americans in denouncing and resisting all forms of terrorism. So in watching '24,' please, bear that in mind."

Which Sutherland did. Technically, it was called a "disclaimer." What it disclaims and abdicates, however, is the right of Fox in "24" to portray Muslims as it sees fit, regardless of the accuracy of such a portrayal, regardless of the fact that most American Muslims are an alien fifth column of manqués, conditioned by the Koran and their clerics to do the bidding of Allah, Mohammad, and CAIR. CAIR's Annual Report could just as well have been titled, "The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States 2006, The Struggle for Supremacy."

Holzer then lets fly at CAIR:

"Wrapping itself in the flag, invoking the Constitution, and hiding beneath its veneer of a self-styled 'civil liberties' organization - modeled on its anti-American mentor and template, the American Civil Liberties Union - CAIR is the preeminent domestic mailed fist of Islam in the velvet glove of civil liberties....CAIR is using the American legal system to intimidate the exercise of free speech, to undermine our homeland defense and to advance Muslim cultural infiltration of our domestic institutions by seeking special dispensations concerning dress, national holidays, educational texts, the content of books, movies, television, and more. In addition to its incessant intimidating complaints about the alleged violation of 'Muslim Civil Liberties.'"

(The balance of Holzer's article is a description of the extent of CAIR's legal activism in the U.S., to which the news media and our elected representatives are either oblivious or criminally ambivalent.)

While Fox's decision to "submit" to Islamic sensibilities indeed does not constitute censorship (see Ayn Rand's definition and discussion of censorship in The Ayn Rand Lexicon), it is symptomatic of what could be called "mirror censorship," that is, self-censorship from fear and moral cowardice without the excuse of being subjected to or threatened with government force. In the fog-bound ethics of approximations, relativism, and non-absolutes, the one absolute that pragmatists, "realists" and the "practical" fear to encounter in that fog is: the necessity of opposing censorship. Censorship is the forcible suppression of free speech by the entity that has a monopoly on force, the government. Facing naked censorship, they know they must take a moral stand.

So one must wonder about the moral stature of men who readily submit to faux force, that is, to the whims and wishes of a "community" that threatens lawsuits, demonstrations, or boycotts. Since force is not threatened, the pragmatists and "realists" feel comfortable by acknowledging a group's "displeasure" and claims of "persecution" and by calling their penance "public service." One cannot but conclude that they would rather not face a moral decision at all, and that, confronted with genuine censorship, they would sanction that, as well, in the name of the "public good."

Let us not forget the power behind CAIR, which is chiefly Saudi money. That money has been funding gangs of tribalist killers who target American soldiers in Iraq, as well as funding "civil liberties" insurgents in this country who target the First Amendment. And now the Baker-Hamilton team of compromisers is proposing that the U.S. hold direct talks with Iran and Syria, which have also been sending other tribalist killers money and weapons to Iraq to kill American soldiers.

One of Bush's gravest errors was not asking Congress for a declaration of war against the "axis of evil." As a friend explained, such a declaration would give the U.S. the right to deem an organization like CAIR an enemy agent and to take the appropriate wartime punitive actions. But no such declaration has been made; one consequence of that failure is that the moral behavior of private individuals and organizations like Fox has too often mirrored that of our foreign policy: cowardice and appeasement. Remember the Danish cartoon imbroglio?

At least American soldiers can fight back and kill the enemy in Iraq. But where, Holzer asks, are the "dedicated lawyers with the desire to meet CAIR on the legal battlefield...?" Are they all dead? Are they too busy passing statist legislation in Congress, such as the selective censorship of the Campaign Finance Law, or cooking up class action suits against businesses?

In Book Four - Empire of my Sparrowhawk series, Patrick Henry, a lawyer and freshman burgess, about to introduce his Stamp Act Resolves in the Virginia General Assembly in May of 1765, states:

"We propose that this House adopt and forward to those parties [Parliament and King George the Third], not genuflective beseechments or adulatory objurgations, but pungent resolves of our understanding of the origins and practice of British and American liberty, resolves which will frankly alert them to both the error of their presumptions and our determination to preserve that liberty. These resolves, in order to have some consequence and value, ought not to be expressed by us in the role of effusive mendicants applying for the restitution of what has been wrested from them, but with the cogently blunt mettle of men who refuse to be robbed."

The historical irony is that when Henry made his speech, the Wahhabist Saudis were engaged in the conquest of the Arabian Peninsula, which they completed in 1806. Who could have predicted then that their descendants and their hired fellaheen would invade America unopposed two and half centuries later with the express purpose of gagging the likes of Henry in the name of Allah?

The gulf between the protector and the protected

By Nicholas Provenzo from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Last night MSNBC ran its documentary "For God & Country: A Marine Sniper's Story" which tells the story of Matt Orth, a 22-year-old war veteran of both Afghanistan and Iraq. The footage consisted mostly of interviews with Orth as he chronicled his experiences in combat, as well as return to civilian life.

In watching Orth's story, I thought it was interesting when he remarked that he and his fellow snipers did not talk about the larger implications of their killings in their training or among one another on the battlefield. If that's the case, that's clearly a taboo that should be broken. One deserves to be morally and mentally armed as one goes into combat, if only to reduce the likelihood of developing unearned guilt later down the road. One needs to fully think though just what it means to kill another human being, and why, in certain contexts, morality demands that one kill.

And from what I could tell (and not unlike many veterans), Orth suffers from being unable to fully reconcile his life in civilized society with his life on the battlefield. For example, when Orth says sees a parked car, his first thoughts drift toward it being a roadside bomb. He notes that in America, people who murder even one person are sent away to prison for life, yet here he is a man who has killed hundreds of people--in supposed opposition to society's cherished norms. The obvious implication that Orth makes is that he is a murderer, yet he clearly is not a murderer, in the same way that an executioner who puts to death a criminal on death row is not a murderer. The work is protecting America's freedom against its enemies is grisly and draining, yet justice demands it.

So why then the emotional hang-up? It think its source is that few people back home in America ever put in the effort to understand the gravity and the impact of the choices that men like Orth have to make in order to achieve their mission on the battlefield. For example, Orth says he has drifted away from most of the friends he had prior to her service with the Marines. One gets the sense that the none of these former friends would ever think to approach him to say, "time and time again, you had to make brutal life and death decisions in order to survive (and you have to carry the weight of decisions that went badly), and I understand and respect you for it." I doubt that such an acknowledgement of the life of a solider would even show up on their radar.

One also hears about the negative effects of "dehumanizing" one's enemy, but in Orth's case, I see the exact opposite--Orth has humanized the enemy to the point that I think it clearly takes away from his own well being. For example, several times he asks if the men he shot said good by to their children that day. So what if they didn't? These enemy men made a deliberate choice to act against America in pursuit of their vile and irrational cause. They created a universe where our men would have no choice but to strike them down. No solider who engages such an enemy should lose a night's sleep as a result of his actions.

And thus one can see the negative fallout from Orth's perception of what constitutes heroism. In the documentary, Orth repeats the mantra that a hero is someone who sacrifices for others, yet how awful it must be for him to realize that if he did sacrifice himself for others, they are utterly clueless about it, and that most of them refuse to put in even the modicum of effort it would take to understand him on his own terms. The irony is that Orth says that he values his relationships all the more, because he is intimately aware of how easily life can be squelched away, yet only a few in his circle seem to be able to respond in kind--and in this, one sees the gulf between the protector and the protected.

By trade, snipers have to make life and death decisions on the battlefield, and they are unusual in that they must individually stalk their targets (and thus their interaction with their opponent is often more intimate than someone who simply drops a bomb from a plane). Nevertheless, the net reasoning and the net result for both the sniper and the aviator the same. In battle, our armed forces exist to kill the enemy and compel him to surrender his cause. Such a task demands a stout heart--and head.

And as a grateful people, I think it falls upon us to help such people develop the tools that they need to return to the peaceable and fulfilling lives that they so deserve. As Orth's story aired, I could not help but say to myself that a little bit of rational egoism would go a long way for this young hero, and the others like him.

John Snow

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Theodore Dalrymple has posted an interesting book review over at City Journal on The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, by Steven Johnson, which describes the triumph of epidemiology over cholera in nineteenth-century London.

New epidemic diseases, even if they kill fewer people overall than the old ones, are particularly frightening, making it almost impossible for people to proportion their anxiety according to the objective risks. Though cholera was not one of the greatest killers of the nineteenth century (tuberculosis easily took the palm in Western Europe), it was new and unfamiliar when it first reached Britain in 1831. The suddenness of the epidemics it caused provoked panic; but by the time Robert Koch proved the bacteriological cause in 1883, cholera had not shown up in Britain for nearly 20 years.

Not bacteriology but epidemiology and sanitary engineering defeated cholera. The 1854 cholera epidemic in London, and the subsequent removal of the handle of the Broad Street pump by John Snow, was to epidemiological history what the Declaration of Independence was to American history.

...

[Snow] was responsible for the greatest single feat of epidemiology ever. It would hardly be too much to say that he founded the discipline.

...

By examining the distribution of cases, starting from the new hypothesis that cholera was waterborne rather than miasmatic, Snow deduced that the epidemic's source was contaminated water from the Broad Street pump, and he persuaded the reluctant authorities to remove the pump handle so that water could no longer flow. A local clergyman, the Reverend Henry Whitehead, at one time skeptical of Snow's theory, then proved that the initial patient who began the epidemic (the index case, as epidemiologists call it) had poisoned the pump's water supply.

It took a while before everyone accepted the waterborne nature of cholera, though the theory did win over the leading medical statistician of the day, William Farr, who initially believed that it was elevation above sea level that accounted for the distribution of cases, with filthy, cholera-carrying air stifling lower elevations. One of the greatest engineering projects of all time, the construction of a proper sewage system and clean water supply for London, then got underway, and no large-scale waterborne epidemics have plagued the city since. Indirectly, Snow made vast urban agglomerations safe, for the developed world soon copied London's example. [bold added]

This story amazes me for two reasons. First of all, Snow did a remarkable bit of original thinking that very quickly started saving lives. Second, thanks to his own efforts, basically everyone takes healthy urban living so much for granted that few remember the man. Chalk one up to the discipline of history for reminding us of just what a remarkable achievement that aspect of our daily lives really is.

-- CAV

Why Philosophers Are Important

By Andy from The Charlotte Capitalist,cross-posted by MetaBlog



Yesterday in my thoughts about Robert Tracinski's "What Went Right?" essay, I noted:

But there do have to be fundamental ideas, someone needs to package them into a system, and someone needs to advocate them -- or else they won't spread. That someone is a philosopher -- whether it is Augustine, or Plato, or Aristotle, or Aquinas, or Kant, or Democritus, or Ayn Rand or whomever.

And it is those systems of ideas which have both identified and driven the history of the world with varying consequences -- from the splendor of ancient Greece to the Dark Ages to the Englightenment to the horrors of the 20th century and now who knows where in the future.

If you wish to spread ideas, the value of pointing to a philosopher makes the job easier.

The key word is integration. To the greater degree that a philosopher can provide an integrated philosophy, the more important the philosopher. One may not like Kant, but one can not discount his integrated approach -- and his influence.

From personal experience -- prior to becoming aware of Ayn Rand, I was an implicit "believer" in reason. Religion was not an important factor and in fact I had told my girlfriend in 8th grade that I thought I was an atheist. I couldn't explain why other than religion didn't make sense. That didn't keep me away from religion as I participated in various groups, mostly for the social aspects, over the next few years.

But most important to me was understanding "why" and what was real. I remembering listening to adults and wondering where they got their opinions. Why did some ideas make sense? Why did some ideas some crazy? How would I ever decide what to say?

Politically, I endorsed "capitalism" without a definition. I knew it produced prosperity. I knew communism was bad because of the experience and stories of my Russian grandparents.

In the end, I was a "secular capitalist" (as Andy Bernstein once told me). But as you can see, I held a hodgepodge of ideas all loosely connected but unknown as to how by me.

I spent several years "shopping" for the connection. Was it religion? Conservatives? Libertarians? Liberals? None of them could provide a case that was both integrated and made sense.

Until I read "Atlas Shrugged" and followed up with other works by Ayn Rand. Now I had the tools to determine on my own what was right and wrong -- and most importantly why. I could see that ideas connected. Metaphysics to epistemology to ethics to politics -- it all made sense. I was able to begin to judge the good and bad ideas I held and the keep the good and toss the bad.

That is the value of a philosopher -- to provide an integrated view of life at all levels. Philosophers build systems of thought -- not random catch-alls. Thus, when Robert Tracinski says the following, he is incorrect:

Unfortunately, that has been an implication of the common Objectivist interpretation of the role of ideas in history. In this view, all important intellectual trends begin in books written by philosophers and are then propagated downward into a culture's political ideas, its art, its sense of life.

Of course, good ideas (such as reason) can be passed from person to person implicitly and without the knowledge of the important philosophers. Without a doubt that happens everyday. But the risky result is individuals and cultures won't have a clue as to the essentials of what they know and why they are important. Without an integrated view individuals and cultures can easily lose the good and their confidence.

Ideas are important. They are sacred to human life. They must be defined carefully and integrated with other ideas in order to provide value to human life and to be preserved. Individuals need to be able to access explicit abstract ideas in order to use them. And that is what philosophers are important.

Open Letter to Republicans

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

John Lewis has kindly allowed me to reproduce his excellent Open Letter to Republicans posted on Principles in Practice. I strongly recommend reading the whole thing -- and sending it to your state and federal representatives, whether Republican or Democrat.

Open Letter to Republicans
by Dr. John Lewis

There are two things that all Republicans know today: that you lost the mid-term election, and that the loss was a repudiation of President Bush's policies. What you must now figure out is why. Why did Americans vote as they did? What specific policies did they reject? The answer you accept will determine whether you discover a road to victory for your country and your party, or whether you stumble further into defeat.

You have heard--and will continue to hear--many explanations for the election results. You have been told, for instance, that Democratic obstruction stymied the president, and leftist defeatism undermined support for the war. These answers will not cut it. Republicans held a political majority in Washington for six years, and the President was given all the resources and authority he asked for--including a solid re-election two years ago.

You have been told that Democrats wanted to spend like crazy on domestic programs, and that they turned on Bush because he sought to allow Americans greater choice in how they spend their money. But the president has increased spending to a degree not seen since LBJ and FDR, and has not vetoed a single spending bill.

It has been said that the election was about values--meaning, religious values--and that you lost because you were not "Conservative" enough. But what does this mean? That you did not lobby strongly enough for government intervention in family affairs, education, and science? Religious conservatives--such as Senator Santorum--were also soundly defeated. The American people expressed no desire for more religious values in government.

It remains telling that the American people were solidly on the president's side when he promised a reduction in government coercion at home, and a victory in the war overseas (over 80% supported the invasion of Iraq)--and that they withdrew their support only after he failed to follow through on his promises.

I'll offer a different reason for your defeat. You lost because you ceased being Republicans, and became new, "Neo-," Conservatives. You were too Conservative, and not Republican enough. To earn my vote, it is Conservatism that you must reject, in favor of freedom, rights, and reason. You must once again become Republicans--the party of the American Constitutional Republic.

What Republicans once stood for, despite many compromises and errors, was preserving and extending American freedom. But where in recent history have you upheld this value? Have you, for instance, defended America's freedom against foreign enemies? The "Forward Strategy of Freedom" uses our soldiers to dig toilets for foreigners, claims success when a hostile government is elected, and promises years of American casualties. The result has been permanent airport checkpoints at home and armed guards on our borders. Whatever happened to the idea of driving to victory over avowed enemies?

Have you preserved freedom at home? Did you demand spending reductions along with your excellent tax cuts, or rather settle for deficits in the hundreds of billions of dollars? Who doubled the size of the Department of Education, which some of us once hoped that Reagan would eliminate, and which is now pursuing a de facto federal takeover of the schools? Who enacted the Sarbanes-Oxley persecutions of businessmen? Who projected government power vigorously into bedrooms and marriage contracts? Who showered government money onto churches as replacements for the local welfare office?

Fiscally, you have accepted without question a God-given imperative to distribute other people's money by force--not as a compromise with the Democrats, but with a commitment to outdo them. Every time you have set out to eliminate or reduce a government program, you have ended up energetically saving it. Social Security, for instance, once facing elimination, has been saved--by Republicans. You have surpassed the Democrats in spending other people's money.

In no case have you been Republicans--meaning, defenders of the American Republic. You have been Conservatives--conservators of your vision of America, in the form of the liberal welfare state.

The first cause of this problem is the moral premise that you share with the leftists: altruism. You have accepted that moral goodness means sacrificing for the (alleged) good of others, and you have worked to shape America in this image. This ideal has defined President Bush's policies overseas, which purport to wage war by bringing benefits to enemy nations. It has defined a domestic policy that sees moral goodness in expanding programs of redistribution. Whereas the Democrats do this in the name of socialism (a discredited doctrine that has wreaked havoc wherever it has been tried), Conservatives do it in the name of "compassion." Democrats base their vision on class warfare and revolution; Conservatives base it on charity. But the practical results are the same: Socialism, now anchored not in Marx, but in civic religion.

Is this what you want for your party? If so, then stay the course, and continue your competition with the Democrats. But if you wake up one day and find that no area of life is beyond the reach of government power, and that we are all wards of the state, then you may rejoice. You will have reached the Promised Land. This is what you wanted.

If, however, you want to restore and protect freedom in the Land of the Free, then you must see the error of your ways. The proper state of man is not that of a beggar, demanding handouts by coercion and moral blackmail. The proper state of man is that of a thinking being--a being free to act on his own judgment for his own sake--free to produce and to trade for what he needs--free to achieve his full intellectual and physical potential--free, that is, from coercion by others.

This idea of freedom is based on a moral conception of man that is radically different from man the dependent. By this vision--the vision of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"--each person is an autonomous moral agent, free to act as his nature requires, for his own benefit, without sacrificing self to others or others to self--free to deal with others voluntarily, by offering values, not by imposing "duties."

But where, in our culture today, is this moral conception to be found? Leftists claim that moral principles--the broad generalizations that define the basic terms of right and wrong for every area of our lives--are not derived from facts. No "is" can lead to an "ought," they claim; moral principles are invented, culturally relative, subject to change, mere conventions that shift with the winds of the day. This premise led to the 1960s, freedom of speech as sit-ins on private property, and freedom from political authority as smashing "the system." The basis of this anarchy is subjectivism--the idea that we create reality in our minds, rather than grasp it through our senses and our reason. There are no absolutes, in this view; there is only man the follower of whims. Vox populi, vox dei.

You were appalled at this, and rightfully so. But what was your answer? There are standards, you said, but they are not derived from facts. With this basic premise you agreed with the leftists: There is no "ought" to be derived from this world. Where then shall we find moral principles? In another world, you said. Moral principles are supernatural and beyond reason, but they are imbedded in society and tradition, and knowable by faith. The result is an undefinable feeling that tells you to give to the poor, to render unto Caesar, to turn the other cheek, and to lose your fortune--or to tax mine--if it benefits others. Vox dei, vox populi.

The root of the moral views shared by leftists and Conservatives remains the conviction that the mind is incapable of grasping moral principles--and that we must rely on the authority of feelings, whether from the immediate consensus (vox populi) or from claims to divine sanction (vox dei). The clash between the leftists and the Conservatives is a clash of feelings. Neither side appeals to the mind; each wishes to impose its views by force.

This elevation of Feelings over Reason is precisely what you must reject. You must learn that your emotions are not tools of cognition. Your feelings will not tell you how to run a business, how to protect freedom, how to win a war, or how to distinguish good from evil.

If you, as Republicans, want to regain control of your party and end its malignant alliance with the looting left, then you must stop being looters yourselves, both in mind and in matter. Intellectually, you must grasp that rights and freedom can be discovered only through rational thought--individual thought--and that only the rational mind makes rights and freedom necessary. Materially, you must end your love affair with socialist redistribution, and become protectors of property rights--the practical expression of individual thought and freedom.

Each man's rights are inalienable from his being. This is a fact of nature--not of "supernature." Since each man must act on his own judgment in order to live as a man, he must be free to do so. This is his basic right: The right to act on his best judgment--that is: the right to do what is right. It is right to identify the facts and think--and to act as reason dictates--because we can live only by using our minds. It is right to keep what we produce--and to trade in a free market--not because this embodies some mystical "invisible hand," but because our lives depend on it. It is right to interact with others by rational persuasion and values--because the alternative is the club. And it is right to use physical force to restrain--and, if necessary, to destroy--those who attack us.

If you Republicans want to become true rightists--and a real alternative to the left--you must accept a morality of reason and become its advocates across the board: in classrooms, in newspapers, in board rooms, and in town squares. You must recognize that there is no dichotomy between what man is and what he ought to do, and no chasm between moral rights and practical consequences. The only true alternative to the left is a view of man as a rational being who owns himself and is the proper beneficiary of his own productive effort.

Grasping this makes it easy to evaluate the numerous issues swamping political discourse today. Domestic programs? Redistribution means taking from one person by force because another (allegedly) needs it. The principle is not changed if extended to millions--only the scope of the destruction is broadened. What of Social Security, Medicare, and government funding of medical research, agriculture, and education? There is no basis in reason for making an employee, a CEO, a doctor, a researcher, a farmer, or a teacher, into a slave to others because he produces--nor to demand the enslavement of others to fund him. Republicans can seize the moral high road by opposing such redistribution forthrightly, as a matter of principle.

The purpose of the government is to prevent criminals from preying on us. We need a domestic policy that does this and this alone--rather than turning police into social workers, and courts into moral censors and persecutors of businessmen. Republicans need to become voices for objective, rights-based, reason-based law, as a matter of principle.

What of foreign policy? Support for the war in Iraq has collapsed because there are no goals being pursued except the sacrifice of our youth for strangers, and no accomplishments except a demonstration of America's weakness. Republicans need to become advocates of a foreign policy of self-interest, by which we fight to defend the freedom of Americans, and only the freedom of Americans, with the goal of a fast and decisive victory when we do fight, as a matter of principle.

To preserve and extend the freedom of Americans was once the mission of the Republicans. But this mission was never properly understood. This is what you must discover. Your choice is: Conservatism (i.e., faith, self-sacrifice, and religion-inspired socialism) and its consequences of enslavement, self-loathing, and further defeat--or proper Republicanism (i.e., reason, self-interest, and individual rights) with its consequences of freedom, self-respect, and victory. I hope you Republicans--and all Americans--make the right choice: the rational choice.

Dr. John Lewis is Assistant Professor of History at Ashland University.

Pope Benedict: Advocating "Reason" or "reason"?

By Andy from The Charlotte Capitalist,cross-posted by MetaBlog


Originally posted on HBL.

***

The Pope recently made a distinction between Christianity and Islam. His primary message was the god of Islam is completely transcendent and has no interaction with us. The message is that we are to simply follow the will of Allah. On the other hand, God of Christianity is connected to us. The link, the Pope says, is "reason".

At first this sounds interesting. It seems the Pope advocates reason. Is it possible that Pope Benedict is a modern-day Thomas Aquinas? Reviewing the Pope's statement, I doubt he is speaking of reason as Objectivists do.

He criticizes "modern reason" as limited through a 3-step process he terms "dehellenization."

Steps 1 and 2:

Behind this thinking lies the modern self-limitation of reason, classically expressed in Kant's "Critiques", but in the meantime further radicalized by *the impact of the natural sciences*.

Step 3 is stripping the Greek spirit from the New Testament. That Greek spirit is Platonic.

The Pope's solution is to remove these limitations upon reason and to expand reason. He calls for "the right use of reason," "reason as a whole," "breadth of reason."

This is achieved:

if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the *empirically verifiable* . . . A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.

I think the "non-deaf" reason is Philo's "logos" as described by Wilhelm Windelband:

The Logos is Reason as coming forth from the deity ("uttered Reason") . . . With this Logos doctrine the first step was taken toward filling the cleft between God and the sensible world. (Windelband, p. 241--242).

Throughout, the Pope refers to "logos":

The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur--this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. 'Not to act reasonably (with *logos*) is contrary to the nature of God', said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great *logos*, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures.

And:

...the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is logos.

And:

In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist.

"Logos" has many meanings. But, in this case it is Philo's. Kant and the Pope are two sides of the same coin. They both present a distorted view of reason. Objectivists should oppose the Pope's efforts just as they do Kant's.

Originally posted by Andy from The Charlotte Capitalist, ReBlogged by Meta Blog

Global Warming Hysteria Bankruptcy

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Global warming fearmonger and self-proclaimed "artist", Jimmy Wright of Vancouver Island, Canada, has, in the form of a crucified Santa Claus on his front lawn, essentialized the environmentalist movement.

A Vancouver Island artist has put an effigy of a crucified Santa Claus on his front lawn, causing some neighbours to complain it's traumatizing their children.

Jimmy Wright said the figure is intended to be a comment on society's growing appetite for consumer goods.

"I don't know how it came into my mind but I thought I'm going to take Santa Claus and I'm going to crucify him."

Wright said his latest work is not for sale.

"I think it's an evil way," one woman said. "Kids see things like that and children -- they see that on the front page -- I think that's terrible."

Others are also wondering what motivates someone to crucify Santa.

"All I wanted to do was to promote a dialogue," Wright said.

"Global warming is consumption-driven so there's the argument. We have to come to terms with our hang-up on consumption. We're in a consumptive orgy, I feel."

Critics are concerned the effigy will spoil the magic of Christmas for children.

"If that magic is Santa and if that magic is 'oh boy lots of stuff,' well then that kid needs the message right away and so does the parent," Wright said. [bold added]

To deliberately set out traumatizing children in an effort to start a "dialogue" is as close to actually going into a courthouse and filing for intellectual bankruptcy as one can possibly get.

What the hell kind of dialogue is leaving psychological scars in children supposed to promote? Oh. That's right. Children are neither intellectually developed enough nor knowledgeable enough to discuss a topic as complicated as global warming or whether anything should be done about it (i.e., the proper role of government). This leaves the parents of these children as those with whom this sickening person would hope to initiate a "dialogue".

Leaving aside the question of whether one should engage in conversation someone who has just deliberately attacked the innocence of one's own child, how would one hold an actual dialogue with Wright when he has offered nothing but assertions, including that his heart is in the right place: "I feel." It is impossible to have an intellectual debate with someone who appeals to arbitrary emotions (and recklessly acts on same), rather than facts and logic. But then it should be clear that an attack on children is probably designed to remove reason and self-control from the equation, to be replaced by panic and ill-considered responses to a "crisis".

Jimmy Wright is not attempting to start a dialogue. He is engaging in psychological warfare, and targeting children at that. But then he is merely the most shocking example of what is going on daily in public schools across the industrialized West.

In related news, the government has just made available a 64-page "Skeptic's Guide to Global Warming" which features, among other things: speeches by Senator James Inhofe, commentary on media "reporting" on global warming, and articles from major media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal and Investor's Business Daily.

-- CAV

TERRORIST LINKED TO MOSQUE IN STOCKHOLM

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In the news:

US freezes Swedish terror suspect's assets - The Local.

A Swedish citizen of Moroccan origin is one of five men to have their assets frozen by the US Finance Department. The man is suspected of supporting the al-Qaida terrorist network and other groups. (TheLocal.se, 12/07/06.)

U.S. Treasury Names Swede Alleged Terrorist Helper - Radio Sweden.

The Treasury also says the 41 year old "was the uncontested leader of an extremist group centered around" a mosque in the Swedish capital. (SR.se, 12/08/06.)

For more information on Mohamed Moumou, go to the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the News - International (Pakistan).

Related: My post, TERRORIST UPDATE.

Senators' Letter Is a Violation of ExxonMobil's Freedom of Speech

Irvine, CA--On October 27 Sens. Rockefeller (D., W.Va.) and Snowe (R., Maine) sent a letter to ExxonMobil's CEO requesting that ExxonMobil end its financial assistance and support of groups and individuals who reject global warming claims, and urging it to "publicly acknowledge both the reality of climate change and the role of humans in causing or exacerbating it."

"This letter constitutes an outrageous violation of ExxonMobil's right to free speech," said Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. "Whether or not one believes there is a threat of catastrophic global warming, the government has no right to tell ExxonMobil what ideas it should advocate or fund.

"Free speech means the freedom to promote any idea one wishes without the danger of suppression or punitive action by the government. When two United States senators declare that a company has 'manufactured controversy, sown doubt, and impeded progress with strategies all-too reminiscent of those used by the tobacco industry for so many years,' that is clearly a thinly veiled threat, and any sensible organization must regard it as such.

"Observe that the senators do not offer a single fact intended to convince ExxonMobil of the truth of their position. Their message is not 'agree with us because,' but 'agree with us or else.' That is a message appropriate to a dictator, not to the representatives of a free nation.

"Defenders of free speech must stand up against this vicious attempt to intimidate ExxonMobil into embracing the global warming cause, and declare that the government has no business telling Americans what they should think or say."

Copyright 2006 Ayn Rand Institute.

Sherlock Holmes

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Ghetto "Capitalism"

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

There is an article over at Slate about Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, by Sudhir Venkatesh, whom readers of Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics might recall as the unorthodox economics student who immersed himself in ghetto life in order to understand the economics behind drug dealing.

The review seems to treat the book fairly and, in turn, the book seems to avoid drawing too many unwarranted similarities between the underground ghetto economy and actual capitalism, despite the presence of the term "capitalism" in the title of the review.

On that one residential block, Venkatesh focuses on three women: Bird, a prostitute; Eunice, an office cleaner who sells home-cooked meals on the side; and Marlene, a nanny who is president of the block's neighborhood association. (All the names in the book are pseudonyms.) The women share tart observations about their respective livelihoods: Bird thinks gangsters should "let the pimps show them how to run a business." Through them, we come to meet a diverse cast of locals, "nearly all linked together," Venkatesh writes, "in a vast, often invisible web that girded their neighborhood. This web was the underground economy."

Licit and illicit economies tend to be entwined, and in a closely knit urban neighborhood, this mutual dependence means that public-minded civilians and hardened criminals are regularly forced to negotiate. In the spring of 2000, an entrepreneurial gang leader, Big Cat, was elevating the criminal activity in a local park. Marlene and a preacher, Pastor Wilkins, arranged a tense summit with the kingpin in a church basement. Venkatesh talked his way into the room and watched as Big Cat agreed to stop peddling drugs in the park during after-school hours. For this concession, Pastor Wilkins promised to persuade a nearby store owner to allow Big Cat's gang to deal in his parking lot, and Marlene agreed to ask the cops to leave the dealers unmolested in their new location.

...

If Venkatesh sometimes marvels at the ingenuity of the people he writes about, he does not overlook the essentially tragic nature of the story he is telling. The depredations of daily life mean that for many residents, what Venkatesh calls the "perceptual horizon" does not extend beyond the neighborhood. Sadder still, it doesn't reach beyond the struggles of the day to day. Bird, Eunice, and Marlene each envision a leisurely future of comfortable retirement. But none is clear on precisely when and how that future will come to pass. In the meantime, they hustle to get by, and the hustle means relying on one another. "You have to do things shady," one local businessman tells Venkatesh. "Well, maybe not shady like committing a crime, but shady like you depend on each other." [bold added]

A big problem with many pro-free-market economists is that they do not consider the moral aspects of capitalism and it would be interesting to see whether Venkatesh makes the same error, and whether he in fact regards how the economy works in the ghetto as "capitalism" or merely sees elements of capitalism at work there.

It is worth noting that (setting aside whether such activities as drug use and prostitution should be illegal) the fact that so many people pursue illegal activities in the ghetto means that these people are subject to blackmail on the fear of being turned in to authorities. This fact alone makes the police one's enemies in the sense that an arrest or a fine can, at any time, destroy one's plans, whatever degree of planning or creativity one has managed to exercise.

Furthermore, this makes many people less likely to take the recourse of being aided by the authorities when they should. Whatever "free market" mechanisms exist in the ghetto, they are only manifestations of the way economies not under central control work. But capitalism is more than the absence of central planning: it is the protection of individual rights by the government, and this is severely compromised in the ghetto. In a truly capitalistic milieu, there is no need to negotiate with criminals, for example, as they usually end up where they belong: behind bars.

Thus in the ghetto, the "perceptual horizon" and short-range thinking become the inevitable result of its inhabitants' lives not being free from the threat of the initiation (or lawful retaliatory use) of force. If crime doesn't pay, neither do criminals make profitable partners.

I am tempted to read this book. Will Venkatesh make connections like these? Perhaps, but even if he does not, his book promises to provide lots of good data for anyone else who can.

-- CAV

Foxhole theist syndrome

By Nicholas Provenzo from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

We have all heard the line that "there are no atheists in foxholes." The argument goes that it is impossible for a person to maintain their rationality when pushed to the extreme; a person must believe in God if they are to endure the challenges of the battlefield. How it empowers anyone to switch focus from facing the facts of reality to believing that a transcendent being will face them for you is never really answered, yet such is the way of those who are animated by their blind beliefs. Besides, the goal in claiming that there are no atheists in foxholes is to smear the rational by simply denying that they exist, or that their reason earns them anything.

It is interesting then to see a variation of this tactic employed by the conservatives in response to C. Bradley Thompson's landmark essay "The Decline and Fall of American Conservatism." For example, blogger Orrin Judd thinks that the American founding was not animated by reason in defense of individualism, but by faith in pursuit of the general welfare.

Mr. Thompson argues that the rights to life, liberty, etc., matter because self-interest is the American ideal. The Declaration, however, states quite clearly that they matter because the Creator endowed us with them. Similarly, when it came time to institutionalize the genuine American ideals, the Founders not only made no mention of self-interest but were quite forthright about their purposes being social, rather than individualist: "We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty, to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Their concern is general welfare, common defense, etc, not your own welfare or your own defense or other narrow and selfish aims.

This argument on the part of the conservatives shows how they seek to enshrine the aspects of the founders' philosophy that embraced faith while rejecting the more influential (and consequential) aspects of their philosophy that embraced reason. Frankly, to claim that the Declaration of Independence did not establish the principle of individual rights (including the right to pursue one's own selfish happiness) as the governing philosophy of America is ludicrous and dishonest. How does one then explain the Bill of Rights, which limited government power to enter into the individual's private spheres? And almost more importantly, how does one then explain the industrial revolution, were it not an expression of individual men's selfish desire to conqueror nature and prosper accordingly?

In the comments to his post, Judd goes on to reveal his real hand when he chimes that Objectivism is "libertarianism, [but] just more cultish." What else would one expect from a person who believes in an unknowable supernatural entity that demands all our sacrifice, and that the goal of our civil government is to secure such a benighted worldview? Yet according to some, we should nevertheless align ourselves politically with such people in order to secure and protect our freedom.

Count me as one who fails to see how any such an alliance can bring Objectivists anything worthwhile.

What Real War Looks Like

By Elan Journo

The Iraq Study Group has issued many specific recommendations, but the options boil down to a maddeningly limited range: pull out or send more troops to do democracy-building and, either way, "engage" the hostile regimes in Iran and Syria. Missing from the list is the one option our self-defense demands: a war to defeat the enemy. If you think we've already tried this option and failed, think again. Washington's campaign in Iraq looks nothing like the war necessary for our self-defense.

What does such a war look like?

America's security depends on identifying precisely the enemy that threatens our lives--and then crushing it, rendering it a non-threat. It depends on proudly defending our right to live free of foreign aggression--by unapologetically killing the killers who want us dead.

Those who say this is a "new kind of conflict" against a "faceless enemy" are wrong. The enemy Washington evasively calls "terrorism" is actually an ideologically inspired political movement: Islamic totalitarianism. It seeks to subjugate the West under a totalitarian Islamic regime by means of terrorism, negotiation, war--anything that will win its jihad. The movement's inspiration, its first triumph, its standard-bearer, is the theocracy of Iran. Iran's regime has, for decades, used terrorist proxies to attack America. It openly seeks nuclear weapons and zealously sponsors and harbors jihadists. Without Iran's support, legions of holy warriors would be untrained, unarmed, unmotivated, impotent.

Destroying Islamic totalitarianism requires a punishing military onslaught to end its primary state representative and demoralize its supporters. We need to deploy all necessary force to destroy Iran's ability to fight, while minimizing our own casualties. We need a campaign that ruthlessly inflicts the pain of war so intensely that the jihadists renounce their cause as hopeless and fear to take up arms against us. This is how America and its Allies defeated both Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan.

Victory in World War II required flattening cities, firebombing factories, shops and homes, devastating vast tracts of Germany and Japan. The enemy and its supporters were exhausted materially and crushed in spirit. What our actions demonstrated to them was that any attempt to implement their vicious ideologies would bring them only destruction and death. Since their defeat, Nazism and Japanese imperialism have essentially withered as ideological forces. Victory today requires the same: smashing Iran's totalitarian regime and thus demoralizing the Islamist movement and its many supporters, so that they, too, abandon their cause as futile.

We triumphed over both Japan and Germany in less than four years after Pearl Harbor. Yet more than five years after 9/11, against a far weaker enemy, our soldiers still die daily in Iraq. Why? Because this war is neither assertive nor ruthless--it is a tragically meek pretense at war.

Consider what Washington has done. The Islamist regime in Iran remains untouched, fomenting terrorism. (And now our leaders hope to "engage" Iran diplomatically.)

We went to battle not with theocratic Iran, but with the secular dictatorship of Iraq. And the campaign there was not aimed at crushing whatever threat Hussein's regime posed to us. "Shock and awe" bombing never materialized. Our brave and capable forces were hamstrung: ordered not to bomb key targets such as power plants and to avoid firing into mosques (where insurgents hide) lest we offend Muslim sensibilities. Instead, we sent our troops to lift Iraq out of poverty, open new schools, fix up hospitals, feed the hungry, unclog sewers--a Peace Corps, not an army corps, mission.

U.S. troops were sent, not to crush an enemy threatening America, but (as Bush explained) to "sacrifice for the liberty of strangers," putting the lives of Iraqis above their own. They were prevented from using all necessary force to win or even to protect themselves. No wonder the insurgency has flourished, emboldened by Washington's self-crippling policies. (Perversely, some want even more Americans tossed into this quagmire.)

Bush did all this to bring Iraqis the vote. Any objective assessment of the Middle East would have told one who would win elections, given the widespread popular support for Islamic totalitarianism. Iraqis swept to power a pro-Islamist leadership intimately tied to Iran. The most influential figure in Iraqi politics is now Moktadr al-Sadr, an Islamist warlord lusting after theocratic rule and American blood. When asked whether he would accept just such an outcome from the elections, Bush said that of course he would, because "democracy is democracy."

No war that ushers Islamists into political office has U.S. self-defense as its goal.

This war has been worse than doing nothing, because it has galvanized our enemy to believe its success more likely than ever--even as it has drained Americans' will to fight. Washington's feeble campaign demonstrates the ruinous effects of refusing to assert our self-interest and defend our freedom. It is past time to consider our only moral and practical option: end the senseless sacrifice of our soldiers--and let them go to war.

Elan Journo is a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute (www.AynRand.org) in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand--author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." Contact the writer at media@aynrand.org.

Failure Of The Iraq Study Group

By Andy from The Charlotte Capitalist,cross-posted by MetaBlog

No Hope

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

What's Next for China?

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

It has been a long time since I have posted on China in any depth. Fortunately, there is a long article on the domestic situation there at Commentary Magazine which I found informative despite its sometimes very flawed analysis. Here are a few excerpts:

As Deng correctly calculated, shedding the blood of hundreds had the effect of intimidating hundreds of millions. There were few disturbances in the years immediately following Tiananmen. But the event irrevocably changed the People's Republic. By the end of the 1990's, Chinese society was turbulent once more as individual protests, both in the countryside and the city, began attracting tens of thousands of participants. In early 2002, two of them -- one by oil workers in Daqing in the northeast and the other by factory hands in nearby Liaoyang -- may have reached the 100,000 mark. In late 2004, in China's southwest, about 100,000 peasants protested the seizure without compensation of land to build a hydroelectric plant in Sichuan province.

Protests have not only become bigger in size; they are now more numerous. In 1994, there were 10,000 such "mass incidents"; by 2003 there were 58,000; in 2004 and 2005 there were 74,000 and 87,000 respectively. This is according to official statistics, which undoubtedly undercount. According to the legal activist Jerome Cohen, a truer figure for the last year may be 150,000.

This would seem to indicate a growing dissatisfaction with the regime. As we have seen with Russia, though, even the overthrow of the Communist regime, should that occur, will not guarantee that China will end up with a government designed to protect individual rights.

As Tocqueville observed, "steadily increasing prosperity" does not tranquilize citizens; on the contrary, it promotes "a spirit of unrest." In pre-revolutionary France, discontent was highest in those areas that had seen the greatest improvement; the Revolution itself followed a period of unprecedented economic advance. In the late 20th century, the same trends played out in Thailand, in South Korea, and in Taiwan. [Might Iran's effete upper classes disprove this "rule"? -- ed]

In China today, it is middle-class citizens, the beneficiaries of a quarter-century of economic reform, who are once again confirming the pattern. In Shanghai, homeowners recently fought a state-owned developer who had reneged on his agreement to keep an area of open land in the middle of a multi-building project; one group of residents tore down a fence to stop construction, and when the developer put up another, an even larger group demolished it. In Dongzhou in prosperous Guangdong province, riot police ended up killing perhaps as many as twenty people who were protesting the government's arbitrary seizure of their land for a power project and denying them the use of a nearby lake.

This is not like Tiananmen. In 1989, Chinese protesters were peaceful until attacked. Those in Dongzhou, however, used pipe bombs as an initial tactic, to break up police formations. In present-day China, the well-to-do act like hooligans, and will even resort to deadly force, if that is what it takes to defend their rights. [But do they really know what "rights" are? Or is this heightened violence only indicative of desperation? --ed]

Deng Xiaoping's strategy after Tiananmen was to buy off the people by means of economic growth. It was successful, but only for a decade. Change begat the demand for more change. Grievances that were once tolerable began to appear intolerable when people realized they could be remedied. Since the end of the 1990's, the laobaixing are no longer, to borrow one of Mao's favorite phrases, "poor and blank."

Paradoxically, it was Mao himself, the great enslaver, who in his own way taught the Chinese people to think and act for themselves. In the Cultural Revolution, he urged tens of millions of radical youths, who were then forming themselves into roving bands known as Red Guards, to go to every corner of the country to tear down ancient temples, destroy cultural relics, and denounce their elders, including not only mothers and fathers but also government officials and Communist-party members. The young radicals seized these "reactionary elements" and paraded them in the streets, barred local officials from their desks, tortured and killed millions. Urban residents were "sent down" to work in the countryside. In some places, Red Guard factions fought pitched battles with one another.

This section is very interesting. It would be confusing enough on its own without its author conflating the two cultural trends that seem to be affecting the intensity of the protests. I would be more favorably inclined to believe that China's unrest was a manifestation of an explicit desire to be free from tyranny if the "mass incidents" were better-organized and coordinated. Perhaps they are, unknown to the West, or they are not -- yet.

But to engage in violent protests apart from an actual attempt to at least overthrow the Communists seems more blind, and more anarchic than revolutionary. If Mao's "lessons" form any part of this, they are dangerously incomplete lessons. To win freedom through armed revolt and to simply overthrow a tyrant may look the same, but the former is far more difficult, and requires certain ideas that were held on shaky foundations in the West to begin with and seem to be in the process of being forgotten today.

It is interesting that China's increasing prosperity has become part of a positive feedback loop with concessions by the Communists. This reminds me of the last Days of the Soviets in Russia. Furthermore, if there are parallels between the end of Communism in Russia and in China, new technology provides an opportunity in China that Russia never had to avoid the path Russia has been taking of late:

It would be difficult to underestimate the role played by wireless communications and the Internet in this phenomenon. Societies change -- or reach a "tipping point," to use the contemporary term -- when enough people begin to think simultaneously in a new way. These days, Chinese thoughts and emotions travel through optical fiber at the speed of light -- there are 123 million "netizens" in China, and 34 million of them are bloggers -- and the Chinese are holding nationwide conversations for the first time in their history. Ideas -- like, for instance, the idea of representative government -- start out small and spread rapidly via countless chatrooms and online forums.

But this technology is just that: an opportunity. This is a point too many commentators very giddily fail to appreciate (search "An Army of Davids"). China has perhaps a greater opportunity to become free than Russia did. To desire more prosperity is one thing. To know what conditions such prosperity requires (i.e., for a culture to generally hold a political philosophy that will lead to freedom) is quite another. The Internet could help the Chinese learn quicker how to build a free society, but it cannot do their thinking for them. In the end, the Internet will be only as good for the Chinese as their own efforts to understand it are.

-- CAV

Coming To America?

By Andy from The Charlotte Capitalist,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Martin Lindeskog says: As an American in spirit, I have entered the green card lottery. Let's hope he gets his card. I don't think there is anyone in Europe more deserving.

Earth 2020: three outcomes to global warming

By David from Truth, Justice, and the American Way,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Let’s assume that “global warming” is the hoax that I think it is. What happens when, sometime around 2020, no evidence of global warming (as a historically unique trend) is found? The following scenarios are three plausible outcomes to the “global warming” crisis.

A) The Fraud Discredited
Politicians and the scientific community admit their error. Environmentalist regulations and environmental agencies are cut back or eliminated. The hundreds of think-tanks, non-profits, and lobbying agencies that survive on the profits from the environmentalist hysteria voluntarily disband.

B) A disaster narrowly averted
Continual improvements in solar power or another renewable technology make it more cost efficient than fossil-fuel based power. The market gradually changes until solar power is dominant.
Politicians proclaim victory, and praise the regulatory state and state-coerced green energy. They stress the need for continual vigilance as they look around for a new crisis to bankroll their campaigns.

C) A self-fulfilling prophecy
Faced with a lack of evidence for global warming, environmentalists focus instead on random climate variation and natural disasters under the banner of “climate change,” which can conveniently be blamed for heat waves, cold fronts, hurricanes, and even tsunamis. The draconian regulatory state gradually erodes the wealth producing capacity of industry, thus destroying the only tool man has to deal with nature’s fury. The EPA/ /DOJ wrecks the economy, FDA causes plagues, and the FCC makes sure the party line gets coverage. The Son of Kyoto shifts energy production and industry from relatively clean, developed nations to environmentally irresponsible developing ones. Innovations in energy production/consumption become prohibitively expensive to get past the regulatory state.
By 2020, nature is unpredictable as ever, but our ability to deal with it is crippled by the state. Politicians seize upon the global havoc they unleashed as proof of the need for further regulation.

Which outcome is most likely? Very likely, it will be a combination of all three. Which one is pre-eminent depends on your estimate of the world’s sanity.

Fantasy By Force

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

A Scam Behind Every Hysteria: $1.5 Billion

By Andy from The Charlotte Capitalist,cross-posted by MetaBlog

There is always a scam behind every hysteria. The global warming hysteria masks a fascist/socialist agenda. The bird flu hysteria is no different. From Reuters: Global efforts to fight bird flu need $1.2-1.5 billion extra funding over the next two to three years, the World Bank said on Monday, advocating more effective compensation for poultry farmers caught in the front line. In a report

Islam, 1984, & Moderates

By Andy from The Charlotte Capitalist,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Ed Cline at Rule of Reason: It is not possible to win the "hearts and minds" of dedicated, or even semi-dedicated Muslims. Islam is one of the most "heartless" of religions. It tolerates good will among only Muslims, and even then it is conditional. As for kaffirs and other non-believers, it is open season on them at the whim of Islam's clerics and rulers. And as for "minds," Islam is more

"Are Humans Involved in Global Warming?"

By Andy from The Charlotte Capitalist,cross-posted by MetaBlog

From World Climate Report: The authors place the recent warming into an interesting perspective noting “the global warming observed during the latest 150 years is just a short episode in the geologic history. The current global warming is most likely a combined effect of increased solar and tectonic activities and cannot be attributed to the increased anthropogenic impact on the atmosphere.

The Sandstorm of Western Confusion

By Edward Cline from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

One of the most foolish squibs I have ever read outside of State Department pap on how to deal with Islam and Muslims appeared in the Daily Telegraph (London) on November 30th. Michael Burleigh, author and distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, in "Winning Muslim hearts and minds," argues that a key factor in successfully combating terrorism and Muslim "separatism" in Western nations is to somehow communicate with "moderate," non-violent Muslims. "Let's reach out to them," writes Burleigh, "or at least create some forum where we can be reminded of their existence."

"Rather, we lazily allow Islamist fundamentalists to equate our culture with trashy television programs about penile implants rather than Bach, Rubens or Mozart, Newton, Pascal or Einstein. As the philosopher Roger Scruton has written, we should be more careful about what image (and reality) of ourselves we project into more traditional societies."

Translation: We should strive to assure "moderate" Muslims that we are not "profiling" their barbarous creed, and that we really don't believe the jihadists and suicide bombers and ranting imams among them are practicing that creed in its most fundamental terms or are in the least representative of Islam in its ideal state.

Given that Europe is now populated with about 50 million Muslims, I don't think anyone needs to be reminded of their existence. They have invaded and invested Europe, and have established a foothold in the U.S. Their agent provocateurs here are busy testing the legal waters to see if this country is as weak and accommodating as Europe. They are fashioning nooses with which to hang us from the hemp of multiculturalism and tolerance.

(For an excellent appraisal of Europe's future prospects vis-à-vis the Muslim Borg, articulated by German author Henryk M. Broder, see "The Rape of Europe" by Paul Belien in The Brussels Journal of October 25th.)

Conceding that contemporary Western culture is predominantly "trashy" - a appellation that can be applied to most modern art, literature, and music, as well as to television - what would be gained by projecting a better "image" to insular tribal societies such as that of the Muslims? It can't be that Muslim rank-and-file or their fire and brimstone clerics care a fig about Bach, Rubens, Newton or Einstein. Islamists wish to conquer and eliminate the civilization that produced such creators and thinkers. Islam in its "at rest" state is a model of smug, conscientious, cultural stagnancy. It has no room for, and can never produce, the likes of Michelangelo or Jonas Salk. Islam makes no distinction between the Rolling Stones and Berlioz. In Islam's miasmatic, anti-life ethos, all such Western values are decadent and corrupting.

In response to Burleigh's proposed policy of patronizing vacillation, I posted a comment in the reader's column that more or less said:

It is not possible to win the "hearts and minds" of dedicated, or even semi-dedicated Muslims. Islam is one of the most "heartless" of religions. It tolerates good will among only Muslims, and even then it is conditional. As for kaffirs and other non-believers, it is open season on them at the whim of Islam's clerics and rulers.

And as for "minds," Islam is more hostile to them than is Christianity. It is a "God says so because Mohammad said so" faith from top to bottom. This is why one rarely hears from "moderate" Muslims. They are caught between allegiance to the rational and allegiance to the utter irrationality of Islamic tenets and dictates, their convictions divided between remaining loyal to Allah and heeding Mohammad and being loyal to some semblance of wanting to live on earth (just as many Christians are, but much more pathologically).

Unlike Christians, devout Muslims can't pigeonhole their religious beliefs and get on with life. Unlike Christians, they can't spend one morning in mosque and then live on earth the rest of the week without so much as a nod to Mecca; Islam requires their daily expression of submission. Understand the ubiquitous presence of Big Brother in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and what the totalitarian Party expected of its members - which was unswerving, unthinking, goodthink obedience in all things - and you will understand Islam and Muslims.

So, it is futile to attempt to persuade Muslims that theirs is a fatal dichotomy, and to boast of all the wonderful things Western culture has produced and which they, too, can share and appreciate. Reason is the enemy of faith, not its occasional handmaiden (the assertions of Pope Benedict to the contrary notwithstanding), and the truly faithful of any creed are beyond rational persuasion. Since a Muslim possesses the attribute of volition, it is he who must exercise it (and a very, very few have).

I could have added: And they don't care, either. If the works of Beethoven, Shakespeare, or Newton were to suddenly perish, or the statue of David in Florence or the Statue of Liberty was blown to bits by "disenchanted" fellow Muslims, do you think we would witness "moderate" Muslim men and women in Baghdad or Dearborn or London's East End writhing and wailing in hysterical grief? Not likely.

An interesting post followed in the Daily Telegraph on December 1st, in apparent answer to Burleigh's encomium on reciprocity and "reaching out." There was no attribution or credit; it simply appeared on its own page, under the same title. Its theme is that the West should not rush to win Muslim "hearts and minds" when Muslims are the victims of natural disasters, such as the recent Indonesian tsunami and the Pakistani quake.

"...When such a calamity strikes a Muslim population, whom are we trying to rescue? We are rescuing our future murderers. The suicide bombers on the London Tube came from Pakistan. [Actually, they were British citizens of Pakistani origin.] They were the kin of those whom we rescued in Muzafarrabad." [Actually, their more animated spiritual kin.]

Although much of the anonymous post is rambling, it does make a few trenchant observations and draws some legitimate parallels. The best one is this:

"Muslims have always attacked those of their adversaries who have been struck by a natural disaster. When a sandstorm struck a Sassanid Persian army at the battle of Quadisiya in modern day Iraq, the Arab Muslim attackers took full advantage of that Persian discomfiture and slaughtered the entire retreating Persian army."

A little research provided some historical context which the anonymous writer did not establish. The Persian Sassanian Dynasty established an empire in the Mideast between AD 244 and 651, most of which fell to Arab conquerors in 640. Mohammad died in 632, and until then was battling for Arabia, so he can't be blamed for that particular conquest, although his followers can be, busy as they were spreading the faith by sword. The Quadisiya sandstorm debacle probably occurred in the reign of Khosrow II, the last Sassanian king, who died in 628. On his death, the empire quickly disintegrated and became easy pickings for Mohammad's followers. Its capital, Ctesiphon, was taken by them in 637.

Elsewhere in the article, the anonymous writer recommends that the West adopt the same Islamic tactic that has been used against the West, even to the point of adapting the Islamic ultimatum: Abandon Islam, or die. He more or less has the same advice that another correspondent proffered, to wit, that if Mecca and the Kaaba were reduced to molten glass and tens of thousands of pebble-throwing pilgrims vaporized in a small nuclear detonation, nothing would happen. Allah, who does not exist, would neither prevent the attack nor avenge it.

Countless Muslims worldwide would subsequently experience such a crisis of faith that most would adjure Islam. And that would be the end of that. The "war on terror" would be won. As my correspondent noted, this recommendation also came from an ex-Muslim. "The fellow who suggested it was adamant that this would indeed demoralize the Muslim world and convince them that they are not going to inherit the earth."

Nuking Mecca, Medina, Riyadh, Damascus, and Tehran to demoralize Muslims would be an exercise in preemption, certainly heartless but one way of appealing to minds otherwise insensate to reason by way of the primary goal of defending ourselves. After all, Ahmadinejad is promising us the same apocalyptic destruction.

By all available evidence, however, our political leaders are staring straight into the sandstorm of pragmatism, appeasement, wishful thinking, and diplomacy. Taking the moral high ground in a preemptive strike against our enemies is not in the cards. Neither President Bush, nor Secretary of State Rice, nor Prime Minister Tony Blair, nor the Iraq Study Group, nor any European leader can take a moral high ground. They are all value-negating multiculturalists. Since the moral is to defend and preserve a value, their minds are shut to the necessity of defending any Western value.

And while our leaders are being blinded by a sandstorm of their own making, thinking they are constructing a Roman aqueduct when they are actually digging a shallow ditch, our enemies are not only chortling over the dilemma in which the U.S. finds itself in Iraq - an occupation to win Muslim "hearts and minds" by not fighting a true war - but preparing to fight over the spoils. The Persians and the Arabs are again maneuvering to contest control of Iraq. "Saudis and Iran prepare to do battle over corpse of Iraq," reads the headline of the Sunday Telegraph (December 3).

"In Tehran, Iranian leaders have made clear that they believe they are the big winners from America's involvement in Iraq. 'The kind of service that the Americans, with all their hatred, have done us - no superpower has ever done anything similar,' Mohsen Rezal, secretary-general of the powerful Expediency Council that advises the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamanei, boasted on state television recently."

In the meantime:

"Saudi Arabia, America's closest ally in the Arab world, is considering backing anti-U.S. insurgents because it is so alarmed that Sunnis in Iraq will be left to their fate - military and political - at the hands of the [Iranian-backed] Shia majority." Vice President Dick Cheney flew to Riyadh last week to discuss the matter.

An ally so close that he can stick a dagger in our hearts - again. It isn't enough that the Saudis can hold the U.S. hostage with its confiscated oil wealth and produce suicide bombers with which to attack our cities. Now they want to pay "insurgents" to kill American soldiers. I suspect they have been doing this all the while, helping to bankroll Sunni "freedom fighters" in Iraq, and that the Bush administration has known it all the while. But, in the rarefied, oxygen-short realms of diplomacy, it isn't tactful to identify or acknowledge a truth. Two plus two can be any sum one wishes, and somehow translate into "stability" on the ground.

In the meantime, there is to be a "meeting of minds."

"...In a break with previous policy, Mr. Bush will meet tomorrow in Washington with Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a party closely tied to Iran."

That, one supposes, to paraphrase Mr. Burleigh, is the political way of "somehow communicating with moderate, non-violent Muslims." Only it is the Islamists who are reminding Bush of their existence. The last vestige of Bush's moral stature, such as it was, has gone up in a little puff of smoke.

Stay tuned, if you can stomach it. The sandstorm can only get worse.

Sandra Shaw's Art History I

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

My Top 11 Favorite Rock Guitarists

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Casino Royale

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Bad Solutions

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I recently wrote the following response to an e-mail I received proposing that all Muslims be ejected from the United States. I thought it worth reposting, even though I think it should go without saying:

Is that supposed to be a serious proposal? If so, it means that we should strip something like 5 million people of their citizenship and eject them from the country -- solely based upon their private religious beliefs. Some of those people would have no ties to any terrorist or Islamist organizations, nor even sympathy for them.

That would be the end of freedom of conscience in America. It would mean that Christians would be free to eject their devils from the US, namely "secular humananists" and other godless heathens, provided they could muster the vote. Then the Christian Reconstructionists would be free to make America into a thoroughly Christian nation, complete with the stoning of adulterers, abortionists, and homosexuals.

People have the absolute, inalienable right to believe what they please. They do not have the right to support enemy countries, such as by funneling money through charities to Hezbollah. They do not have the right to involve themselves in organizations seeking the violent overthrow of the US government. That's the line. Yes, our government permits Muslims to cross that line, just as they did with the communists decades ago. That does not justify violating it in the other direction. It would be morally wrong to do so -- and the consequences would be horrifying.

Shuttling Between The Abstract And The Concrete

By Andy from The Charlotte Capitalist,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Lisa VanDamme at Principles In Practice: Among Mr. Travers' principles for deeply grasping and relishing a work of art is the idea of "shuttling"—of moving back and forth cognitively from abstract conclusions about what is observed (e.g., strength, bravery, intelligence) to detailed perceptual observations that yield the abstractions (e.g., sinewy muscles, an erect stance, a furrowed brow) and

Recycling is BS?

By Nicholas Provenzo from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

So say Penn and Teller in this video of an episode of the comedic duo's provocatively-named Showtime series that is now propagating across the Internet.

What is remarkable about this video is that Penn and Teller actually track down and confront the federal regulator that is responsible for much of the pro-recycling hype, a one Dr. J. Winston Porter, PhD who was the Assistant Administrator for Solid Waste and Emergency Response at the Environmental Protection Agency during the Reagan and Bush I administrations. Porter was responsible for an 1989 EPA report that claimed that the US would run out of landfill space if it did not recycle at least 25% of is garbage waste—ignoring the salient fact that landfill space is cheaper and ultimately less polluting than the recycling craze he started.

The other refreshing angle is the unvarnished contempt Penn and Teller have for the irrational. They so utterly demolish the pro-recycling environmentalists, one almost feels sorry for the bastards—were they not behind wasteful and inefficient myth-making. Pretty compelling stuff for only a 30-minute program aimed at a mass audience.

NB: The language in this clip may be inappropriate for some viewers—discretion is advised.

Doonesbury's Hypocritical Warmongers

By Greg from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

A friend pointed me to the Doonesbury comic strip, where Trudeau has been exploring the phenomenon of those advocating war while not being willing to serve in the military:







What struck me is that Trudeau actually has a point, as long as people conceive of and prosecute war in a sacrificial way. It is indeed hypocritical to advocate that someone else go to war and be sacrificed for your own interests, and it's positively evil to advocate something like the draft to make them do so. On the other, "moral" hand, there are those who volunteer to be sacrificed for the sake of their countrymen, and there are pacifists who urge that we not fight at all. The premise of war-as-sacrifice seems unfortunately widespread, so back and forth people argue with charges of impracticality against charges of immorality (the "warmongers" on one side and the pacifists on the other, with the martyrs enjoying a status as tragic but respected cannon-fodder).

Of course, Objectivists don't accept any necessary conflict between morality and practicality, and I wince at the idea that we must prosecute war by either sacrificing ourselves or our countrymen, or resigning our country to an enemy's aggressive ambitions. We can and should develop a foreign policy of self-interest with a non-sacrificial military.

Americans would then be able to relate to the military and its services just as they do with any other higher-risk profession like coal mining, high-rise construction, test piloting, or whatever. Americans are not hypocrites for advocating and enjoying reading at night, living in condos, and flying to visit Grandma. And even when there is a significant chance of serious injury or death, the companies who bring us these things do not do it by calling for martyrs or seeking to sacrifice their employees. The same should be true of our military: tremendously risky work, yes, but only undertaken in defense of our rights, and never dependent on calls for sacrifice at any level.

Flemming Rose on "Why Publish the Danish Cartoons?"

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

What: Lecture by Flemming Rose on "Why Publish the Danish Cartoons?"

When: Monday, December 4, 2006 at 7:30 pm

Where: Wittemyer Courtroom, Wolf Law School Building, University of Colorado at Boulder.

Flemming Rose is the Cultural Editor for the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, the person who commissioned and then published the cartoons of Mohammed that became known as the Danish Cartoons. First published September 30, 2005, they created a furor around the world last spring. These dramatic events were caused by one man and one newspaper, with the able assistance of 12 political cartoonists.

Flemming Rose tells his story: why he commissioned the cartoons, the reasons for their publication, and puts the cartoons in a larger context of the battle of ideas in today's Europe. This battle is about freedom of speech, respect for and by religion, the integration of Muslims into European culture and wider immigration issues.

While this talk may leave you wondering about the future of America, Europe and the entire world, Mr. Rose will inspire you and show you how ideas influence the world. There will be a Q & A after the talk.

There is no charge to attend this event, and it is open and intended for the public. Members of the media are welcome to attend.

Don't miss this rare opportunity -- Flemming Rose is only in this country for a short time.

For further information, please contact Ideas.Matter@yahoo.com, or jim.manley@objectivistclubs.org or Lin Zinser at 303.431.2525.

Co-sponsored by Ideas Matter! and the Boulder Objectivist Club.

Letter to the Editor

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I'm pleased to report that Hannah Krening, who I know from Front Range Objectivism's 1FROG discussion group, recently published a letter to the editor in the Denver Post on Charles Rangel's proposal to reinstate the draft. The published version was edited for length somewhat, so I'm here posting the longer original version.

Charles Rangel wants to have a draft. What is he after? What is at the base of this? As someone who worked hard to abolish the draft in my youth, and as an upper-middle class mother whose daughter is an enlistee in the Army, I want to know.

Does he want to destroy the military? Because make no mistake, this will do it in our present culture. And I can think of several politicians (John Kerry and Bill Clinton come to mind for starters) who would cheer that effect.

But Rep. Rangel is after something much more than that. He wants to punish the middle and upper classes, that 20 to 30 percent of top moneymakers who pay the bulk of the government's cost of doing business. Listen carefully to what he says! Giving him more credit for innocence than is due, he is looking to "level the field," to stop the trend of those who are poorer to join the United States military. Never mind the ignorant enlistee in my daughter's boot camp who learned basic hygiene in her first week in the army, never mind the life lessons my daughter has learned, while many of her high school classmates party and drift aimlessly in college.

Consider the reality: Rep. Rangel is out to change our armed forces from a volunteer to a conscripted service. The fact that he is out to do this by force is the issue. This is not about the myriad problems in the military under the draft during the Vietnam War. It is not even about the fact that a draft allows a government to pursue an unpopular military action without the consequence of a drop in enlistment. This is about denying young people their right to pursue their lives by their choices (whether others deem them wise or not), and he and his allies will work tirelessly to do it.

If you believe that the majority of the middle and upper class works honestly and hard to earn a good living, then the fact that Rep. Rangel wants to punish them by taking their children against their wishes should disturb you. And he wants to punish the children as well: the idea of forcing a young person to sacrifice part of their life and perhaps to die, based on his or her "luck in life's lottery," should chill you to the bone.

The morality of altruism (self-sacrifice) is the morality that Rep. Rangel is relying on to advance his agenda, and that morality is anathema to America's founding principles. If we really believe in those inalienable rights: "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," then we need to preserve the system in which young people choose military enlistment, for reasons of principle, self-improvement, opportunity, or any other reason that they may have.

Hannah Krening
Larkspur, Colorado
November 20, 2006

Thank you for writing that, Hannah!

Chairman Mehlman Speaks

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

A Case to Watch

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Quick Roundup 121

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Biographical Blurb as Unwitting Parody

Some time ago, on a visit to Tim Blair, which I've added to my blogroll, I learned of a particularly entertaining moonbat colony called Dissident Voice, which purports to "provide hard hitting, thought provoking and even entertaining news and commentaries on politics and culture that can serve as ammunition in struggles for peace and social justice".

I no longer remember why Blair sent his readers to this web site, but I did become curious and so went straight to the "about" page, where I read the following biographical sketch of co-editor Kim Petersen

DV Co-Editor Kim Petersen is an average dude who enjoys scuba diving, working out, and advancing the struggle for a world based on principles of peaceful and equitable sharing and respect for the environment and life. He studied at universities in occupied British Columbia, Canada and Norway. He contributed "Western Imperialism and China" to the upcoming Alternative Atlas, which critiques imperialism around the world over the last 15 years, to be published by French editor Le Temps des Cerises in October 2005. His articles have appeared in various progressive media, and he has been a contributing writer to Dissident Voice since 2002. He can be reached at: kim@dissidentvoice.org. [link dropped, all bold mine]

Love that leftist mini-rant that follows "scuba diving, working out"! Everything is a speech to these people. And "occupied British Columbia"?!?! Occupied by whom? The Brits left long ago. And if this is supposed to be some kind of statement of solidarity with the American Indian population, why not call the rest of Canada "occupied"? Or does Canada (snicker) "occupy" British Columbia? He does list Canada separately, although whether he sees it, too, as "occupied" is open to debate. (And if Canada is not "occupied", is this but the tip of the iceberg of Canadian Imperialism soon to be revealed by the Alternative Atlas? What are those devious Canucks up to over there, anyway?)

It was that phrase "occupied British Columbia" that allowed me to google this bio so easily. But if this bio was so easy to find, it was because there seems to be nobody else on the planet who regards BC as "occupied". If you know of any such rumors, please point them out.

And the articles? Here are a couple of samples of what its editors consider to be "hard-hitting" commentary.

First, we have "Nukes: Iran and North Korea Are Not the Problem", where one Mickey Z is careful to ask, "What is the only nation to have used nuclear weapons (and have civilians been targeted)?" Unfortunately, he never bothers to ask why the United States used nuclear weapons in the first place.

Second, we have a more recent article, which implies that Israel my have played a role in the recent assassination of Pierre Gemayel of Lebanon. After making fun of anyone who falls for the bit about Syria -- of all nations -- being involved ("and this seems to clinch it for most observers"), it delivers this damning broadside:

Conversely, civil war may pose serious threats to Syrian interests -- and offer significant benefits to Israel. If Hizbullah's energies are seriously depleted in a civil war, Israel may be in a much better position to attack Lebanon again. Almost everyone in Israel is agreed that the Israeli army is itching to settle the score with Hizbullah in another round of fighting. This way it may get the next war it wants on much better terms; or Israel may be able to fight a proxy war against Hizbullah by aiding the Shiite group's opponents.

Never mentioned is the fact that the Party of God provoked the Israeli attack. Do I detect a pattern here?

In any event, Dissident Voice is so far out there that nearly every article will deliver gasps of unbelief if not audible laughter. I will grant that it is sometimes entertaining.

Russia Meddles

I am at a loss as to which of the following is most amazing: (1) the brazenness of Russia's recent exploits on the international stage, (2) the failure of nearly anyone in the mainstream media to "connect the dots", or (3) the fact that President Bush still regards Russia as a valuable ally against North Korea.

Consider what a quick Google News search turned up this morning: Russia has been selling enormous amounts of weaponry abroad, most notably to China with whom it is busily upgrading (probably military) satellite technology and Iran, whom it is helping develop not only a nuclear capability but also missile systems. Russia is also shipping air defense systems to Iran for its new nuclear plants.

In the meantime, Russia has possibly assassinated one of its former intelligence agents in England with polonium-210. Although Russians claim not to be involved -- using a logic reminiscent of that on the pages of the second Dissident Voice article linked above -- this story is the flashiest of the bunch, but ultimately, it seems the least important. In fact, one could argue that it is distracting many in the West from all the help Russia seems so fond of giving to the regimes in Iran and China lately.

Return of the Meanderthals?

Word Spy defines "meanderthal" as "A person who walks particularly slowly and aimlessly." You've encountered them before -- usually from behind in places like the mall when you're in a hurry.

What I am speaking of isn't really the same thing, but they remind me of meanderthals because of the great annoyance they cause me.

I'm talking about highway slow-pokes. To be more precise, I'm talking about self-righteous highway slow pokes.

"Huh?" most of my readers will probably ask.

The reason many of you will ask this question is that that old Democrat favorite, the 55 mile per hour speed limit, has been repealed so long that it is a distant memory if you remember it at all. I myself had only a few years' driving experience when that silly speed limit began disappearing from southern highways shortly after the Republicans took Congress and repealed it.

One thing I remember, though, was that every once in a while, before the repeal (and even afterwards for a time), I'd be merrily cruising around at 60 or 65 and have to just about slam my breaks. (You try driving 55 some time. But take something like No-Doze first.) Why? Because some idiot was driving at exactly 55 miles per hour and doing so in such a way that he just had to be "enforcing" the limit. This is, after all, Joe rank-and-file Democrat's chance to wield the same kind of petty authority that rude civil servants abuse over line-standers every day at such establishments as the Department of Public Safety or the Post Office.

Call me crazy, but I seem to have started encountering this again lately after the Democrats took control of Congress this November. Heck, there has even been noise (and long before the election, in fact) about bringing back that particular bit of silliness.

Ugh. All I can think at such encounters is something to the effect of, "Please. At least wait until the socialists are sworn in before you do that."

They're meanderthals to me, anyway.

-- CAV

"Contact with Nature" vs. Your Health

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Spiked Online posts a very interesting article by Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick about a claim by a group called "Natural England" that an unspecified set of conditions it calls "contact with nature" is good for human health.

According to William Bird, a Berkshire GP and Natural England's health adviser, "increasing evidence suggests that both physical and mental health are improved through contact with nature". A campaign factsheet claims that "aggression and domestic violence is [sic] less likely in low-income families with views or access to natural green space", and "crime rates are lower in tower blocks with more natural green space than identical tower blocks with no surrounding vegetation" (no references provided).

Dr Bird is worried that "people are having less contact with nature than at any other time in the past" and insists that "this has to change!".

Natural England's campaign, which is endorsed by Britain's deputy chief medical officer and the BBC and supported by a budget of £500million of taxpayers' money, offers a curious combination of the silly and the sinister. On the one hand, the notion that a breath of fresh air and the sight of a few trees can cure the ills of both the individual and society has the aura of whacky green fundamentalism. On the other hand, Dr Bird's schoolmasterish tone and his offer of a natural cure for a wide range of social problems clearly appeals to the authoritarian instincts behind New Labour's public health policies. [minor punctuation and format changes]

Of course, by "nature", the environmentalists basically mean "anything unaltered by human efforts" because, somehow, man's rational faculty -- despite the fact that it evolved naturally over many eons -- is "unnatural".

Even leaving aside some of the wilder claims and proclivity towards social engineering of Nature England at present, and the inglorious past history of the "nature therapy" movement as explored by Fitzpatrick, let's very briefly examine the idea that more "contact with nature" is beneficial to man's health.

Environmentalists the world over regard the banning of DDT in the United States as an unqualified triumph despite (?) the fact that since the 1972 ban, millions of human beings have died since having more "contact with nature" in the form of bites from mosquitoes carrying the parasite that causes malaria. Fortunately, while the environmentalist brothers-in-spirit of the Nature England folks weren't looking, the use of DDT to fight the spread of malaria has been partially resurrected in those parts of the third world hardest-hit by malaria. Unfortunately, DDT remains illegal in the United States, where we may be about to learn on our own hides about the health benefits of "contact with nature":

Chikungunya, a severe and sometimes deadly infectious disease that has devastated the islands of the Indian Ocean, has arrived in the United States.

Colorado, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota and at least a half-dozen other states have reported cases of travelers returning from visits to Asia and East Africa sick with the mosquito-borne virus, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Chikungunya can cause fever, chills, nausea, headache, rash, crippling joint pain and even neurological damage. There is no drug treatment, just bed rest, fluids and mild pain medication. [bold added]

DDT would not alone head off Chikungunya, but the very idea that we are wrongly forgoing even a single weapon in the arsenal against this emerging threat is unconscionable. Worse, there are still those who are working to ban DDT worldwide, and they make DDT out to be as much of an all-destroyer as Nature England makes "contact with nature" out to be a panacea!

But what about immigrants ... who ... might have been exposed to DDT without even knowing it? That certainly describes many thousands of immigrants who enter as farmworkers critically needed to keep crops from rotting in fields or on trees, as about 20 percent of this year's Florida orange crop did because of a labor shortage.

If their children are affected in the ways the Berkeley study suggested, those kids will inevitably pose problems for public schools as long as they remain here.

And what of persons who enter this country as visitors but stay to have babies, who automatically become citizens with rights to emergency healthcare?

The most spectacular recent instance of this came at midsummer, when surgeons in a 22-hour operation at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles separated tiny twins who had been conjoined at birth.

Their mother and father, Mexican nationals Sonia Fierros and Federico Salinas, entered this country last year on tourist visas and had those permits extended after Fierros suffered a urinary tract infection during a visit with relatives and learned from doctors she was carrying conjoined twins.

The couple stayed on long after their visas expired, they said, because, "We thought (the babies) would be able to get better medical care here," the 23-year-old mother said after the successful operation, which cost an estimated $900,000, a cost shared by Childrens Hospital and the Medi-Cal program.

No one knows if either parent had been exposed to DDT or whether the insecticide caused the babies' problem.

...

The other certainty is that the longer this country remains passive about pushing a complete worldwide ban on DDT, the worse the problem will get. [bold added]

Notice how long it is -- and how expensive it is made to sound for victims of the welfare state -- between author Thomas Elias's implication (based on an unreferenced source) that exposure to DDT might have caused a case of conjoined twins and his admission that the whole linkage is speculative at best!

It is astounding to me that such environmentalists get so much as the time of day when they so easily (and without references) exaggerate the dangers of the man-made and the benefits of the untamed natural world man's mind evolved to survive within!

But then, if the "facts" they argue from are suspect, so might be their motives. "Contact with nature" is good for us and DDT causes conjoined twins? Yeah. And maybe you guys are all with David M. Graber, and hoping that Chikungunya is the "right virus", too.

Man's mind, although it is not infallible, is what nature has given us to survive on this earth. If the environmentalists really believed that "contact with nature" were good for our health, they would not routinely come out against our use of reason to combat deadly parasites, their vectors, and the diseases they cause.

Indeed, they would not only have to count our use of the latest advances in medicine and pest control as part of nature, they would also have to admit that not everything in nature is beneficial to man. The claim that "contact with nature" is inherently good for our health is absurd because some things already in nature benefit our health and some harm it. But to allow even that observation would be to concede too much ground to reason.

And to do that would expose their profession of concern for mankind as the farce that it is.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Three minor changes.

Around the Web on 11-22-06

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Since I will be spending time with family tomorrow and Friday, I will take a break from blogging on those two days, returning some time on the weekend. Since I'll be away, I decided to do my normal weekly roundup early.

Rangel's "Draft" is Really National Service Slavery

Mark my words. And when this becomes apparent, Republican resistance to it is going to soften.

Yesterday, I posted again on Rangel's proposal to reinstitute the military draft because I saw yet another weak objection to it at a prominent conservative blog. In addition to noting the weaknesses of that argument, I anticipated how the national debate over the proposal might progress since Rangel has admitted that he is not thinking exclusively along the lines of military service when he says he wants to make everyone serve the state for two years.

Given that Colin Powell and John McCain -- to name just two prominent Republicans -- both favor national service, how likely will other Republicans be to take a stand against Rangel's "draft"? If volunteering for the military can substitute for it? If the military gets to cherry-pick from the draftees? If some of the draftees get to serve in "faith-based" initiatives?

The more I think about this, the more worried get that unless more and better arguments are made against this horrendous idea on moral grounds, the more likely we Americans are to get blindsided by a bunch of politicians pulling the bait-and-switch of a national service measure Republicans foolishly support in the initial guise of an anti-war draft proposal by a Democrat.

Andy over at Cozy Corner gives this a go. He rightly notes that, "[T]he draft is a form of institutionalized slavery," but he undercuts himself by conceding that the draft is morally defensible "for the survival of a nation". The flaw in this argument is that it forgets what the proper purpose of a government is: the defense of individual rights, the most fundamental of which is the right to one's own life. If a nation does not do just that, it does not deserve to survive.

When one of America's Founding Fathers said, "A republic, if you can keep it," he very succinctly stated how crucial it is for the people to take self-government seriously. Andy (like very many others) sees clearly that a nation cannot defend itself without an army. But what good is such a "defense" if said country denies the rights of its own citizens to decide for themselves whether to risk combat?

We must not only be willing to serve in the military or at least offer strong support to those who do (or find another means of self-defense, like hiring mercenaries) in order to remain free, we must consistently adhere to the principle that servitude is wrong. Once we make even one exception, we open the door to countless others.

The government is only our servant. It cannot make us as individuals do what it takes to remain free whether that is to bear arms or to uphold the principle of individual rights. Those jobs lie with the master, us. Government force cannot replace a people's desire to be free or their responsibility to think and act accordingly.

Net Neutrality: Gateway to Censorship

Myrhaf gives us a timely update on efforts by the Democrats -- and we all knew they were coming -- to impose government control over alternative media.

Such an innocuous name: net neutrality. Who could be against that? And the Internet Nondiscrimination Act of 2006 sounds so fair! What bigot would dare oppose nondiscrimination?

Under the cover of these happy fuzzy words the Democrats are about to slap price controls on internet providers. Americans should be happy, as the consumers in the Soviet Union were under price controls. Oh, wait -- there were long lines and empty shelves? Scratch that.

...

But making the internet better is not really the point of all this legislation. Giving the state power over the internet is the point.

There have been rumbles about this for quite some time, too.

Although Rangel's "draft" threatens to impose two years of slavery on every American, the threat of censorship is by far the greatest danger we face, for only the free exchange of ideas permits rational debate about politics to occur, and only reason permits us any hope of examining and correcting past mistakes.

Keeping our freedom of speech is Job One for the foreseeable future in the current political climate.

A Small Victory

On the Freedom of Speech front: the California Supreme Court recently made a ruling that is clearly applicable to bloggers. "Websites that publish inflammatory information written by other parties cannot be sued for libel, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday."

News from the Front

Oh yeah. I nearly forgot, there's a war going on.

Quick, remind the President!

Negotiating with terrorists will be far less effective at achieving peace even than participating in this "Global Orgasm for Peace". (There's a "liberal orgasm" for you, Mr. Limbaugh.)

Japanese Submarine Accident

Bubblehead posts an update on the recent collision of a Japanese submarine with a tanker, complete with a photo of the damage. Money quote: "Note for non-submariners: The rudder is supposed to be vertical."

Wah!, Part I

So the United States is "the most unfriendly country to visitors".

Rude immigration officials and visa delays keep millions of foreign visitors away from the United States, hurt the country's already battered image, and cost the U.S. billions of dollars in lost revenue, according to an advocacy group formed to push for a better system.

To drive home the point, the Discover America Partnership released the result of a global survey on Monday which showed that international travelers see the United States as the world's worst country in terms of getting a visa and, once you have it, making your way past rude immigration officials.

Gosh. I wonder why. Before I get to my point, though, there is the following not unrelated story.

Wah!, Part II

Six imams have the audacity to act indignant when they arouse suspicion aboard a plane flight and are escorted off in handcuffs, which is standard for passengers who do not obey orders from the flight crew.

A passenger initially raised concerns about the group through a note passed to a flight attendant, according to Andrea Rader, a spokeswoman for US Airways. She said police were called after the captain and airport security workers asked the men to leave the plane and the men refused.

"They took us off the plane, humiliated us in a very disrespectful way," said Omar Shahin, of Phoenix.

...

"CAIR will be filing a complaint with relevant authorities in the morning over the treatment of the imams to determine whether the incident was caused by anti-Muslim hysteria by the passengers and/or the airline crew," Hooper said. "Because, unfortunately, this is a growing problem of singling out Muslims or people perceived to be Muslims at airports, and it's one that we've been addressing for some time."

As I said about a similar incident, in which a Middle Easterner wearing an Arabic tee shirt in an airport raised Cain over being told to wear something else:

While we all have freedom of speech in America, we are not entitled to express our opinions through the use of someone else's resources. This is why I cannot simply plant a campaign poster in my neighbor's yard. This is why [Raed] Jarrar should not have my tax money at his disposal (if he does) to finance his various foreign junkets. Nor I his money for my causes. Indeed, Jarrar himself seems to apprehend this point: He has closed the comments on his blog. This is no more an infringement of my freedom of speech than JetBlue's imposition of a rule against Arabic script would be an infringement of Jarrar's. If he objects to the notion that an airline can have "no Arabic script" as part of a customer dress code, then he has some explaining to do. [bold added today]

But even if our government actually protected the right of a carrier like Jet Blue to bar certain forms of dress on its flights, all the above still does not mean that the government would properly just ignore suspicious-looking characters with an interest in domestic aviation. Not after the atrocities committed in the name of Islam on September 11, 2001.

So these imams were allegedly praying. Let them pray, but do not force an airline to ignore the fact that they are Moslem or pretend that their religion does not rightfully arouse suspicions among most Americans. If they haven't the foresight to schedule a flight around prayer time in an overwhelmingly non-Moslem country which has been repeatedly attacked by Moslems, then tough nuts. Have these nincompoops never heard of red-eye flights? Or trains? Or automobiles?

I thank US Airways for being attentive to the concerns of its passengers and fully support its right -- which our government does not adequately defend and may infringe further -- to refuse service to anyone for any reason it pleases.

Perhaps if our government would fight a ruthless war abroad and respect property rights at home -- rather than indiscriminately hassling all foreign visitors -- we would not have our ill-deserved new reputation.

A New Genre?

Software Nerd asks an interesting question: Why aren't there more business novels?

Good Photographer

Robert Tracy introduces and provides a link to the site of a talented, self-taught photographer, Chris Kamphaus.

Fault Lines

There is a short, but interesting article at MSNBC about fault lines in the Democratic Party.

But the tectonic plates move in dangerous ways when the topics are taxes, trade, torts and terrorism. [George] Miller voted against reducing the federal tax code's "marriage penalty"; [Ellen] Tauscher was for it. He was against liberalizing trade with China; she was for it. He was against limiting awards in lawsuits; she was for it.

Then there is terrorism -- and Iraq. Tauscher, with her lower Manhattan ties and her swing district (which includes two of the government's most important defense-research labs), voted to authorize the war in Iraq and is wary of the consequences of a too-hasty exit. To Miller, the war is an unsalvageable blunder. Coming of age in antiwar San Francisco, his view is framed by Vietnam. He voted against authorizing the invasion. He admires Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania for having come forward last year to denounce it. "Everyone discounted the criticisms of people like me because we were the 'antiwar crowd'," Miller says. "Jack gave the Democratic Party a place to stand."

Tauscher is a mixed bag to be sure, but if there are more people like her in the party (and this article is accurate), that would be a very good thing.

What's Up ...

... with Oak Tree? I can still access individual entries from my feed, but the main page of the blog is FUBAR.

Army, Navy, Air Force, Missionaries

Nick Provenzo reports on an unwarranted use of our military: spreading religion.

The Beverly Hills Teddy Bear Co. manufactures a Jesus doll that is less a toy and more a tool with which to preach Christianity to children. For example, the toy quotes the Holy Bible with statements like "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again." The doll's manufacturer offered to donate 4,000 of its dolls to the Marine Toys for Tots Foundation, founded by the Marines in 1947 to ensure that needy children received some toys for Christmas.

The foundation, supported today by the Marine Corps Reserves as part of its official mission, opted to refuse the Jesus dolls on the grounds that the Marines don't profess one faith over another, and that the doll was an inappropriate gift for a non-Christian family. And that's when all hell broke lose.

In response to its decision, the foundation was peppered with so many calls of Christian outrage that The Washington Post reports that it became impossible for the foundation to perform its mission -- which is simply to give some hard-luck kids something nice to play with on Christmas Day. Caving in to the pressure, the foundation reversed itself and agreed to accept the Jesus dolls, and will simply have to make an extra effort in addition to its already large commitments to ensure that these dolls don't go to families that don't want them.

The purpose of our military is to defend the United States from foreign threats. Not to serve as an overseas welfare agency (to which many conservatives rightfully object) or as a religious order. This is an outrage.

"Saying Justice"

As an atheist, I have noticed that religion often coopts many legitimate tasks of cultural transmission, like education, sponsorship of art, and various cultural ceremonies.

A corollary of this is that many times, those of us who do not follow a religion find ourselves lacking a viable alternative to a common, at least partially worthwhile cultural practice that has been traditionally prescribed by religion.

In that vein, Craig Biddle notices that the positive role of the Christian custom of saying grace at Thanksgiving -- in reminding us of how fortunate we are -- is compromised by the fact that it fails to do justice to those who make our prosperity possible.

To say grace is to give credit where none is due -- and, worse, it is to withhold credit where it is due. To say grace is to commit an act of injustice.

Rational, productive people -- whether philosophers, scientists, inventors, artists, businessmen, military strategists, friends, family, or yourself -- are who deserve to be thanked for the goods on which your life, liberty, and happiness depend. This holiday season -- and from here out -- don't say grace; say justice: Thank or acknowledge the people who actually provide the goods. Some of them may be sitting right there at the table with you. And if you find yourself at a table where people insist on saying grace, politely insist on saying justice when they're through. It's the right thing to do.

Thank you, Craig, and Happy Thanksgiving!

And to all who stop by, ....

Thank you, and Happy Thanksgiving!

-- CAV

Around the Web on 11-30-06

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Tons of stuff. Diving straight in....

The Jig is Up ...

... for the "N-word". I mean, ...


Oh, wait. That won't do for a slogan, either!

Cox and Forkum have provided yet another example of a recent theme of mine: Similarities between the Islamofascists and the totalitarians who have hijacked the civil rights movement. The former want to ban drawings of Mohammed and the latter, the word, "nigger".

Simply using a word does not make one a racist, and besides, far worse can be said using plain English. Furthermore, working to limit public debate does not make one an advocate for freedom. Michael Richards was an idiot for losing his composure, but Jesse Jackson is a villain for attacking freedom of speech.

And Jackson is, incidentally, also a coward for hiding behind Michael Richards while he does it.

Coulter nails it!

It has been ages since I have read something good from Ann Coulter, but this column about the recent, newsbreaking pre-flight trash removal executed by US Airways in Minnesota is very funny and makes several excellent points.

Six imams removed from a US Airways flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix are calling on Muslims to boycott the airline. If only we could get Muslims to boycott all airlines, we could dispense with airport security altogether.

Witnesses said the imams stood to do their evening prayers in the terminal before boarding, chanting "Allah, Allah, Allah" -- coincidentally, the last words heard by hundreds of airline passengers on 9/11 before they died.

Witnesses also said that the imams were talking about Saddam Hussein, and denouncing America and the war in Iraq. About the only scary preflight ritual the imams didn't perform was the signing of last wills and testaments. [bold and link added]

This is worse than the proverbial "shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theater'. This is standing in front of the screen, turning on the lights, and waving a machine gun around. My only question is this: Will our government bring up criminal charges, as it should, against these "scholars"? (HT: Harry Binswanger List)

Now word so far from Jesse Jackson about whether he thinks the word "Allah" should be banned, not that it should.

Let Go of God and Grab this CD!

Joe Kellard tells us how we can purchase the CD of Julia Sweeney's one-woman act, "Letting Go of God".

A Few New Blogs

I have, over the past few weeks, added some new blogs to the sidebar, but, except for Tim Blair, haven't yet made my usual introductions, so here goes....

Michael Bahr of Tempe, Arizona, is the author of Bahr's House of Exuberance. His most recent post starts off from a discussion of racism, but quickly becomes more philosophical. I like this point:

There are few sweeping generalizations to which I will adhere without considering new evidence, and one of those is that any philosophy, religion, meme, superstition, saying, or other effect which discourages critical thinking, discredits itself in so doing. It cuts to the central tool for the evaluation of truth -- the truth withstands any amount of critical scrutiny.

Are you listening, Reverend Jackson? I didn't think so. He also invites readers to weigh in on what they think the Song of the Year should be....

Student of Objectivism, who names his blog after himself in the tradition of the greatest bloggers, asks an interesting question -- and gets some good feedback from a commenter.

DJR (When Facing Darkness, I Made Fire) is a man who wants to think for himself, which is a great virtue, but he is too quick here to lambaste Leonard Peikoff for the way he delivered his advice on the recent elections. For the reasons suggested by Diana Hsieh (near the end of the post) and others, I think Peikoff delivered his advice bluntly with a good purpose in mind.

As I have said before, I do not think at this point that one necessarily need know about the DIM Hypothesis to stop supporting Republicans. I think the arguments of C. Bradley Thompson and some careful examination of the current state of political debate on the Right are enough. Why? Because the practice of the Republicans has evolved over the past few years to catch up with the theories of the most consistent in their party.

Jim Woods is not unfamiliar to my readers, but I have finally gotten around to linking to his very good blog, Words by Woods. I found this bit about a new dollar coin intriguing, although I am not completely on the same page with him.

New dollar coins. Again !?!? Looks like the mint got it right this time as America wants Presidents and symbols of our values like Lady Liberty on our money, not more affirmative action creations. Personally, I wish they had done a series on Fed Chairman to remind us why the dollar has devalued over time. At least with the first coins, we will be reminded of real American Presidents, but will the political parties identify their recent shortcomings in time for 2008.

I'm mostly with Jim here but for the fact that I actually liked the Sacagawea Dollar in an aesthetic sense. Yes. The design was unfortunately chosen in a nod to multiculturalism, a fact I do not like. But since there was ample precedent for Indians on American coinage, I thought that this multiculturalist dollar coin fit in far better than its predecessor. Aside from being better-looking, you could easily forget the multi-culti claptrap.

You can't do that when you look at the coin that featured the visage of the woman my Dad used to call, "Old Hatchet-Face".

More Than Just Phonics

I really enjoyed what Lisa VanDamme had to say about teaching children how to read.

One day, I asked the students, "How is Robin like the bird?" I then watched as one face after another illumined with the glow of a new understanding. They saw it.

In Lana's words: "They both have a problem and then they solve it. The branch is falling, but the bird knows he has wings, so he flies. Robin's legs don't work, but he learns to read and whittle and swim. They both find a door in the wall: if they can't solve something one way, they find another."

Fixing the broken mechanics of how children are taught to read -- by abandoning the "look-say" method -- is only the initial battle. Opening the eyes of children to literature is just as important in preparing them for adulthood.

A Tragic Jewel

The title I ripped off from Isaac Schrodinger, who is completely right.

I recognize what I see in these pictures. Ruins. I see the ruins of a once beautiful city. I am reminded of Miami and New Orleans. Places with so much flavor that they live. Places where you know, every minute, exactly where you are. I see a shadow of that in the corpse of a once great city, a once great country. It hurts to look at it. The thing is, I am not Cuban, not really. I am an American who was born in Cuba. What must real Cubans think when they see this tragedy?

This post is its author's tribute to his departed father for having the foresight and courage to take asylum in America when Fidel Castro took power, get his family here, and work their way up from being poor. His father saw the ruins long before most others did, and he acted decisively.

This is no spoiler because nobody else can put this story into words better than its author did. Go and read it now.

"Invited". Declined.

I see that I have been "invited" by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to submit my mind to the mullahs, thereby destroying it. This would be worse than suicide because to do so would make my life on earth worse than actually being dead.

Here's my answer in English and in Arabic.

Bombs as Speech

Over at The Belmont Club, Wretchard examines recent remarks by Newt Gingrich to the effect that if America fails to preempt the Islamic Bomb before we lose a city, we might see restrictions on freedom of speech. He quotes Gingrich.

And, my prediction to you is that ether before we lose a city, or if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people before they get to reach out and convince young people to destroy their lives while destroying us.

This is a warning we should heed. Gingrich has just told us how many of our leaders might react to such a calamity. For to indefinitely restrict freedom of speech is both an abominable suggestion and a confession that one so poorly understands the value of freedom that one cannot see a way to offer intellectual competition to brutes.

The best way to begin offering a counterargument to the jihadists would be to show them, as we showed the Japanese during World War II, the consequences of their creed and the foolishness of picking a fight with the West.

The bombings marked America's total victory over a militaristic culture that had murdered millions. To return an entire nation to morality, the Japanese had to be shown the literal meaning of the war they had waged against others. The abstraction "war," the propaganda of their leaders, their twisted samurai "honor," their desire to die for the emperor--all of it had to be given concrete form. This is what firebombing Japanese cities accomplished. It showed the Japanese that "this"--point to burning buildings, screaming children scarred unmercifully, piles of corpses, the promise of starvation--"this is what you have done to others. Now it has come for you. Give it up, or die." This was the only way to show them the true nature of their philosophy, and to beat the truth of the defeat into them.

How well could the jihadists raise recruits if we started leveling cities in their home countries? How well would terrorists continue being tolerated in the Islamic world? How effective would blowing oneself in an airplane look, compared to an, say, atomic blast?

It speaks volumes that Gingrich puts restrictions on freedom of speech on the table in the first place and then merely seeks a new set of "Geneva conventions" for this war -- rather than bluntly stating something along the lines of really bringing the war home to the Islamofascists. (I haven't listened to the whole speech, but methinks if he'd said anything like this, it would have made news.)

To fail to make the case for waging a ruthless war, including the possible use nuclear weapons, at this juncture is cowardice. Such is the state of the Right today.

See also this post at Myrhaf.

How to Write Congress

Software Nerd has a timely post on this topic.

Such activism only makes sense if it takes a minimal amount of time. I recently discovered the Congress.Org site . It tracks what Senators and Congressman are doing and what Bills are coming up. It makes it easy to enter one's details one time, and then send emails out every now and then with very little effort.

...

I figured that it would be even easier if the research part was shared. So, whenever I do send an email, I'll post a copy here, in case anyone else wants to send something similar to their rep. I'd ask that if anyone else sends an email to a rep about a bill, they could do the same: post the text here. Again, for me, this particular strain of activism is not about making arguments, but about "being counted", so to speak.

Keep this post in mind.

Po-210

For the curious, Bubblehead gives us the scoop on Polonium 210, the national poison of Putin's Russia.

Buttons

Bothenook has posted an amusing list of "sayings that should be on buttons". After my wife told me the other day that I look "stern" from a distance, I should probably wear this one: "Do l look like a freakin' people person?"

More!

And if this isn't enough for you, head on over to Mike's Eyes or Intellectual Watchman!

-- CAV

Mussulmen and Mobs

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The "Right" to Act Belligerently

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Did Atta "Fly While Moslem"?

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Critical Thinking: Theory and Practice

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Nature Wants Us Dead

By Andy from The Charlotte Capitalist,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Chris Davis quotes Penn Jillette, "We need technology to fight against nature. Nature so wants us dead. Nature is trying to kill us. The natural things in this world are HIV and bears. Everything natural in the world wants us dead." So true -- and that gets to the essential question when it comes to the environment. Do you want to make the environment safe for man...or safe from man?

Globalization: What Philosophies Are Appropriate? Shinto?

By Andy from The Charlotte Capitalist,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Dr. George Reisman: Globalization, in conjunction with its essential prerequisite of respect for private property rights, and thus the existence of substantial economic freedom in the various individual countries, has the potential to raise the productivity of labor and living standards all across the world to the level of the most advanced countries. In addition, it has the potential to bring

Defining A Trend: "Locational Warming"?

By Andy from The Charlotte Capitalist,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Jon Ham at The Locker Room reports: Calgary is about to break a 110-year-old temperature record. For cold! Here in Charlotte a few weeks ago we experienced a record cold day also. You can't have a warming trend if you are experiencing new temperature lows. An uptrend in temperatures is defined as a series of higher highs and higher lows. A downtrend in temperatures is defined as a series of