Founders Gets Ready for Blast-Off!

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Red Light Cameras See Green

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

Whether Big Brother is busy telling you what you may or may not eat, where (or whether) you are allowed to smoke, or whether you may continue driving your own car, it is mind boggling how much of our freedom is being taken away lately in the name of protecting us. Those of us who know better understand this to be an impossibility: To live lives proper to man, we must be free.

We also look upon the government officials who push such measures with the proper degree of suspicion. Being politicians, these are people who have power over others as a major, if not a primary motivation. Unfortunately, so many of our journalists are too lazy or complicit in such schemes and end up giving them something they do not deserve: the benefit of the doubt.

Even so, you can't fool all of the people all of the time, as Mark Twain once put it. Case in point: A couple of months ago, an official in Chicago belied the stated purpose of red light cameras when he proposed an ordinance to ban red light camera detectors in motor vehicles!

After getting wind that a Chicago company known for its radar detectors and GPS navigation systems was about to hit the market with a $449.95 red-light and speed camera detector, Finance Committee Chairman Edward M. Burke vowed to remain one step ahead of the technology game.

He's drafting an ordinance for introduction at the July 19 City Council meeting that would ban camera detectors.

Ever since Chicago entered the Brave New World of traffic enforcement, City Hall has insisted that red-light cameras were about safety -- not money. That's even though red-light cameras now positioned at 39 accident-prone intersections generated 304,011 tickets and $17.9 million in 2006 alone.

On Thursday, Burke gave up the ghost. He acknowledged that red light cameras are, indeed, about raising money -- and that the proposed ban is about keeping the gravy train rolling.

"Of course it is. It's budgeted in our annual appropriation ordinance. That's why all of these cameras are being installed. You can't deny the reality. The reality is people blow through these intersections and they're going to be caught and they're going to be fined...It has become a big revenue source," Burke said.

"I don't think the goal is to allow the motorist to subvert the system we're spending so much money on....Why waste money on the cameras?" [bold added]

Leaving aside the question of whether such cameras should exist at all, Burke should have welcomed news of these potentially life-saving devices. Obviously, he did not.

As a government official, Edward Burke's proper role is to protect the individual rights and the lives of his constituents. Not to defend the government installing surveillance equipment in public places, but Burke's question, "Why waste money on the cameras?" sums up eloquently a disregard for both our rights and our lives that is all too common among politicians today -- and accepted without the least bit of indignation by most people.

And what about our journalists? This story is two months old and the only reason I know about it at all is because I happened to look at a blog I very rarely read hosted by an alternative paper. (And its focus was on the technology.) Oh yeah. When they're not busy cheerleading such "public welfare" measures, they're busy parroting such nonsense as, "This is not about revenue. This is about changing the behavior and public safety."

Well, if you count "getting the public used to being watched by the government" as "changing behavior", the above government official was honest one out of three times. Fine for a batting average in baseball, but not enough integrity for (proper) government work.

Burke's ordinance should have instantly made national news and the man should have been hounded out of office by now. Our culture is, alas, a far cry from the days when such mottoes as "Live free or die" were generally understood, and therefore regarded seriously.

-- CAV

Low Health Care Ranking Debunked

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

John Stossel takes a look under the hood of the WHO study that Michael Moore and so many others make so much of when they push for socialized medicine, and finds, in his words, "less than meets the eye".

So what's wrong with the WHO and Commonwealth Fund studies? Let me count the ways.

The WHO judged a country's quality of health on life expectancy. But that's a lousy measure of a health-care system. Many things that cause premature death have nothing do with medical care. We have far more fatal transportation accidents than other countries. That's not a health-care problem.

Similarly, our homicide rate is 10 times higher than in the U.K., eight times higher than in France, and five times greater than in Canada.

When you adjust for these "fatal injury" rates, U.S. life expectancy is actually higher than in nearly every other industrialized nation.

Unsurprisingly, the study also skewed its results through a criterion it called "fairness", which basically gave points for government interference in the medical sector -- a category in which our nation should strive mightily for last place.

And Stossel's not done yet. He closes with this teaser: "Next week: the truth about the Commonwealth Fund study." Stay tuned.

-- CAV

The Oxymoronic "Fair Tax"

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

Back in 1996, I supported the candidacy of Steve Forbes, which centered around simplifying the income tax through a "flat tax". My rationale at the time was based partly on the notion that this simplification of the tax code would at least reduce the intrusiveness of the IRS and partly on the naive assumption that this would represent a first step by the Republicans towards reducing spending as well as taxes.

A decade later, I have been disabused of the notion that the Republicans really care about reducing the size of the welfare state. Nobody is talking about a flat tax anymore, but this might be due to the fact that, politicians being what they are, the bloom came off that rose when they realized that the idea was not popular enough to win an election. But at the same time, nobody is talking about spending cuts anymore, either.

The political debate has, thanks to the adoption of the welfare state by the Republicans, shifted away from rolling back the welfare state as have noted before. And yet, as I also noted, the Republicans continue to enjoy an undeserved reputation as defenders of economic freedom.

Furthermore, it remains easy to hate the IRS, so despite the electoral non-viability of the flat tax, some Republicans who want to run against the IRS have come up with a new gimmick: the "fair tax". Just the name should clue you in that the Republicans have no opposition on principle to taxation: What's "fair" about the government confiscating your money?

But this Wall Street Journal article shows that it's even worse than that. The idea is being sold with a mountain of lies, damn lies, and statistics. Worse still, it incorporates an element of wealth redistribution that would make any Democrat proud:

Rep. John Linder (R., Ga.) and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R., Ga.) have introduced legislation (H.R. 25/S. 1025) to implement the FairTax. They assert that a rate of 23% would be sufficient to replace federal individual and corporate income taxes as well as payroll and estate taxes. Mr. Linder's Web site claims that U.S. gross domestic product will rise 10.5% the first year after enactment, exports will grow by 26%, and real investment spending will increase an astonishing 76%.

In reality, the FairTax rate is not 23%. Messrs. Linder and Chambliss get this figure by calculating the tax as if it were already incorporated into the price of goods and services. (This is known as the tax-inclusive rate.) ...

The distinction is confusing, but think of it this way. If a product costs $1 at retail, the FairTax adds 30%, for a total of $1.30. Since the 30-cent tax is 23% of $1.30, FairTax supporters say the rate is 23% rather than 30%.

This is only the beginning of the deceptions in the FairTax. Under the Linder-Chambliss bill, the federal government would have to pay taxes to itself on all of its purchases of goods and services. Thus if the Defense Department buys a tank that now costs $1 million, the manufacturer would have to add the FairTax and send it to the Treasury Department. The tank would then cost the federal government $300,000 more than it does today, but its tax collection will also be $300,000 higher.

...

Since sales taxes are regressive--taking more in percentage terms from the incomes of the poor and middle class than the rich--some provision is needed to prevent a vast increase in taxation on the nonwealthy. The FairTax does this by sending monthly checks to every household based on income. [bold added]

Not to defend income redistribution in any way, but wouldn't Americans still have to file reports subject to audit to make sure people were not lying about their income in order to get these rebate checks? This wouldn't even really get rid of the IRS as far as I can tell.

Oh, and there's more:

A 2000 estimate by Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation found the tax-inclusive rate would have to be 36% and the tax-exclusive rate would be 57%. In 2005, the U.S. Treasury Department calculated that a tax-exclusive rate of 34% would be needed just to replace the income tax, leaving the payroll tax in place. But if evasion [e.g., non-collection --ed] were high then the rate might have to rise to 49%. If the FairTax were only able to cover the limited sales tax base of a typical state, then a rate of 64% would be required (89% with high evasion).

As I noted, the public debate ceased being about reducing spending long ago: Just look at the emphasis of this article -- in a presumably pro-business publication -- on how impractical Linder and Chambliss's proposal is as federal income replacement! Granted, that is the focus, but the remarkable fact remains that it would take a 57% sales tax to replace the federal income tax. I can't believe something wasn't said about the need to cut spending!

The obscene amount of wealth our government seizes to finance the welfare state is, thanks to this debate, being made impossible not to notice. It will, however, be up to those of us who understand the nature of capitalism and who value our individual rights to interject that this is inexcusable and that Americans can and should change this by demanding, at least for a start, a reduction in size of the welfare state.

This is a chance -- no thanks to the "Fair tax' Republicans -- to bring the public debate on the welfare state back to where it belongs: on how to eliminate it.

-- CAV

Loving Christians?

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Today's fundamentalist Christianity definitely has a militant streak, well-supported by scripture and history. So I'm not surprised by this news:

Until this month, "imprecatory prayer" was not in many people's vocabularies. But then the Rev. Wiley Drake, pastor of First Baptist Church of Buena Park, Calif., urged his supporters to use Psalm 109 to focus prayers directed at the "enemies of God" -- including the leaders of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Drake was urging the use of imprecatory prayer -- prayers for another's misfortune or for vengeance against God's enemies. Now such prayer is the talk of blogs and letters to the editor.

The controversy flared Aug. 14, the day the Washington, D.C.-based church-state group asked the Internal Revenue Service to probe the tax- exempt status of Drake's congregation. Churches, as tax-exempt, are prohibited from campaigning for candidates. Drake earlier had issued a statement on church letterhead endorsing former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Republican presidential candidate. Drake told his supporters that he attempted to talk to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State about the issue. He cited a verse from the Gospel of Matthew that says, "If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you." Drake said his efforts were rebuffed.

"Now that all efforts have been exhausted, we must begin our Imprecatory Prayer, at the key points of the parliamentary role in the earth where we live," Drake wrote. Under the heading, "HOW TO PRAY," he listed all 31 verses of Psalm 109, in which King David appeals to divine justice. Drake provided his congregation the King James Version of the psalm, including Verse 9, which says: "Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow." On the advice of his attorneys, Drake has declined to be interviewed.

Happily, this story should bring the generally good work of Americans United for Separation of Church and State to the attention of those who don't wish to live in a nation run from pulpits.

India

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

It's a fascinating country, India: "The world's largest democracy," with a population of 1.12 billion, and now the world's customer service department. It is a place of vast contradictions that embraces (in a mixed economy) the individualism of a free market, yet retains vestiges of a pre-capitalist caste society. How many Indians will touch an untouchable to this day?

On the 15th of this month India celebrated its 60th anniversary of independence from the United Kingdom. As an American I tip my hat and say congratulations. A free and flourishing India is not only morally right, it is important to the world's economy. And India is, along with Israel, America's natural ally in the war against Islamic totalitarianism.

I believe that independence is good, but I also think India's association with the British Empire was the best thing that ever happened to it -- another paradox in this land of contradictions! The infusion of western values that came from Britain accounts for India's progress and is the foundation of its freedom.

"East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet," wrote Rudyard Kipling, but in India today the two very different cultures do meet. I once read an anecdote about an Indian VIP who was taken to a concert in New York City of the three B's -- Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. After the concert he was asked which he liked best. He said he liked the piece at the very beginning the best. After some confusion his American host realized the Indian thought the orchestra tuning up was part of the show and liked that best.

In India you can find individuals on the cutting edge of the Information Revolution, but you'll also find ghastly superstitions and mysticism. Now, mysticism is everywhere in the world, from Malibu to Melbourne to Madrid to Marakesh; but it is noisier and more bizarre in Mumbai. You don't find fakirs lying on a bed of nails in Montana.

Along with the mysticism in India you can find many who subscribe to the philosophy of Ayn Rand, a philosophy of reason and reality that is the opposite of mysticism. I was fascinated in the 1980's to read announcements in The Intellectual Activist of all the cities where Leonard Peikoff's taped lectures could be heard. After the USA, the country with the most lectures by far was India.

When Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand was published in 1991, I could hardly put it down and I took it to work with me as a temp legal proofreader. This being New York City, I was surrounded by liberals, of course; they reacted to the sight of the book with revulsion, as if I had done something wrong merely by bringing the book to work. I was not part of the politically correct group. But there was one Indian woman at work, an immigrant with a heavy accent whose eyes lit up at the sight of the book and we had a very nice conversation about our favorite philosopher. To the liberals, Ayn Rand represented an enemy to be scorned; to that Indian woman she represented the best within, the hope of aspirations fulfilled by the use of reason and productiveness in a free country. (I suspect that the Indian woman was the only one in the office besides me who had actually read Ayn Rand.)

What are we to make of a country where one can find both Objectivists and Hindus? A country where one can find computer programmers and women who decorate fire hydrants with flowers in some fertility ritual because they look like phallic symbols? A country that has a thriving international commerce and poor people who defecate in the gutter?

I think the contradictions in India are the same as the rest of the world -- the struggle of reason vs. faith, individualism vs. collectivism, freedom vs. statism -- but the mysticism is purer, which is to say more backward and less tempered by the west's philosophic heritage of reason. The crisis is similar to that in the Islamic world, but India seems to have benefited from its Hindu religion's syncretism. Unlike the more dogmatic Islam, Hinduism, from what little of it I understand, has a tradition of bringing in outside ideologies and working with them.

Looking at the struggles in non-western civilizations reminds me how much we owe to the medieval scholastics led by Thomas Aquinas, who integrated Aristotle with Christianity. They made this world real to Christians and made all the subsequent achievements of science and civilization, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, possible.

Hindus must have their limit of how much reason they will tolerate before they lash out in mindless force. Hinduism is certainly no guarantee of freedom. India seems to be in a precarious position: will it move forward in the direction of reason and freedom or backward to its mystical past?

Ultimately, the fate of India and the world rests on the fate of America. American leadership allows the best elements of the rest of the world to work for peace and international trade. If America succumbs to religion and statism, there is no hope for the rest of the world.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Messages from Bizarro World

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

It is not often that two mortal enemies agree on the same policy and, by design or coincidence, issue fundamentally similar statements on the goal of that policy. The enemies in question here are Iran and Saudi Arabia, Shiite and Sunni dominated regimes respectively. Their goal is world conquest.

On August 14, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, visiting Kabul, Afghanistan to meet with President Hamid Karzai and to deliver a kind of “pep” talk to a gathering of Sunni and Shiite clerics, stated, according to IRNA (Islamic Republic News Agency):

“There is no truth on earth but monotheism and following tenets of Islam and there is no way for salvation of mankind but rule of Islam over mankind.” (sic)

The IRNA story went on:

“President Ahmadinejad said nations are today distancing themselves from culture of materialism and selfishness and look for a new way for their prosperity, that is the path of Islam. (sic)…He said that the world is on verge of a great upheaval and ulama at this juncture shoulder a heavy responsibility that is introducing Islam as it is.

“’Nations today have no haven but religion….All of us have the duty to resist the enemy by closing our ranks.’

“The president said Islam belongs to all generations and Muslims should get ready for global mission of Islam.” (sic)

Translation: Sunnis, Shiites, and other Islamic sects should put aside their doctrinal differences and unite to conquer the world, specifically the West. They can resume butchering each other and recalcitrant infidels, too, once that goal is accomplished and the globe has been claimed in Allah’s name.

Ahmadinejad probably watched Saudi cleric Sheik Muhammad Al-Munajid on Saudi television on July 26 and decided to adapt that other mystic’s “sermon” to his own purposes. Very likely he resolved that this heretical Sunni was not going to upstage him on the matter of world conquest. Ahmadinejad is, after all, the next “Mahdi.” He switched a few of the heretic’s words around but the message is the same.

Al-Munajid proclaimed:

“This is a nation of monotheism, and this is the Islam that Allah wants to spread throughout the world, and to rule the land in its entirety. Allah wants this. He sent down the Koran and the Hadith for that purpose.

“Humanity can have no happiness without Islam. Humanity can enjoy no goodness, unless the sun of monotheism, the Koran, and the Sunna shines (sic) upon it. The world without the sun of the divine revelation is a place of eternal darkness, as we can see today – a world of frustration, collapse, injustice, arbitrariness, and wrongdoing. The world today is a jungle – a world of barbarism of all kinds. People in many parts of the world are not happy, because they do not walk in the path of Allah.”

Well, it seems that Western civilization has two monotheistic nemeses: Islam and Christianity. But, the only monotheism that Ahmadinejad recognizes is Islam’s. He made an oblique reference to the role of environmentalism in most Western nations’ policies (“nations are today distancing themsleves from [the] culture of materialism and selfishness”) – Snake Eyes is nothing if not an astute measurer of his enemy’s weaknesses, and he has certainly taken the measure of especially the United States – but this was a point that apparently was over Al-Munajid’s head. He had other things on his mind.

One of the barbaric practices the cleric dwelt on was the colored underwear worn by Westerners. He said in the course of his sermon:

“There are rules of Sharia in everything. We have counted almost 70 rules about how to urinate and defecate. In contrast, how do those beasts in the West answer the call of nature? They stand in front of other people, in toilets in airports and other public places….Even their underwear is colored and not white, so it can conceal all that filth.”

If the reader is laughing, he can be forgiven. But this kind of Islamic lunacy cannot be made up. Al-Munajid can be seen delivering this sermon on Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch, complete with English subtitles by MEMRITV, at this link: (http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/017819.php). The reader will be forgiven, too, if he at first seems to recognize a reincarnated John Belushi in a white Holy Mary ensemble, sporting a bib-length beard and perhaps rehearsing a variation of his Samurai character from the old Saturday Night Live comedy. Or, he could be taken for a disguised Michael Moore trying on a new slob persona through which to attack the West.

Further, it might tempt the curious to root through the Koran and Hadith and Sunna to see where exactly Allah or Mohammed establishes the rule that white undergarments are de rigueur. (It won’t be found.) However, we may be certain that Al-Munajid wears Fruit of the Loon.

But the dictator’s and the cleric’s mutual message to man is clear: that to “save” him, he must be enslaved, by sword, by guile, or by conversion. These Islamists are as serious about conquest as American religious conservatives are serious about putting God back into government – not that He was ever there to begin with. They would agree with Ahmadinejad and Munajid that nations have “no haven but religion.”

In the meantime, in another quarter of Bizarro World, The New York Times of August 15, under the headline, “U.S. Weighing Terrorist Label for Iran Guards,” reported that President Bush “is preparing to declare that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is a foreign terrorist organization.”

That might seem six years too late.

“President Bush seemed to signal a tougher approach to Iran last week when he called attention to what American officials have said was an active role by the Revolutionary Guard in providing munitions, training and other support to Shiite militants who have been attacking American troops in Iraq. ‘When we catch you playing a nonconstructive role, there will be a price to pay,’ Mr. Bush said of Iran during a news conference on Thursday.”

It is doubtful that this “tough talk” left Ahmadinejad shaking in his boots. To employ the World War II analogy again, declaring the Revolutionary Guard a “foreign terrorist organization” is the equivalent of Roosevelt hypothetically having declared the Japanese air force or the German Luftwaffe “foreign terrorist organizations,” but not the Japanese or Nazi government, which, by a pragmatic, multi-political policy, would have been exempt from moral judgment. The military of any nation is the means of force of its government; it is not some autonomous entity segregated from politics and that acts independently.

What “price” is Iran paying for continuing to field Iranians to fight Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan? More opportunities to talk about it and to cock a snook at the U.S. over its uranium enrichment program.

According to IRNA, the same day that Ahmadinejad spoke of monotheism, he said,

“The Islamic Republic of Iran has kindly received their Afghan brothers and will continue to do so in future. Minor issues will cannot affect Iran’s policies on Afghanistan.” (sic)

The fact that President Karzai of Afghanistan hosted Ahmadinejad in Kabul should cast grave doubt on Karzai’s status as a loyal and grateful “ally” of the U.S. Is he covertly “closing ranks” with his Iranian “brothers”? It is certain that he and Ahmadinejad did not limit their talks to local cuisine and the comparative merits of Persian and Afghani rugs.

What price is our “moderate ally” Saudi Arabia paying for enabling Sunni “insurgents” in Iraq to kill Americans, and for permitting one of its “holy men” to call Bush, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and all Americans “beasts”? A $20 billion arms package of advanced weaponry with which to perpetuate a Dark Age, feudal monarchy.

This Bizarro World can only be sustained and nurtured, and grow even more bizarre and dangerous, by the continued U.S. policy of concession, conciliation and judgment-suspending tolerance (another name for that policy, Ahmadinejad and Munajid would agree, is submission). Not to mention the policy of altruism and/or moral cowardice, which requires our policymakers to deny reality and repeatedly turn the other cheek.

Ahmadinejad and Munajid, among many other Islamists, keep telegraphing their punches, past, present and future. But one half of our Western policymakers have their heads in the sand, and the other half's minds are floating in the ethereal realms of Platonic forms. Neither stance facilitates communication.

Barbary Pirates: Old and New

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

“The Policy of Christendom has made Cowards of all their Sailors before the Standard of Mahomet. It would be heroical and glorious in Us, to restore Courage to ours. I doubt not we could accomplish it, if we should set about it in earnest. But the Difficulty of bringing our People to agree upon it, has ever discouraged me.”*

So wrote John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, ministers of the United States to Britain and France respectively, in 1786, expressing their mutual distaste for having to pay the Barbary pirates to stop seizing American merchant vessels in the Mediterranean and enslaving their crews and/or holding them for ransom. By “Christendom” he meant most of the European powers, which simply paid tribute to the pirates to leave their merchant vessels alone.

Adams himself proposed paying the bribe in order to allow American traders to sail the Mediterranean unmolested, reasoning that, in terms of money, the amount of trade possible there would far outweigh any “Sum of Money” paid to the pirates. He proposed that, not out of pragmatism, but because he doubted that “our People” – meaning Congress – would be willing to approve a navy that would punish the pirates and protect American ships.

For Adams and Jefferson, it was a matter of finding the money to build and sustain such a navy. Even when America had a navy, its merchant vessels remained the prey of not only Islamic pirates, but were harassed or obstructed by British and French navies, as well, a practice that with Britain led to another war, and near-war with France. Adding to their frustrations was an ineffectual Congress hamstrung by war debt and the anemic Articles of Confederation, not to mention civil unrest that culminated in Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts.

And Congress had authorized only $80,000 with which to bargain with all the Barbary States, not nearly enough to satiate the looting appetites of a single one of them. And this money could be had only on credit – from loans to the U.S. by principally Dutch bankers. For example, the “Bashaws” of the Barbary States had various “sliding scales” of prisoner ransom values, say, from $300 for a common seaman to $1,000 or more for a ship’s captain.

This would have been in addition to a substantial flat purchase price, the exorbitant commission and expenses demanded by an Islamic “ambassador” or negotiating party for deigning to discuss the matter, and spectacular “presents” to the ruler of a Barbary nation as a gesture of “good will,” all of it in cash. (These amounts were in real money, that is, gold and silver.)

Adams and Jefferson were at the time attempting to conduct negotiations with the Algerian Dey with envoys authorized by Congress for that purpose. But even if they had managed to “treat” successfully with Algiers and paid the tribute, there remained the Deys, Beys and Pashas of Tunis and Tripoli to placate, not to mention the Porte, or the Sultan of Turkey in Constantinople, whose pirates also raided the Mediterranean. A treaty of “peace” with one would not necessarily mean an end to the others’ depredations. (A treaty with Morocco was ratified by Congress in July, 1786.) And there were no guarantees that any of the Barbary “regencies” would not renege on a treaty and resume its raiding. They all knew that the U.S. had no way of enforcing the terms of a treaty or of retaliating if the terms were violated.

In a letter of July 3, 1786, to Jefferson in Paris, Adams outlined his “premises” concerning the dilemma:

1. We may at this Time, have a Peace with them [the Barbary pirates], in spite of all the Intrigues of the English or others to prevent it, for a Sum of Money.
2. We never Shall have Peace, though France, Spain, England, and Holland Should use all their Influence in our favor without a Sum of Money.
3. That neither the Benevolence of France nor the Malevolence of England will be ever able materially to diminish or Increase the Sum.
4. The longer the Negotiation is delayed, the larger will be the Demand.
Jefferson was more adamant concerning the Barbary pirates, preferring to send a squadron of American warships to the Mediterranean to deal permanently with the corsairs. In his reply to Adams of July 11, after conceding the “practical” wisdom of paying tribute, he wrote:

I acknowledge I very early thought it would be best to effect a peace through the medium of war….I should prefer the obtaining [of] it by war.

1. Justice is in favor of this opinion.
2. Honor favors it.
3. It will procure us respect in Europe, and respect is a safeguard to interest.
4. It will arm the federal head with the safest of all the instruments of coercion over their delinquent members and prevent them from using what would be less safe.
5. I think it least expensive.
6. Equally effectual.
But, the conundrum was insoluble for as long as the U.S. government lacked the will and the means to act. It had no “instrument of coercion.” The Continental navy of the Revolution had been disbanded. The only country that offered America any assistance was Portugal, which in 1786 ordered its navy to protect American merchantmen at the Strait of Gibraltar. Jefferson further proposed to Adams the idea of a naval alliance between the U.S., Portugal, and Naples (then capital of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies) to confront the Barbary nations and end their outrages. Nothing came of it. All the European diplomats on speaking terms with Jefferson and Adams advised that the U.S. pay the tribute.

While Jefferson remained in Paris as minister, he made arrangements with the Catholic Order of Mathurins, which had for centuries begged alms with which to buy the freedom of chiefly Frenchmen taken captive by the Barbary pirates. The head of the order agreed to try to redeem as many Americans as he could, especially from the Algerians. Before enough funds could be collected, however, the French Revolution occurred and the new, anti-cleric government dissolved the Mathurins.

Treaties were signed between the U.S. and all the Barbary States in the late 18th century, but these more or less lapsed when the British navy barred American merchantmen from the Mediterranean during the War of 1812. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, together with the treaty between the U.S. and Britain the same year, the Barbary States again felt free to raid American vessels.

The United States Navy was created by an act of Congress on April 30, 1798. Between 1805 and 1815, under Jefferson’s and Madison’s administrations, the Navy and its Marines solved the problem, restoring Adams’ “Courage” to the American standard.

The moral of this narrative is that while Americans, particularly Jefferson and Adams, held the rational moral principle regarding the proper way to deal with the Barbary States – with retaliatory force – they lacked the means. But when they had the means, they acted on that principle. The European powers, on the other hand, particularly Britain, France and Spain, possessed the “instruments of coercion” – large and powerful navies – but chose instead to submit to Moslem extortion in policies of craven pragmatism.

It was not until the U.S. took the moral “high ground” that European nations abandoned their “pragmatic sanction.” For example, British admiral Exmouth, commanding an Anglo-Dutch fleet, reduced Algiers in 1816 when it reneged on the treaty it made with American commodore Stephen Decatur the year before, and forced the Dey to sign a second treaty that reaffirmed Decatur’s terms.

Today, the U.S., in addition to the West, is being raided and plundered and held hostage by a new gang of Barbary States – Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, and even our “ally” Pakistan, not to mention all the oligarchical/feudal Gulf States now thriving on seized Western oil assets. No nation, not even the U.S., can agree on the proper action to take against them, or whether any action would be proper. This is because they lack, not the “instruments of coercion,” but rather the moral courage to assert their selfish existence.

Jefferson almost had it right when he nearly said, in reply to Adams in 1786, that the rationally moral is the practical.

*The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959). Ed. Lester J. Cappon. All of the quotations and most of the information in this commentary come from this work. Also, complete texts of all the treaties with the Barbary States are available at Yale Law School’s Avalon Project site.

Barbary Pirates: Old and New

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

“The Policy of Christendom has made Cowards of all their Sailors before the Standard of Mahomet. It would be heroical and glorious in Us, to restore Courage to ours. I doubt not we could accomplish it, if we should set about it in earnest. But the Difficulty of bringing our People to agree upon it, has ever discouraged me.”*

So wrote John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, ministers of the United States to Britain and France respectively, in 1786, expressing their mutual distaste for having to pay the Barbary pirates to stop seizing American merchant vessels in the Mediterranean and enslaving their crews and/or holding them for ransom. By “Christendom” he meant most of the European powers, which simply paid tribute to the pirates to leave their merchant vessels alone.

Adams himself proposed paying the bribe in order to allow American traders to sail the Mediterranean unmolested, reasoning that, in terms of money, the amount of trade possible there would far outweigh any “Sum of Money” paid to the pirates. He proposed that, not out of pragmatism, but because he doubted that “our People” – meaning Congress – would be willing to approve a navy that would punish the pirates and protect American ships.

For Adams and Jefferson, it was a matter of finding the money to build and sustain such a navy. Even when America had a navy, its merchant vessels remained the prey of not only Islamic pirates, but were harassed or obstructed by British and French navies, as well, a practice that with Britain led to another war, and near-war with France. Adding to their frustrations was an ineffectual Congress hamstrung by war debt and the anemic Articles of Confederation, not to mention civil unrest that culminated in Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts.

And Congress had authorized only $80,000 with which to bargain with all the Barbary States, not nearly enough to satiate the looting appetites of a single one of them. And this money could be had only on credit – from loans to the U.S. by principally Dutch bankers. For example, the “Bashaws” of the Barbary States had various “sliding scales” of prisoner ransom values, say, from $300 for a common seaman to $1,000 or more for a ship’s captain.

This would have been in addition to a substantial flat purchase price, the exorbitant commission and expenses demanded by an Islamic “ambassador” or negotiating party for deigning to discuss the matter, and spectacular “presents” to the ruler of a Barbary nation as a gesture of “good will,” all of it in cash. (These amounts were in real money, that is, gold and silver.)

Adams and Jefferson were at the time attempting to conduct negotiations with the Algerian Dey with envoys authorized by Congress for that purpose. But even if they had managed to “treat” successfully with Algiers and paid the tribute, there remained the Deys, Beys and Pashas of Tunis and Tripoli to placate, not to mention the Porte, or the Sultan of Turkey in Constantinople, whose pirates also raided the Mediterranean. A treaty of “peace” with one would not necessarily mean an end to the others’ depredations. (A treaty with Morocco was ratified by Congress in July, 1786.) And there were no guarantees that any of the Barbary “regencies” would not renege on a treaty and resume its raiding. They all knew that the U.S. had no way of enforcing the terms of a treaty or of retaliating if the terms were violated.

In a letter of July 3, 1786, to Jefferson in Paris, Adams outlined his “premises” concerning the dilemma:

1. We may at this Time, have a Peace with them [the Barbary pirates], in spite of all the Intrigues of the English or others to prevent it, for a Sum of Money.
2. We never Shall have Peace, though France, Spain, England, and Holland Should use all their Influence in our favor without a Sum of Money.
3. That neither the Benevolence of France nor the Malevolence of England will be ever able materially to diminish or Increase the Sum.
4. The longer the Negotiation is delayed, the larger will be the Demand.

Jefferson was more adamant concerning the Barbary pirates, preferring to send a squadron of American warships to the Mediterranean to deal permanently with the corsairs. In his reply to Adams of July 11, after conceding the “practical” wisdom of paying tribute, he wrote:

I acknowledge I very early thought it would be best to effect a peace through the medium of war….I should prefer the obtaining [of] it by war.

1. Justice is in favor of this opinion.
2. Honor favors it.
3. It will procure us respect in Europe, and respect is a safeguard to interest.
4. It will arm the federal head with the safest of all the instruments of coercion over their delinquent members and prevent them from using what would be less safe.
5. I think it least expensive.
6. Equally effectual.

But, the conundrum was insoluble for as long as the U.S. government lacked the will and the means to act. It had no “instrument of coercion.” The Continental navy of the Revolution had been disbanded. The only country that offered America any assistance was Portugal, which in 1786 ordered its navy to protect American merchantmen at the Strait of Gibraltar. Jefferson further proposed to Adams the idea of a naval alliance between the U.S., Portugal, and Naples (then capital of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies) to confront the Barbary nations and end their outrages. Nothing came of it. All the European diplomats on speaking terms with Jefferson and Adams advised that the U.S. pay the tribute.

While Jefferson remained in Paris as minister, he made arrangements with the Catholic Order of Mathurins, which had for centuries begged alms with which to buy the freedom of chiefly Frenchmen taken captive by the Barbary pirates. The head of the order agreed to try to redeem as many Americans as he could, especially from the Algerians. Before enough funds could be collected, however, the French Revolution occurred and the new, anti-cleric government dissolved the Mathurins.

Treaties were signed between the U.S. and all the Barbary States in the late 18th century, but these more or less lapsed when the British navy barred American merchantmen from the Mediterranean during the War of 1812. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, together with the treaty between the U.S. and Britain the same year, the Barbary States again felt free to raid American vessels.

The United States Navy was created by an act of Congress on April 30, 1798. Between 1805 and 1815, under Jefferson’s and Madison’s administrations, the Navy and its Marines solved the problem, restoring Adams’ “Courage” to the American standard.

The moral of this narrative is that while Americans, particularly Jefferson and Adams, held the rational moral principle regarding the proper way to deal with the Barbary States – with retaliatory force – they lacked the means. But when they had the means, they acted on that principle. The European powers, on the other hand, particularly Britain, France and Spain, possessed the “instruments of coercion” – large and powerful navies – but chose instead to submit to Moslem extortion in policies of craven pragmatism.

It was not until the U.S. took the moral “high ground” that European nations abandoned their “pragmatic sanction.” For example, British admiral Exmouth, commanding an Anglo-Dutch fleet, reduced Algiers in 1816 when it reneged on the treaty it made with American commodore Stephen Decatur the year before, and forced the Dey to sign a second treaty that reaffirmed Decatur’s terms.

Today, the U.S., in addition to the West, is being raided and plundered and held hostage by a new gang of Barbary States – Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, and even our “ally” Pakistan, not to mention all the oligarchical/feudal Gulf States now thriving on seized Western oil assets. No nation, not even the U.S., can agree on the proper action to take against them, or whether any action would be proper. This is because they lack, not the “instruments of coercion,” but rather the moral courage to assert their selfish existence.

Jefferson almost had it right when he nearly said, in reply to Adams in 1786, that the rationally moral is the practical.

*The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959). Ed. Lester J. Cappon. All of the quotations and most of the information in this commentary come from this work. Also, complete texts of all the treaties with the Barbary States are available at Yale Law School’s Avalon Project site.

Esthetics and Commercialism

By Kendall J from The Crucible & Column,cross-posted by MetaBlog

On my recent trip to China, as I perused the stack of magazines I'd brought with me, I happened upon Virginia Postrel's article Dress Sense.  I have been a fan of Postrel since she was editor at Reason, and have been enthusiastically watching her break into mainstream journalism. I ripped out the article as I do with all the articles I find compelling, folded it up and put it in my briefcase, not quite knowing what I'd write, but knowing there was something interesting in the article.

The article makes the case that fashion is museum worthy, as a form of art. Not just from a historical perspective, but from a design and beauty perspective. What I found fascinating was her description of how fashion, specifically commercial fashion of the last century, is eschewed by museums as unworthy of display.

Behind the criticism of fashion as an artistic medium is a highly ideological prejudice: against markets, against consumers, against the dynamism of Western commercial society. The debate is not about art but about culture and economics. Critics who decry fashion collections are less troubled by the prescribed costumes of dynastic China or the aristocratic dress of baroque France than by the past century’s clothes. With its fluctuating forms and needless decoration, fashion epitomizes the supposedly unproductive waste that inspired 20th-century technocrats to dream of central planning. It exists for no good reason. But that’s practically a definition of art.

Her case takes this argument on, and this is what I love about Postrel. She sees the intersection of esthetics and business as a good thing. Business is not some grubby corrupter of high art, but rather the enabler or creater of a broader audience for it. Her phenomenal book The Substance of Style, which overviews the proliferation of esthetic design in  popular culture (think iPod, Crate & Barrel, etc.) specifically makes the case that it is the innovations in manufacturing, distribution, and resultant rising income levels, that have created an "esthetic abundance" of selection available to the average consumer. That mass customization enables the proliferation of personal esthetic choice.

And so rather than the everyday trying to "wedding crash" the province of high art, we have artistic elements making their way into the everyday, with capitalism creating the opportunity for this to happen. And when one looks at history, one can see that this has always been so; that the commercial in art has enabled it to exist and to flourish. Michealangelo was paid to paint the Cistine Chapel. Some of the best artwork of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was also commissioned work. I think of Maxfield Parrish  whose paintings were prominent on the covers of magazines such as Collier's, Scribner's, and Century, and also on calendars. Or Hollywood photographer George Hurrell, whom Postrel highlighted in her Atlantic article Starlight and Shadow who created the lighting techniques that gave 1940's Hollywood it's glamour. People who created art to be appreciated and viewed by someone so much that they were willing to pay money for the opportunity. This is the highest expression of the value of a work of art, as described by Ayn Rand in T he Romantic Manifesto; the highest expression of the desire and need of man to bring his view of the world into full, conscious, concrete focus.

Art is a concretization of metaphysics. Art brings man's concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as it they were percepts.

This is the psycho-epistemological function of art and the reason of its importance in man's life (and the crux of the Objectivist esthetics).

Just as language converts abstractions into the psycho-epistemological equivalent of concretes, into a manageable number of specific units-.-so art converts man's metaphysical abstractions into the equivalent of concretes, into specific entities open to man's direct perception. The claim that "art is a universal language" is not an empty metaphor, it is literally true—in the sense of the psycho-epistemological function performed by art.

The insertion of artistic elements into the everyday has value, and those who do it, and those willing to pay for it are the good. And so why shouldn't a gown be considered for it's artistic beauty? Is it not in reality, as Postrel so aptly characterizes, a sculpture, three-dimensional and made all the more ephemeral by the fact that it is designed over the framework of the human body, and to be seen in motion, and to be touched? Compared to the piles of garbage and canvases of painted blobs that pass for art in today's "Modern Art" museums, and exhibition of 20th century fashion would be a welcome addition to any museum.

The Postmodernist Nightmare in the City of Lost Wages

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Last week, Paul and I visited his parents, brother, sister-in-law, and niece in Los Angeles. It was a pleasant and easy time, plus I got two to three hours of dissertation work done every day. So that worked out fabulously well.

In the middle of the week, we went with Paul's parents to Las Vegas for three days. (Happily, I came out $60 ahead on video poker!) The much-anticipated event of the trip was the Cirque de Soleil "O" show. (That's the one at the Bellagio performed over water.) Even though it has been running for a few years, it's still enormously popular. We saw a substantial line of people waiting in the "standby" line in the hopes of buying the rather expensive tickets -- on a Wednesday night! A few years ago, Paul and I saw -- and very much enjoyed -- Cirque de Soleil's "Mystere." So we were expecting a good time.

Much to my dismay, the production was a postmodernist nightmare. The stage was often crowded with random runnings-around by meaningless people in costume, to the point that you missed the introduction of the actual acrobatic act or were distracted from it. Many of the costumes and props seemed to have some substantial meaning (e.g. brides and grooms, 18th century servants) but that meaning was utterly unclear, not to mention unconnected to the activities of the acrobats. (In contrast, and perfectly fine, were the colorful costumes intended to highlight the acrobat and his/her movements.) No integrating theme in these costumes and props could be discerned: it was just a jumbled bunch of unconnected threads.

The worse moment was when they brought the stage hands out for display. Let me explain how that worked. The vast tank of water was not always the surface of the performance. A floor could be raised to the surface to create a totally solid platform -- or a platform under a few inches or feet of water. (That was very cool, technically speaking.) Also, the performers were helped while underwater by stage hands in scuba gear, i.e. in fins, wet suits, tanks, and regulators. (I know that from a bit of a television special I watched a few years ago.) So at one point, they raised the floor -- and raised about four stage hands with it. They flopped around feebly like fish out of water. It was bizarre and incomprehensible, except as an expression of the postmodernist ideal of breaking the "barrier" between audience and production. Pathetically enough, that was just one of the distractions during some act that I can no longer remember.

Even the acrobatics of "O" seemed less impressive than those of "Mystere," but I can't say for certain. I might have simply been too distracted by all the goings-on. That would be far worse in a way, undoubtedly. The performers deserved better, namely production that focused the audience on their daring and dangerous stunts rather than on the unicyclist whizzing across the front of the stage.

So I definitely do not recommend wasting your money on "O" -- unless you actually enjoy postmodernist nightmares.

Happily, we very much enjoyed a far better show for far cheaper: The Mac King Show. It's an afternoon comedy-magic show at Harrah's. The magic was delightful, the comedy was funny, and it only cost $10. That I can recommend without reservation!

China Regulates Reincarnation

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

China regulates reincarnation:

In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation." But beyond the irony lies China's true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region's Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country. By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.

At 72, the Dalai Lama, who has lived in India since 1959, is beginning to plan his succession, saying that he refuses to be reborn in Tibet so long as it's under Chinese control. Assuming he's able to master the feat of controlling his rebirth, as Dalai Lamas supposedly have for the last 600 years, the situation is shaping up in which there could be two Dalai Lamas: one picked by the Chinese government, the other by Buddhist monks. "It will be a very hot issue," says Paul Harrison, a Buddhism scholar at Stanford. "The Dalai Lama has been the prime symbol of unity and national identity in Tibet, and so it's quite likely the battle for his incarnation will be a lot more important than the others."

I'm speechless. (Via Jim May)

Idiot Bumper Stickers, Part 4

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

Ah! The stress-lowering benefits of blogging!

It's been about a year and a half since the last time I was annoyed enough about a bumper sticker to blog about one!

And this time, it's not so much annoyance as incredulity. As is so often the case when a car owner's ability to inflict his opinions on others is a substitute for an actual sense of self-worth, the below bumper sticker appeared with about six others on the back of a jalopy.

Cumulatively, the half-dozen or so stickers screamed of preening moral relativism and bigoted pseudotolerance, and rendered their companion, the Pacifica radio station sticker, doubly redundant. (After all, if one is so benighted as to not have already tuned to it, let alone to have to ask which station it is, he will need more than being told! Such stickers are shibboleths only.)

But I digress. The other stickers, suffice it to say, clearly indicated that even though one may be capable of arranging words in such a way as to express a profound truth as they are arranged below, one may well, like a parrot, not have a grasp, however slippery, upon that truth.


Quite true. Terrorism is a symptom. But of what disease? I am sure that the person who was driving in front of me would say something like "poverty", or "oppression by the racist West", or anything besides the disease the terrorists themselves have forthrightly admitted suffering for decades: The motivation to govern in accordance with the alleged orders of their imaginary friend.

Whether or not our anti-war activist honestly believes that the secular West is ultimately at fault for the atrocities so many religious people feel so pious about committing is unimportant. What is important is that he chides us for wanting to fight back, taking advantage of our President's failure to name our adversary in the process, and presumably counting on multiculturalism to make us too afraid of being thought of as bigoted to name the actual disease. His animus against the West is such that his enemy's enemy is his friend, so he is happy to help the West's enemy in any way he can.

Of course, many leftists, needing more guidance than blind nihilism can provide, eventually do seek it in the form of that most anti-Western faith, Islam, making it all but certain that one day, we shall see, side by side on the back of someone's car, the riddle presented by the first bumper sticker and its ... solution ... by the one at the right, with all the irony lost on its unkempt owner!

The final irony is, of course, that so many terrorists believe -- despite the long history of sectarian violence that is the history of Islam -- that if we were all Moslem, peace would reign. This is patently absurd. Faith kills -- first because it causes men to reject crucial evidence about all manner of important things and second, because it preempts rational persuasion, resulting in men dealing with each other like brutes.

If Islam is "the solution", it is "the final solution".

-- CAV

Freedom vs PPPs

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

Via Randex is a lengthy, but very worthwhile article by Tom DeWeese of the American Policy Center which takes up a theme described by its title ("The Principles of Freedom vs. Public/Private Partnerships") that I have also explored lately.

As the Associated Press reported July 15, 2006, "On a single day in June (2006) an Australian-Spanish partnership paid $3.6 billion to lease the Indiana Toll Road. An Australian company bought a 99 year lease on Virginia's Pocahontas Parkway, and Texas officials decided to let a Spanish-American partnership build and run a toll road for 50 years."

In fact, that Spanish-American partnership in Texas and its lease with the Texas Department of Transportation to build and run the Trans Texas Corridor contains a "no-compete" clause which prohibits anyone, including the Texas government from building new highways or expanding exiting ones which might run in competition with the TCC.

That is not free enterprise. And it's not protecting the second principle of freedom - private property.

The most valuable aspects of this article are (1) that it provides numerous examples of how such "partnerships" introduce government into our lives in clear violation of our individual rights and (2) that it shows just how widespread the misconception is in the public debate that such partnerships somehow represent capitalism.

Its greatest weakness is that it leaves the impression that its "three principles of freedom" are fundamental when they are not. As a result, the article is not as clear as it could be about how wrong and dangerous to individuals these partnerships are. Namely, it does not morally attack the notion of the public/private partnership.

Having said that, I was still very impressed and have linked to both the American Policy Center and the Capitalism Magazine archive of Tom DeWeese's columns on the page accessible from "Some Links" in the upper right of the sidebar.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 230

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

A Couple of Sci-Fi Classics

My good friend, Adrian Hester, wrote me recently with the following movie recommendations:

I recently acquired two of the classic SF films form the 50s, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Forbidden Planet (1956). Tonight I finally got around to watching Forbidden Planet. You know, it was quite good. There's a quip that's gone 'round about it, that it was the first episode of Star Trek. It really has that feel, except that the special effects and the story were both better--and, for that matter, Leslie Nielsen's acting was far better than William Shatner's.

The story really is like an episode of Star Trek, and having been a trekkie ages 6-13 I can think of at least three episodes similar to it and a number of turns of phrase and imagery running throughout the series. (Indeed, the original pilot movie for Star Trek with Pike in place of Kirk, cut up into the later episode "The Menagerie", was very much like Forbidden Planet in many respects.) And it had the usual ST denouement, taken over from so much earlier sci-fi, in which there are certain things mankind has not developed sufficiently to control, or perhaps never can develop sufficiently to control, but in this case it actually fit naturally into the set-up of the movie. Only the last line was really typical 50s "Man must not play God." It's not out of place to add that the story was inspired indirectly by Shakespeare's Tempest, and what's especially fun is that the silly subplot with the drink-loving cook actually ended up playing a decent role in the unfolding of the central plot. Of course, you've probably already seen it and are chuckling at my old hat, but if not, it's well worth a watch. (But now it's back to the special feaures on the second disc, which includes a documentary about 50s sci-fi flicks--very few qualify as SF, of course--with interesting interviews with Spielberg, Lucas, Cameron, and Scott.) [minor edits]

Well. No, I wasn't chuckling! I've never seen either of these, so they're now in the Netflix queue.

How Not to Flaunt

Ian Hamet commented on something awhile back that also drives me nuts, "I don't care how many people use 'flaunt' to mean 'flout', the two are not the same."

I have long been annoyed by this sort of phenomenon, which I call "media English", borrowing from a literature professor from college. Somebody uses a word a few other ill-educated journalists have never heard of, but like the sound of -- but not enough to look up the word-- and -- um -- "run" with it. Pretty soon, it seems like it's all you ever hear.

Related are the assorted "verbal tics" I notice propagating through the workplace or even the culture from time to time. Back in grad school, a well-liked professor had a tendency to start every other sentence with "So ....".

So ... everyone else in his wing started doing it too. One of them was so bad about it during a graded lecture that I decided that my sole comment on it would be to state that, "Miss Umptysquat started seventy-four sentences with the word, 'So'". Based on the next lecture I heard from a student in that wing, I think the consensus must have been, "So .... what?"

And don't even get me started on "Thank you soooo much!" That sounded spontaneous and sincere for only the first thousand times I heard it. Hmmmm. "Mirror Neurons vs. Free Will" might be a charitable way to put this!

Belgian ... Pale Ale?!?!

Looking for other things, I noticed this interesting review and list of suggestions for an overshadowed and often-overlooked Belgian style of beer: pale ale.

If you want something with flavor and complexity -- something inspiring -- that is light and refreshing as well, you have to be discerning, especially as many American microbrewers are favoring bigger, more alcoholic styles that may be delicious and complex, but are decidedly not chug-worthy.

India pale ale is a case in point. Not content with a sturdy ale awash in refreshing bitterness, many brewers are making their I.P.A.’s stronger and stronger, with a hop bitterness so aggressive it will knock anybody out of her hammock. These beers can be fascinating in the proper context, but it’s August, man! Cool me off, but don’t bowl me over.

Coincidentally, yesterday was my day to shop for beer. I didn't buy this one (and it's not a pale ale), but I loved the piano-key nimbus around the head of Thelonius Monk on the bottle of North Coast's Brother Thelonius I saw on display.

And on the subject of tasty beers that are also good in hot weather, let this ale drinker startle his friends by suggesting a lager: Full Sail's Session Premium Lager. Don't let the low ratings at the link dissuade you: It is common among beer snobs to speak ill of lagers at every opportunity. (I'm not exactly claiming to be a connoisseur here, but I've been through that phase myself....)

A lager is not an ale. As a lager, I find Session quite good. Heck. As a beer it is quite good. All but one of the people I have introduced to this at parties and poker games have agreed with me.

I do find it slightly puzzling, though, that the Full Sail brewery chose to package this beer in bottles and labels so similar to the much more famous -- but inferior -- Red Stripe.

Privatizing Money

GB offers a succinct discussion of easy credit and its relationship to the boom-and-bust cycle of the economy over at his blog.

"Helicopter Ben" is the nickname Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke reportedly got for a comment he once made regarding how the government should aggressively use monetary policy to prevent a recession. Emphasizing that the key point is to inflate quickly to avert a crisis, he said the government could simply drop money from a helicopter to stimulate the economy.

GB also suggests how we bring our economic policy back down to earth -- without crashing like a helicopter in the process.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Changed "It is common among beer snobs to slam lagers ..." to "It is common among beer snobs to speak ill of lagers ...". One thing they won't do is get close enough to a lager to slam it down!

Free Michael Vick

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Let me see if I can make you angry.

Michael Vick is an innocent man who is being persecuted by an unjust government.

...the NFL star agreed Monday to "accept full responsibility" for his role in a dogfighting ring and plead guilty to federal conspiracy charges.

...

The maximum term is five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, although federal sentencing guidelines likely would call for less. Defense attorneys would not divulge details of the plea agreement or how much time Vick can expect to serve.

However, a government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the terms are not final, told The Associated Press that prosecutors will recommend a sentence of a year to 18 months.

The sport of dogfighting is disgusting, sick, immoral and even evil. To want to watch dogs rip each other to shreds is sadistic; it might be a sign of psychological problems. Certainly it is a sign of inferior imagination and sympathy to the suffering of man's best friend.

It reminds me of the spectacle of bearbaiting, which was popular in Shakespeare's day: dogs were loosed to attack a chained bear. In Merry Wives of Windsor Shakespeare has a moron speak with fascination about bearbaiting. Although both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I loved the sport, it is clear that Shakespeare was not a fan.

Michael Vick is like pornographers, drug dealers, flag burners, prostitutes, Leona Helmsly and Michael Milken: he is among the least defensible, most loathed people in America, whom the government feels confident to persecute even though they have done nothing that would be against the law in a truly free country.

The NFL has every right to ban Vick from the game for life for his participation in dogfighting. However, dogfighting should not be a crime. Animals have no rights, only humans have rights. To give animals rights means to violate human rights. If animals have rights, then one could argue that eating a hamburger and wearing leather shoes are crimes.

Let's take it to the absurd extreme. If animals have rights, then one could argue that any assertion of human will over an animal is a crime. No one asked my cats if they wanted to live with me. I asserted my will over them, bought them and took them home in a little cage as if they were, well, animals.

Animals do not have rights because they do not have the faculty of reason. They deal with one another using force, and humans have a right to initiate force against animals.

It comes down to property rights. If a person owns an animal, then he should have the right to dispose of his property as he wishes. Property rights are absolute; a free and just state should go out of its way not to violate them in any way. It should go so far to protect property rights that it errs on the side of going too far, if such is possible.

Men do not have property rights if they do not have the right to be immoral, stupid, unfair, whimsical and disgusting with their property. A proper government exists only to protect and defend individual rights, not to make sure people are fair, moral and intelligent. This is hard for many to accept in our age when the government routinely violates property rights in countless ways. This absolute, laissez-faire conception of rights is currently theoretical and unconnected to the reality of our mixed economy. It is, as Ayn Rand called capitalism, the unknown ideal.

(Incidentally, isn't it odd that people want to throw the book at Vick but they yawn when Mary Winkler, who murdered her sleeping husband -- a human being -- with a shotgun blast, is let out after 67 days?)

The proper punishment for one who abuses animals is social ostracism. People can voluntarily refuse to sanction irrational, destructive behavior against animals. If we had a free government, then our traditions and customs of volunteer, social punishment would be stronger and more effective, just as private charities flourished before the New Deal brought the state into the charity business.

I don't want to come across as a flower child but I personally think the sport of game hunting is a barbaric holdover from the middle ages. I think it is sick to spend one's leisure time killing animals. People can get much of the thrill of the hunt pursuing animals with a camera instead of a rifle and I believe this is psychologically better than some atavistic lust to butcher a beast in cold blood. But I recognize that hunters have a right to their kills. I hope that as reason spreads through our culture -- if that ever happens -- that the popularity of hunting will wane.

The better our culture becomes, the better our norms of treating animals will be, but our advancement is stifled and indeed retarded when the state assumes the role of our conscience and tells people what they should and should not do. As always, when the state intervenes where is ought not, then people forget their responsibilities and become like children who depend on adults to think and judge for them.

UPDATE: Took out one word, tyrannical; it seems an overstatement of the US government.

The Psycho-Epistemology of Sexuality, Part VI

By Dan Edge from The Edge of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Conclusions and Applications

This is part 6 of a 6-part essay on The Psycho-Epistemology of Sexuality. Parts 1 and 2 can be found here, part 3 is here, part 4 is here, and part 5 is here. In a few weeks, I will publish a revised and edited version of the entire paper.

Over the past few months, I have written and published 5 sections of an essay on the nature of sexuality. I started by noting that a psychologically healthy man experiences his sexuality as a value, though it is not fully understood why this is so. Some have argued that one cannot value sexuality because it is not objectively more valuable to be male or female. As I wrote in parts 2 and 3, I reject this argument on the grounds that one can legitimately value what I call individuating elements of self. One's distinguishing characteristics are integrated with objective values by the subconscious - which treats automatized physical motions, sense-perceptions, values, and judgments as related units.

In part 4, I argued that one's gender integrates a broad range of physical individuating elements of self, and that these elements are stressed when one perceives a member of the opposite sex. If my arguments from parts 1-4 hold, then I have justified the claim that one's sexuality is legitimately a value. This much is evident through introspection, but I believe I have identified part of the psycho-epistemological mechanism for how and why this is so.

Finally, in part 5, I explained the concept of psychological visibility, and I argued that one can experience psychological visibility and sexuality to the highest degree in a romantic love relationship. Psychological visibility and sexuality are closely related -- both are automatized responses to another consciousness that reflects an integration of values. Whether or not these two phenomena are species of some broader genus, I will leave for another paper.

Assuming all of this is true, then where does that leave us? For one, we can forever discard the notion that sexuality is a purely cultural phenomenon. It is proper for men to be masculine and for women to be feminine. Particular expressions of sexuality can be colored by cultural influences, but sexuality itself is based on physiology and objective values. Further, since it has been demonstrated that sexuality is a value, then it is a virtue to act to attain it. Exploring and cultivating one’s sexuality can greatly enhance his life. But how is this done? I will only suggest some answers here.

Since sexuality is dependent on physiology, I choose to start with the physical. Men can develop masculinity, and women femininity, by automatizing physical motions that are consonant with one’s distinctive physiology. Exercise is very important, for two reasons: 1) A healthy man has more reason to value his body and its distinguishing attributes, and 2) Different forms of exercise can help one automatize a distinctive, gender-specific form of motion. For the most part, men and woman who exercise not only look more sexually attractive, they also move in a more sexual way. They practice using their bodies, and they have automatized forms of motion that work for their body-types.

So to those men who have never had much luck with the ladies, my first question is: Do you exercise? Also: Have you tried different forms of exercise? Do you know how to dance? Why not?

An exercise like dance is ideal for cultivating sexuality because it often involves physically interacting with members of the opposite sex. If one is trying to develop masculine qualities, there is no better exercise than learning to move in rhythm with a woman’s body. This is excellent training for a variety of other activities. Martial arts, soccer, basketball, and other sports are also great forms of exercise. When a man has automatized physical expressions of masculine power, he becomes more confident –more comfortable in his own skin – and this is obvious to any woman who watches him move.

Regarding homosexuality, I believe my essay raises more questions than answers. Clearly, homosexual couples fall in love and experience a wonderful depth of psychological visibility. But do two men feel masculine when they make love to each other? Based on the arguments in my essay, the answer to this question may be “no.” If humans were asexual, there would be no such thing as masculinity or femininity. However, I cannot conclude anything on this point because so much of the evidence for my argument was gathered through introspection, and I am not gay. I simply don’t have enough information. I would be interested in feedback on this essay from homosexuals, particularly those involved in a healthy, long-term romance.

There are many more applications of my sexuality theory, which I will explore in future essays. For now, I am bringing this essay to a close. When I began, I was aiming to prove this claim:

The psychological experience of sexuality is rooted in one's positive evaluation of his sex as an integrated, individuating element of self -- and it is experienced to the fullest through psychological visibility in the context of a romantic love relationship.

The reader must decide for himself whether or not I have fully justified this thesis, but I believe I have laid the sufficient groundwork. I hope that my essay inspires others to embrace and cultivate their sexuality. I also hope that others will further develop this theory, fill in some blanks that I left, or develop a theory of their own. Psycho-epistemology is a wide-open field, with many developments and applications left undiscovered.

Thank you for reading.

--Dan Edge

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With "Successes" Like These....

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

So I'm fresh off a being almost completely out of touch for several days and out of my normal blogging rhythm. Naturally, I head straight to the big boys so I can get caught up with the important stuff.

An item at Instapundit catches my eye: "FIGHTING GOLIATH: An eminent domain success story." Has another state has passed legislation to curb the effects of the Kelo decision? Or has, perhaps, a new court ruling posed a serious challenge to some fundamental aspect of eminent domain? Or has the Blogfather unearthed some entertaining bit of poetic justice in which a victim of eminent domain somewhere actually came out ahead in some unforeseen way?

The answer is: "None of the above."

Not that I am unhappy to see the couple in this story win their well-deserved court victory, but the following hardly qualifies as an "eminent domain success story":

Every once in a great while, government, as a land-grabbing Goliath, gets thumped by the most diminutive David, especially when the former fails to follow its own policies.

That may cost Philadelphia $497,230 in damages, plus the plaintiffs' legal fees.

It began when Ed and Debbie Munoz, in pursuit of the American dream, put up their New Jersey home and borrowed $1 million to buy a grocery and garden center in Juniata Park.

Afterward the couple learned -- secondhand through customers -- that their business was in the footprint of a planned housing development.

For more than two years, the Munozes sought answers from the city but said they received none. In 2004, with declining sales -- allegedly because of government's imminent land grab -- and Ed Munoz's declining health, the couple declared bankruptcy. The city picked up the property at a sheriff's sale.

The Munozes went to court.

City officials said it wasn't clear through 2004 whether the Munozes' lot would be needed. Yet an April 2003 letter from the developer asked the city's Redevelopment Authority to acquire the property.

Even the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reportedly warned city officials in 2005 that Philadelphia violated federal relocation law.

Needless to say, Philadelphia will appeal.

But let's say that this case makes it all the way to the Supreme Court and that this decision is upheld. This decision in no way challenges the premise that the government can exercise eminent domain. It just demands that the government be up-front about doing so. The Munozes, as far as I can tell, were lied to, and are simply getting what they "should have gotten" as "compensation" for selling their property ... against their will.

And so the next time a couple goes "all in" on a business that gets in the way of something Philadelphia wants, its officials will just have to be a little more careful before they violate that couple's property rights and potentially derail their dream for good.

Lest I seem to be making a mountain out of a molehill, it is worth remembering that a man who expressed dismay about the Kelo decision and who wrote a book called An Army of Davids -- about the "empowerment" of "ordinary people" -- is calling this "an eminent domain success story".

This brings up the question: What, exactly, does Reynolds mean by "empowerment", anyway? Consider again the following criticism I offered about An Army of Davids and how it relates to this court case:

Here's another counterexample to the notion that technology -- unaided by an improvement in a society's intellectual climate -- can effect meaningful social change. Reynolds notes that Philippine President Joseph Estrada was brought down by a text-messaging flash mob. He fails to mention that this flash mob gathered in exactly the same place the old-fashioned mob that overthrew Ferdinand Marcos 15 years before had gathered. I dare say that unless the people of the Philippines make fundamental cultural and political changes, some other corrupt president will probably have to be overthrown later on. What difference does it make that a president can be overthrown if he never gets replaced by anything better?

The relation is best summed up by the following pair of questions: (1) Is an isolated success of a people against a dictatorial regime -- or its development of a culture that would not tolerate tyranny -- "empowering"? (2) Is the fact that Americans can still sue for a "fair" price in an eminent domain case "empowering" -- or would an end to eminent domain altogether (which would eliminate the need for such lawsuits) be far more so?

To answer those questions, we have to ask questions like: "What can make a culture resistant to tyranny?" and "How is a law that prevents the government from forcing some unlimited number of people from selling their property better than some unlimited number of people potentially winning court cases against the government for doing so?" (Which isn't even what happened here, but, for the sake of argument....)

For a culture to resist tyranny, it has to understand what, on principle is bad about tyranny as well as the various forms of government that can lead to tyranny. A people with such a culture will rarely, if ever have to shake off tyranny because its people will not easily allow it to develop. And the time economy of outlawing eminent domain is obvious.

In both cases, the need to demonstrate or to spend time in court would be obviated by a public with a better understanding (and consistent political application) of the concept of individual rights. Or, as Ayn Rand put this point about the real-life power of abstract principles so well in her essay, "Philosophy: Who Needs It":

Abstract ideas are conceptual integrations which subsume an incalculable number of concretes -- and ... without abstract ideas you would not be able to deal with concrete, particular, real-life problems. You would be in the position of a newborn infant, to whom every object is a unique, unprecedented phenomenon. the difference between his mental state and yours lies in the number of conceptual integrations your mind has performed. [In: Philosophy: Who Needs It, pb. p. 5; bold added]

But the Filipino people do not reject the idea that the government should violate the rights of some to "serve" others -- and so they remain under corrupt rulers. And we Americans have not worked to eliminate eminent domain -- and so we will keep hearing about court fights like these. And since so many of our pundits disdain principles, we'll keep hearing such fights being called "success stories" as we slide closer to tyranny ourselves. And we'll take gadgets and chump change as "empowerment" rather than the real thing -- the vast, untapped power of the minds of a nation with a rational culture.

Unless, that is, we insist on a return to a principled political debate and work for a wider understanding of the nature of individual rights within our culture.

-- CAV

The Defining Premise

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Have you ever wondered what makes a person a liberal or a conservative, a Democrat or a Republican? Or to be more precise with language, what makes a person a socialist or not?

Is it the old joke -- a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged? Or the other old joke -- he who is not a liberal at 20 has no heart and he who is not a conservative at 40 has no brain?

Is it just environment? Do children tend to take on the opinions and beliefs of their parents and their peers? This probably explains many people, especially the passive-minded people who are content to go along with the crowd. But what shaped the opinions and beliefs of their parents and peers? There can't be an infinite regress; at some point, somebody had to have an original thought.

Is it the belief in God? Many more Republicans than Democrats believe in God. But how do you explain that Objectivists, up until lately, voted mostly Republican? With the growth of religion, the belief in God might become the defining premise in American politics in the near future -- and a baleful day that will be indeed. But we're not quite there yet.

Is it pressure group politics? Do people gravitate toward the party that serves their interests best? This would explain why minorities and unions vote Democrat and why the middle class, small business and military vote Republican. But it does not explain why rich educated whites vote Democrat, nor does it explain why many poor people in the "heartland" vote Republican. Both parties are such broad coalitions that it is hard to determine sometimes who they would not give money to in order to buy votes.

In my opinion, the defining premise is the belief in moral absolutes. Liberals are moral relativists. Both the religious right and Objectivists are moral absolutists. (The problem with the religious right, of course, is that their morality comes from religion, not reality. Their morality is grounded in faith, not reason, and is therefore dogmatic.)

In issue after issue, you can see politics determined by morality. Take crime, for an easy example. As moral relativists, liberals tend toward lenient punishment; they shrink in horror from the death penalty. Those who believe in moral absolutes, on the other hand, see vigorous punishment as justice; when someone kills in cold blood, he deserves to be executed.

In the 19th century Thomas Jefferson, a product of the Enlightenment, thought rapists deserve the death penalty. Today, after two centuries of the radical subjectivism of modern philosophy after Kant, most people would think Jefferson was a little harsh. One wonders how much modern philosophy has affected even those of us who oppose it.

Guns are another issue. Liberals think, "Who are we to judge other people?" It's a short step from that idea to, "Who are we to hold the power of a gun? Only the state should have such power." (Granted, the state is just comprised of fallible individuals as much as any other institution; this is a contradiction of statism.)

Liberals support intervention in the economy because it's not fair that employers with their subjective judgment can fire whomever they want or pay "slave wages."

The belief in moral absolutes has been the defining premise in politics all my life. But things are changing, and not for the better, with the increasing religiosity of the Republicans and the increasing radicalization of the Democrats (see Daily Kos). What does the future hold?

If the Republicans become the party of religion and the Democrats the party of modern philosophy, then we will have a pure, classic rationalist-empiricist split in American politics, with the left mumbling skepticism and the right shouting dogma detached from reality. Neither party will be a comfortable fit for those who advocate reason, except on an ad hoc basis. We're close to this situation now, although both parties show moments of lucidity and reasonableness.

We come to an interesting question: Why has President Bush, a seriously religious man, advanced socialism with his spending and big government?

Well, he is actually being consistent with Jesus Christ with his socialism. Christ was no capitalist; his Sermon on the Mount sounds outright communist to me. Christ was an altruist who believed the individual should sacrifice.

The contradiction between capitalism and Christianity has always been present in the religious right. Throughout the 20th century, as traditionalists, they rode the last waves of our enlightenment heritage and were for free markets (to some extent, or at least in lip service). As modern philosophy advances and we get further from the 18th century, the right will become more altruist and socialist. Combine that statism with nationalism and religious dogma and you will have fascism. Religion does not protect the right from modern philosophy.

Although the defining premise now is the belief in moral absolutes, the difference 20 years from now might be whether or not one subscribes to reason and reality -- with a vast majority on the left and right who do not uphold reason and reality and a small minority who do.

UPDATE: Revision.

Choice Versus Rights

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

A reminder from Lin and Ari Armstrong: When conservatives talk about "choice" today, they don't mean respect for rights. They don't mean that people have the right to choose how to spend their time and money as they see fit. Instead, they mean that some people have some range of government-determined options at the forced expense of other people. That's why conservatives love food stamps -- and tons of other statist redistribution programs.

Vicious and Stupid

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Michael Vick has accepted a plea deal on the dogfighting charges. He will serve a prison term of 10 to 12 months.

While I don't support laws against dogfighting, I regard the "sport" as somewhere lower than despicable. In Vick's operation, "according to the indictment, dogs not killed in the fighting pit often were shot, hanged, drowned or slammed to the ground. The document says Vick was consulted before one losing dog was electrocuted in the fighting that took place on his Virginia property." It's sickening.

As he deserves, Vick has lost millions of dollars of endorsements already. According to the article, "Reebok took the unprecedented step of stopping sales of his No. 7 jersey." I hope that the NFL bans him from the game permanently, but that's perhaps too optimistic. In any case, I doubt he'll ever play again. Despite his enormous talents, he'd surely be a public relations disaster for any team that even considered hiring him. Heck, it might even be dangerous for him to play, as I'm sure that more than a few large defensive players are quite fond of their own dogs.

His career is surely over -- as it ought to be. The only way that he could have done worse for himself was to allow the case to go to trial, for then all his brutality would have been displayed to the public in gory detail.

In short, Michael Vick has destroyed a very bright football career for the supposed pleasure of watching dogs rip each other to shreds. If that's not irrational, then I'm not sure what is.

A "Great Society" Conservative

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

An article in the New York Times by Joshua Green makes some very perceptive comments about Karl Rove. Titled "A 'Great Society' Conservative", the article comes very close to hitting the nail on the head with respect to what it calls "the paradox at the heart of Karl Rove's tenure in the White House":

As Mr. Rove sought a political realignment that would create a durable Republican majority, he seized on government as his chief mechanism. He tried to realign American politics principally through the pursuit of major initiatives that he believed would reorient a majority of Americans to the Republican Party: establishing education standards; rewriting immigration laws; partially privatizing Social Security and Medicare; and allowing religious organizations to receive government financing.

The only thing that united these government actions was the likelihood that they would weaken political support for Democrats. Social Security privatization would create a generation of market-minded stockholders. Pork-barrel spending on religious organizations would keep evangelical Christians engaged in the political process -- and pry loose some African-American voters by funneling money to black churches. No Child Left Behind would appeal to voters who traditionally looked to Democrats as the party of education. And generous immigration policies would persuade Hispanics to vote Republican.

To be fair to Rove, it is absurd to equate, without any explanation, the partial rollback of a government program with the institution or expansion of an existing program. (Within the context of the greater question of whether we should have Social Security at all, however, the issue of why Rove did not champion its partial privatization as a step towards outright repeal of Social Security is a very pregnant one.)

Nevertheless, the above paragraph shows that Rove typifies where the conservative movement is these days, as Brad Thompson pointed out a year ago in "The Decline and Fall of American Conservatism", when he said the following about the two major factions of the conservative movement:

[C]ompassionate conservatism's moral and political teaching boils down to this: first, that needs -- the needs of others -- constitute a moral claim on your life; second, that you -- you the taxpayer, you the private individual -- have a "duty" to support -- nay, to love and support -- the poor; and finally, that the federal government must coerce your love and compassion by taking your wealth and giving it to "private" organizations that will use it to serve "those whom prosperity has left behind."

...

[A]ccording to [Irving] Kristol and friends, the principles espoused by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison lead inevitably to the Marquis de Sade, Abby Hoffman, and Jerry Springer. If the growth of the state represented the road to serfdom for Hayek, limiting the state to the protection of individual rights represents the road to nihilism for the neocons. The great political lesson that the neocons have successfully taught other conservatives and their Republican students over the course of the last twenty-five years is to embrace rather than resist the growth of the state.

...

What GOP strategists need, according to Kristol and company, is a strong "dose of Machiavellian shrewdness," the characteristics of which are "quick-wittedness, articulateness, a clear sense of one's ideological agenda and the devious routes necessary for its enactment." The neocons' message to traditional conservatives and Republicans is, in effect: "Grow up! Get over your ideological hang-ups. Be clever. Develop an agenda that will get you elected and keep you in power." Once in power, says Kristol, the GOP must learn how to "shape" rather than balance or cut the budget, which means: shape it in politically advantageous ways (i.e., in ways that buy votes). [notes removed, bold added]

In his embrace of the welfare state, then, Rove is really only an example of a typical conservative.

Karl Rove, from my own experience of occasionally hearing leftists talk about him, is about as well-liked by the left as Hillary Clinton is by the right. This visceral disgust, coupled with the left's inability to appreciate the importance of philosophical ideas, will thus lead to two things which the following paragraph nicely exemplifies:

Of course, there is a bright side. If nothing else, Mr. Rove has strengthened the conservative critique of what happens when you try to engineer great societal changes through government policy. Perhaps conservatives can find some solace by telling themselves they were right all along.

Since the focus of criticism from the left ends up being on the man rather than his political philosophy, said criticism will end up being of the sarcastic variety, and (1) the left will fail to question its own faith in big government (If the conservatives were "right all along" about small government, then why not learn from the lesson?) while (2) even its valid criticism comes off as needlessly insulting and so becomes more likely to fall on deaf ears on the right, which could stand to take this one to heart.

In truth, Karl Rove is not some all-powerful sage whose absence is going to cause all the Democrats' problems to go away. Conversely, he is not, single-handedly, why the Republicans have faltered in recent years. History is not moved by individual personalities, but by ideas. Interestingly enough, that is the very lesson nobody, left or right, seems to be getting from this story.

-- CAV

Multiculturalism's War on Education

By Elan Journo

Back to school nowadays means back to classrooms, lessons and textbooks permeated by multiculturalism and its championing of "diversity." Many parents and teachers regard multiculturalism as an indispensable educational supplement, a salutary influence that "enriches" the curriculum. But is it?

With the world's continents bridged by the Internet and global commerce, multiculturalism claims to offer a real value: a cosmopolitan, rather than provincial, understanding of the world beyond the student's immediate surroundings. But it is a peculiar kind of "broadening." Multiculturalists would rather have students admire the primitive patterns of Navajo blankets, say, than learn why Islam's medieval golden age of scientific progress was replaced by fervent piety and centuries of stagnation.

Leaf through a school textbook and you'll find that there is a definite pattern behind multiculturalism's reshaping of the curriculum. What multiculturalists seek is not the goal they advertise, but something else entirely. Consider, for instance, the teaching of history.

One text acclaims the inhabitants of West Africa in pre-Columbian times for having prosperous economies and for establishing a university in Timbuktu; but it ignores their brutal trade in slaves and the proliferation of far more consequential institutions of learning in Paris, Oxford and elsewhere in Europe. Some books routinely lionize the architecture of the Aztecs, but purposely overlook or underplay the fact that they practiced human sacrifices. A few textbooks seek to portray Islam as peaceful in part by presenting the concept of "jihad" ("sacred war") to mean an internal struggle to surmount temptation and evil, while playing down Islam's actual wars of religious conquest.

What these textbooks reveal is a concerted effort to portray the most backward, impoverished and murderous cultures as advanced, prosperous and life-enhancing. Multiculturalism's goal is not to teach about other cultures, but to promote--by means of distortions and half-truths--the notion that non-Western cultures are as good as, if not better than, Western culture. Far from "broadening" the curriculum, what multiculturalism seeks is to diminish the value of Western culture in the minds of students. But, given all the facts, the objective superiority of Western culture is apparent, so multiculturalists must artificially elevate other cultures and depreciate the West.

If students were to learn the truth of the hardscrabble life of primitive farming in, say, India, they would recognize that subsistence living is far inferior to life on any mechanized farm in Kansas, which demands so little manpower, yet yields so much. An informed, rational student would not swallow the "politically correct" conclusions he is fed by multiculturalism. If he were given the actual facts, he could recognize that where men are politically free, as in the West, they can prosper economically; that science and technology are superior to superstition; that man's life is far longer, happier and safer in the West today than in any other culture in history.

The ideals, achievements and history of Western culture in general--and of America in particular--are therefore purposely given short-shrift by multiculturalism. That the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age were born and flourished in Western nations; that the preponderance of Nobel prizes in science have been awarded to people in the West--such facts, if they are noted, are passed over with little elaboration.

The "history" that students do learn is rewritten to fit multiculturalism's agenda. Consider the birth of the United States. Some texts would have children believe the baseless claim that America's Founders modeled the Constitution on a confederation of Indian tribes. This is part of a wider drive to portray the United States as a product of the "convergence" of three traditions--native Indian, African and European. But the American republic, with an elected government limited by individual rights, was born not of stone-age peoples, but primarily of the European Enlightenment. It is a product of the ideas of thinkers like John Locke, a British philosopher, and his intellectual heirs in colonial America, such as Thomas Jefferson.

It is a gross misconception to view multiculturalism as an effort to enrich education. By reshaping the curriculum, the purveyors of "diversity" in the classroom calculatedly seek to prevent students from grasping the objective value to human life of Western culture--a culture whose magnificent achievements have brought man from mud huts to moon landings.

Multiculturalism is no boon to education, but an agent of anti-Western ideology.

Elan Journo 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.

High Tech Totalitarianism

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

China Enacting a High-Tech Plan to Track People:

At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China [Shenzhen] and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen's name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord's phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China's controversial "one child" policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

First, I need not comment on the depravity of the funding of this technology by an American company. An extra level of hell should be built for Americans who enable repressive governments to violate rights.

Second, how long before Tom Tancredo and company impose such measures on American citizens and legal residents in order to prevent illegal aliens from access to the "goods" of American life--not just government benefits, but also honestly-sought jobs, schooling, medical care, consumer goods, and the like? Today's worthless Republicans aren't concerned to do what's actually required about the problem of illegal immigration, namely (1) to reduce entitlements to zero for citizens and non-citizens alike and (2) to make legal residency possible for any law-abiding foreigner willing and able to support himself. They'll just impose more regulations and restrictions. Mind you, our restrictive immigration policies are a great help to terrorists intending to do harm within the United States. Law enforcement is overwhelmed with the search for mere illegals seeking work. Finely-tuned smuggling operations into the country become profitably "businesses."

Third, why is China's "one child" policy so often described as "controversial" rather than, say, "oppressive." Is it due to some sympathy for population control programs?

Oregon Shakespeare Festival

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Oregon Shakespeare Festival will be going downhill.

Hip-hop at a Shakespeare festival? It may be a stretch, but Bill Rauch seems prepared to try many things to attract a more diverse audience to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he is the new artistic director.

...The audience has gotten steadily older and wealthier: Between 1991 and 2004, the mean age increased to 56 from 48, and the mean income to $95,250 from $68,600. Although the acting company is 25% people of color, the audience is 95% white.

Enter Mr. Rauch, 43, who has many ideas about to make the Festival not only artistically better but also more welcoming to audiences of all ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds. Bringing in hip-hop is one. Another is a Latino festival, to take place next summer around the opening of a production of Arthur Miller's "A View from the Bridge," interpreted with a largely Latino cast. A third is his plan to replace the current format of the Green Show - free outdoor performances, prior to the evening curtain, which currently feature a modern-dance company - with a rotating schedule of diverse local and national artists.

...Mr. Rauch hopes to establish a connection to the growing Latino population in the Rogue River Valley, through events like the Latino festival, which will include Spanish-language play readings and performances where Spanish speakers can hear simultaneous translations of English-language productions over headsets.

For this fall, he is planning what he calls "a hip-hop boot camp," which will bring hip-hop artists to town to generate ideas for future projects. "At first blush a Shakespeare festival doing hip-hop may sound absurd," he acknowledged, "but I think there's a real connection between theatrical movements that are about celebrating language and combining slang with elevated poetic forms. Shakespeare grabbed vernacular from the street." [This reads like a parody -- ed.]

...

Mr. Rauch wants to produce non-Western classics, beginning next season with an adaptation of the Sanskrit epic "The Clay Cart," which he will direct. He also wants OSF to play a greater role in developing new plays. Next season's schedule includes the world premiere of "Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter" by Julie Marie Myatt, about a female Marine returning from Iraq. It will head afterward to the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.

It's common for Artistic Directors to want to make their casts more diverse. Mr. Rauch is going one better: he's worried because the audience is too white. Wanting to get "audiences of all ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds" is fine, but you don't do that by lowering Shakespeare to the level of Hip-Hop street culture. "Oh, Juliet -- thou is my bitch." Wouldn't it be better to appeal to the best within people of all skin colors, to focus on universal values?

OSF's new Artistic Director is focused on bringing New Leftist values of multiculturalism and diversity to the festival. Basically, he's going to turn the atmosphere into what you see on college campuses today.

I go to a Shakespeare play to see great art; as a side benefit, I get away from modern culture. I like to see art from an age now dead, and be reminded of a time when western culture had different standards -- when it had higher standards, and looked at metaphysical issues that are universal to all humans, not just skin color. Mr. Rauch is telling me, "Sorry -- as the Sartre play says, no exit."

So Bring Back DDT Already!

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

The LA Times reports that bedbugs are becoming more common in residences across southern California.

They used to be associated with cramped and dirty living quarters, grimy motels and high-rise living in places like New York. For much of the second part of the last century the liberal use of the eventually banned pesticide DDT seemed to all but do away with them. Now bedbugs have moved into single-family homes with a vengeance and taken up lodging in schools, hospitals and college dormitories too. The wide-open spaces of the West are no defense.

"Bedbugs are just going ballistic everywhere," said Michael Potter, a professor of entomology at the University of Kentucky. "It is going to really rock this country. I'm not trying to sound sensationalist."

Bedbugs hitchhike on humans or in luggage and burrow into bedding, books, sofas and just about any cozy place, even picture frames. Once they establish squatter's rights, evicting them isn't easy. Or cheap. Casting them out of the average house in Southern California can cost thousands of dollars and require multiple visits. [bold added]

So now, people are finally seeing the error of their ways, and are reconsidering the wisdom of banning DDT, right?

That remains to be seen. Until then, ...

They arrived in the New World with the first colonists and were plentiful until about the 1940s, when DDT seemed to do away with them.

Their comeback means public education is vital, Potter said. For example, it's foolhardy to retrieve a mattress or couch from a curb or a dumpster. "That," he said, "is going to have to stop."

...

He's not optimistic about the future, given current restrictions on powerful chemicals and the bugs' knack for adapting to them. "Our arsenal is depleted of effective products," he said, and there's no "silver bullet in the wings." [bold added]

Potter would do well to add informing people of the bad science behind the banning of DDT in the first place to his admonitions against picking up used furniture -- or at least to do so more explicitly.

Who needs a "silver bullet in the wings" when all one needs to do is consider loading the perfectly good one he already has in hand?

-- CAV

PS: (1) Incidentally, Noumenal Self points to an interesting article on the mosquito-repellent properties of DDT over and above its toxicity.

(2) This is not the first time I have blogged on the reemergence of the bedbug.

More Domestic Terrorism

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

Not only do Islamic terrorists act semi-openly in California, so do ecoterrorists whose excuse for unprovoked brutality is the nonobjective claim that animals have "rights".

On Sunday, June 24 ... [Dr. Arthur] Rosenbaum, a highly regarded pediatric ophthalmologist who had been regularly harassed by animal-rights activists for his research work with cats and rhesus monkeys at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA, noticed a device underneath his luxury sedan. The bomb squad was dispatched to the scene and hauled away a makeshift -- but deadly -- explosive. A faulty fuse was the only reason it didn't go off. [bold added]

This very informative article, which is a must-read, errs only in being perhaps too eager to dismiss such terrorism as being a fringe phenomenon, an error that is all too common due to the fact that too many people fail to think in terms of principles.

Consider the case of 49-year old trauma surgeon Jerry Vlasak, who mysteriously remains a free man while openly inciting murder:

"I think the animal-rights movement has been way too slow in taking radical actions," he says. "And they've been way too nice."

...

Besides posting communiques and press releases on the NAALPO Web site, Vlasak understands that his medical background gives the animal-rights movement a certain amount of cachet. Journalists come to him for quotes, and he gives them. In a 2004 interview with the London Observer, he said, "I don't think you'd have to kill too many [researchers]. I think for five lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, 2 million, 10 million nonhuman lives." Those remarks caused him to be banished from England, but in Southern California, he practices surgery at Riverside Community and Parkview Community hospitals in Riverside County, as well as Community Hospital and San Antonio Community Hospital in San Bernardino. [bold added]

The animal "rights" movement equates human life with that of other animals because it (incorrectly) sees animals as having the same rights as man. Seen in this light, waging a military campaign of animal "liberation" is not just an aberrant phenomenon. It is the logical end result of a consistent application of the philosophical principles of this movement.

It is thus a major mistake to shrug off the utterances of a Dr. Vlasak or the illiterate ramblings of "communiques" such as the one cited by LA Weekly. We not only have to start thinking about how to protect our country's great scientists from attack, but also how to offer an intellectual counteroffensive against the philosophical chaos in our culture that permits such groups to have far wider support and sympathy than they deserve.

-- CAV

Public Bible Schools

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

A troubling development in my booksignings lately at Colonial Williamsburg is the growing frequency that visitors ask me if my Sparrowhawk novels reflect the alleged religious origins of the United States. I usually answer that the novels focus on the secular political ideas that were responsible for the founding.

If visitors press for a more concrete answer, I will answer that most of the Founders were professed deists who nevertheless were adamant in their conviction that God and Government should be separate, that religious beliefs were a private matter not to be suppressed, prescribed or regulated by the state, as they were in Britain, and that one of the things they feared both Parliament and king longed to import to the colonies was a state, tax-supported church.

I will then expand on one aspect of British-American tension, that two British organizations, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (founded 1698) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (founded 1701), both with Crown approval and encouragement, lobbied continuously both in London and in the colonies for the establishment of an Anglican episcopate or bishopric in the American colonies. This would have meant that all colonists, regardless of their particular faith, would have been taxed to support the Crown church. This idea was abhorrent to all but colonial Anglicans, and contributed to the swelling dissatisfaction with British rule.

I will offer them a historical tidbit: that the American Episcopal Church (root term, episcopate) is the direct descendent of the Anglican Church, which was disestablished in the United States in 1789.

If necessary, and if my visitors still look doubtful after this free lecture on the political origins of America, I will dwell on the fact that religious freedom, for the Founders, was subsumed under the broader concept of political freedom. Then I refer them to the First Amendment of the Constitution, which on this point is unambiguous in wording and meaning.

If my visitors persist and ask whether men of the cloth have any role at all in Sparrowhawk, I will say that the role is entirely incidental and subsidiary. There is only one benign minister in the whole epic; the other clerics do not appear in a very flattering light, since they all wish to impose tyranny over the minds of my heroes. I freely paraphrase Thomas Jefferson in such instances; if my auditors cannot abide the sentiment, it is not my problem.

That usually convinces many such visitors that Sparrowhawk is not for them. I do not volunteer the information without a query, and if no one asks about the role of religion or priests in the series, my policy is one of caveat lector; readers will discover my overall regard for religion and clerics as they progress through the series. Facts do not matter to them, nor the record. Their minds are impervious to reason, proof against rational persuasion. They are of the same mentality as Muslims. As far as they are concerned, God dictated the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to apostles sporting frock coats and wigs.

Often such visitors are parents who are home schooling their children. Some of these people are home schooling with a general, secularized course of instruction. Others are home schooling because, they say, public schools are “Godless.” Religious parents make up most of the people who want assurances from me that Sparrowhawk credits religion with the founding of the country. I give them no such assurances. In these instances, it means a loss of sales.

So, it was with great interest and with not a little surprise that I opened the Sunday, August 12th Newport News, Virginia Daily Press and on page 3 found an article reprinted from the Los Angeles Times under this headline: “How do you teach the Bible without preaching?”

My snap mental answer was: Well, you don’t – unless you are Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, and then you are not so much teaching the Bible as exposing it as pure balderdash and bunkum.

It was a long article about the controversy of Bible studies in public schools.

In public schools?? Bible studies? Apparently, public schools are not as "Godless" as many parents assume.

“Exact numbers are unavailable, but experts agree that the number of Bible classes in public schools is growing because of new state mandates, increased attention to religion in public life, and the growing prominence of two national Bible curricula.”

Earlier, the article states:

“There’s broad agreement across the social, political and religious spectrum – and most important, the Supreme Court – that the Bible can be taught in public schools and that knowledge of the Bible is vital to students’ understanding of literature and art, including Moby Dick, Michelangelo, and The Matrix.

“But battles are raging in statehouses, schools and courtrooms over how to teach – but not to preach.”

Several questions occurred to me as I read further into the article. How many politically correct, multiculturally skewed, diversity-laden public schools are still introducing their students to Shakespeare, or even to Herman Melville? And, given the appalling level of semi-literacy which public schools are notorious for imbuing in their law-mandated charges, is it too cynical to assume that most of these students are too intellectually stunted or undeveloped to apprehend and appreciate the subtleties of textual distinctions?

Isn’t “Bible studies” more appropriate for an accomplished graduate student planning a career in literary studies that would, for example, require him to conceive of a purpose or theme to tackle the 1,300 biblical references in Shakespeare’s plays or study the Old Testament in conjunction with Milton’s Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes?

The Los Angeles Times article states:

“In 1963, a landmark Supreme Court decision declared school-led Bible readings and prayer unconstitutional. But Justice Tom Clark emphasized in the ruling that the court didn’t intend to discourage academic study of religion.”

Justice Clark wrote in his opinion:

“It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.”

On the premise that public school Bible studies truly do not try or intend to “preach” religion, I maintain there is no justification in intellectually arrested or otherwise lobotomized students studying the texts of the Great Grumpy Gremlin as related by a group of ancient true believers and whose words and tales and morality the living are expected to take on faith. They may as well study the magical world of Harry Potter novels or the electronic intricacies of The Matrix or the blathering language of a James Joyce novel.

But I do not think these courses are merely “academic” or that the motive behind them is so innocent or blameless. And I had to laugh when I read this sentence in the article:

“High school English teachers and university professors say this lack of exposure to Bible tales has led to an education gap.”

It is an education gap evident in the Western canon being discarded in favor of Third World literature and the scribblings of “minority” writers, in students who think that George Washington helped found the United Nations, or that the Triple Entente is either an ice cream flavor or a video game, and in math and science test scores that are among the lowest in the world. These teachers and professors imply that such a “gap” can be compensated or corrected by a study of the Bible (or the Koran, or Buddhism, or American Indian mythology). Which is as absurd a notion as claiming that one can master calculus by a close study of numerology.

The “gap” in American education can be ascribed to the complete absence of the advocacy of reason in public school philosophy – except when reason is being attacked by nihilists or sabotaged by multicultural subjectivists.

Biblical allusions and references doubtless occur in much Western literature; they even appear in Ayn Rand’s novels. Some day, if the world does not descend into another Dark Age, the Bible and its companion texts from other faiths will exert as little influence on men’s minds and on the culture as Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Nostradamus’s Centuries do today. For the time being, however, children and adolescents should not be made to study the Bible. They are already assaulted in their education by criminally irrational pedagogical policies; Bible studies simply underscore the arbitrary eclecticism. No individual should attempt to study the Bible unless he is a full-grown, mature, rational adult. Then he will have a chance to grasp its utter irrationality.

And, taxpayers who are forced to pay for public schools, whether or not they have children in them, should oppose Bible studies, regardless of their “objective, nonsectarian” intent. Promoters of Bible studies can claim that since God and religion are ubiquitous values in our society, they deserve serious academic examination. Not refutation or rebuttal, mind you. That is “preaching.”

The question remains: Why is the Bible appearing in public schools? Why not teach Shakespeare or Melville or Victor Hugo without making Scripture the primary literary referent? Is there an organization behind it, or is it a general cultural phenomenon? I do not think there is an overall, conscious conspiracy to bypass the First Amendment, although I would not discount the influence of the religious right, which is pushing for the acceptance of “intelligent design” as a legitimate course of study, as well.

As a cultural phenomenon, the growing number of Bible studies in public schools can be likened to water leaching out of cracks in an asphalt parking lot. If the lot were properly paved, no leaching would occur at all.

I suppose that with diligence and enough time, one could ferret out the culprits ultimately responsible for the growth of Bible studies in public schools (not to mention the growth of teen Bible study groups, and of Bible camps for teens). The places to start would be the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools and the Bible Literacy Project, competing organizations cited in the Los Angeles Times report.

But philosophically, and historically, the ultimate culprit is Immanuel Kant. At this year’s OCON conference at Telluride, Leonard Peikoff warned that, thanks to Kant’s influence, Western culture is headed for total disintegration, and that if trends are not corrected and reversed soon, the United States could indeed become a theocracy inside of forty years. The growth of Bible studies in public schools is simply one premonitory manifestation of the trend that substantiates his prediction.

Objectivists, Peikoff said, are in the same historical circumstance as the Spartans at Thermopylæ. We are the only ones who advocate reason. Or perhaps we could see ourselves as Athenians and aim for a Marathon. Either way one looks at our dilemma, however, we should not let the enemy pass without a fight.

The PHR Neologism Contest, or “Why I Support Founders College”

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

How many Pearl Harbors did it take?

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

Via Matt Drudge comes a column by Stu Bykofsky which makes the ludicrous claim that America "needs" another day of atrocities committed by superstitious primitives and celebrated by Musselmen the world over.

Remember the community of outrage and national resolve? America had not been so united since the first Day of Infamy - 12/7/41.

We knew who the enemy was then.

We knew who the enemy was shortly after 9/11.

Because we have mislaid 9/11, we have endless sideshow squabbles about whether the surge is working, if we are "safer" now, whether the FBI should listen in on foreign phone calls, whether cops should detain odd-acting "flying imams," whether those plotting alleged attacks on Fort Dix or Kennedy airport are serious threats or amateur bumblers. We bicker over the trees while the forest is ablaze.

America's fabric is pulling apart like a cheap sweater.

What would sew us back together?

Another 9/11 attack.

First of all, unlike Bykofsky, this commentator refuses to use a term so tepid as "9/11" to describe that day when nothing less will do than a phrase containing (1) the word "atrocity", (2) a reminder that said atrocities were motivated by Islam, and (3) the reaction to said atrocities by their supporters around the world.

Second, just this morning, I said the following:

The moral justification and purpose for fighting a war of self-defense ... is the protection of life and liberty from those who wish to take them away. It is not retaliation. It is not stalemate. And it is not the impossible goal of forcing those who reject civilization to adopt civilization. The only legitimate moral or practical criteria for deciding how to act towards our enemy in a war is the following: How can we best render our enemy unable to harm us, while causing ourselves as little injury as possible?

...

My life is sacred.... If Islamic totalitarians and their sympathizers force me, through their hostilities, to choose between the lives of millions of savages and my own life and freedom, I will proudly choose my life and my freedom. It may or may not take them 50 million deaths, give or take, to grasp it, but I want our military to do whatever it takes to get through to this superstitious filth that if they keep lobbing bombs at me, they can damn well plan to hide in their hovels and caves from our war machine.

Clearly, some of us remain outraged nearly six years later, and understand what will be needed to fight the war that these atrocities called for; some of us are either outraged and don't know what needs doing or out of focus and clear about what ought to be done (despair, perhaps?); and some of us possess neither the fire nor a clue.

Forget the sympathizers with Islamic totalitarianism.

How the hell will another attack provide further motivation to those of us who remain in focus? And how will such an event "educate" those who do not understand the purpose, moral justification, and proper execution of a war about any of those things?

Bykovsky also slams Americans for their short attention spans, but forgets that our war in Iraq has already exceeded in duration a two-front war against far more worthy adversaries than Iraq and the nations we should be fighting put together. We won that one decisively, by the way, and remained united, focused, and effective.

Bykovsky, rather than hoping for an Islamofascist encore, should consider (1) the differences between how we fought World War II and the war we should be fighting (of which Iraq should have served by now as, at most, a staging ground for further attacks) and (2) why these differences exist. (Hint: It wasn't because we had kamikaze pilots attack us periodically to roust us from our daydreams.)

If he did, he would see that we truly do not need Moslem totalitarians -- even to goad us on further to present them with the premature end they want and richly deserve. What we need is to rediscover that we have a moral right to our lives and freedom, that protecting those things is what war is for, and that it is up to us to take control of our own destiny.

How many such attacks will we need, Mr. Bykovsky, before we stop talking about all military options being on the table ... while on our way to the negotiating table with Iran, with all kinds of options -- for selling out to them? How many more "security talks" will we tolerate our wartime President holding with the likes of Iran and North Korea? And how long will it be before our leaders selling out to open enemies in "response" to the slaughter of our citizens (and threats of more) become the "normal" way of doing business?

That last one was a trick question, but maybe not if you weren't saying, "Too late!" as you read it.

Our current lack of resolve is due in part to our cultural deterioration since World War II and in part to a perfectly understandable reaction to our leaders failing to actually fight the war. More attacks might stir us up a bit for awhile ... until they slowly seem more "normal", or action more futile. Think we're in a stupor now? Just wait until we've endured a few more "cycles of nonviolence" in response to the Islamic totalitarians. But then, I somehow think that that's their whole hope.

Rather than rooting for the theocrats, might I suggest, in the way of understanding where we're going wrong and how to fix it, reading "'Just War Theory' vs. American Self-Defense" by Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein, and "'No Substitute for Victory': The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism" by John Lewis.

Our enemy is almost as pathetic as the god he worships. And without our moral paralysis, he'd be just as real by now.

-- CAV

Salon: The religious state of Islamic science

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

Turkish-American physicist Taner Edis explains why science in Muslim lands remains stuck in the past — and why the Golden Age of Mesopotamia wasn’t so golden after all.

Q:Why did the scientific revolution happen in Christian Europe and not in the Islamic world?
A: … My perception is that a number of factors came together so that scientific institutions in Europe got lucky. They were able to break free of church constraints and unleash a powerful technology that plugged into emerging capitalism at that moment in history. After that, it was too late to go back and strangle science even if somebody wanted to.

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The Psycho-Epistemology of Sexuality, Part V

By Dan Edge from The Edge of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Sexuality and Psychological Visibility

This is part 5 of a 6-part essay on The Psycho-Epistemology of Sexuality. Parts 1 and 2 can be found here, part 3 is here, and part 4 is here.

In part 4 of this essay, I argued that one's gender integrates a broad range of physical individuating elements of self, and that these elements are stressed when he perceives a member of the opposite sex. Those familiar with Nathanial Branden's "Muttnick Principle" may have noted a similarity between my description of sexuality and what Branden calls psychological visibility. This was no accident.

The psychological experience of sexuality results from perceiving an integration of values as reflected through another human being. Psychological visibility could be described in the same way. This section will explore the relationship between these two phenomenon.

Branden described psychological visibility as our capacity "...to perceive our self as an entity in reality, to experience the perspective of objectivity through and by means of the reaction of other human beings" (Branden, The Psychology of Romantic Love, pgs 77-78). In order to better understand what he meant by these words, I will offer a summary of his argument for the "Muttnick Principle" as presented in The Objectivist and in his book The Psychology of Self-esteem (partially taken from a summary I gave in an earlier essay, The Morality of Monogamy). Along the way, I will relate Branden's discoveries to my theory of sexuality as presented in the first 4 parts of this essay.

Branden begins by attempting to explain the joy he feels when perceiving other living beings. For instance, one may experience pleasure when looking at plant or lush landscape. Why is this pleasurable? What values are achieved in looking at a plant? While trees can be used as tools of production, the pleasure in perceiving them goes beyond their potential industrial uses. To the admiring viewer, a tree seems to have inherent value that makes it pleasurable to look upon.

Branden's answer -- One shares with a tree the struggle for survival. A tree grows towards the sun and pushes its roots deep into the earth in an effort to gain the minerals and chemicals that sustain its life. One perceives in the tree a miniature mirror of his values, and he experiences the actualization of those values as an emotional sum. Based on the mind-body connection I described in Part 3, this reaction is understandable. If the mind has automatized the connection between the perception of living things, life itself, the values that make life possible, and the positive judgments associated with these, then one would expect to experience pleasure when perceiving a being that represents life.

We share even more values with animals, which have the capacity of perception and locomotion. Animals possess a form of emotion, which is obvious to anyone who has ever owned a dog. The dog can often tell if one is happy or sad, excited or stagnant, and it responds in kind. One experiences pleasure when a pet displays recognition of his intentions. This opens up a whole new level of psychological experiences. An animal can provide not only a passive reflection of values, but also an active reflection -- an awareness of a one's self as an individual. A tree doesn't care who you are, but a dog will respond to its owner completely differently from anyone else. Once again, based on my explanation of the mind-body connection, this is exactly what we would expect when perceiving a being that represents both an integration of shared values and an awareness of one's individuating elements.

Through another human being, one can perceive a reflection of a huge range of values. A good friend can reflect both the broadest and most specific aspects of self simultaneously. He reflects one's broad intellectual values like philosophical and political beliefs, and also the specific traits, personality quirks, and physical attributes that make one unique. If individuating elements of self can properly be experienced as a value, as I argued in part 2, then perceiving the integration of such a broad range of individuating elements through the awareness of another conceptual being should yield very positive emotions -- which, in fact, it does. This is the joy of friendship.

The pleasure of psychological visibility can be taken to its highest level in the context of a romantic love relationship. Through a lover, one can experience the greatest reflection of values possible. As one's best friend, a lover can reflect the broadest and most specific aspects of one's self more fully than any other. Beyond that, she represents the integration of physical individuating elements of self (as described in part 4) by stressing the physiological difference between the sexes. This kind of reflection yields the greatest emotional pleasure possible to man: romantic love. Considering that sex is also greatest physical pleasure possible to man, one can understand why this sacred act is so revered. When the experience of sexuality is combined and integrated with the greatest potential source of psychological visibility, the result is a thing of beauty.

I argue that one also experiences sexuality to the greatest degree in the context of a romantic love relationship. A lover is more aware of one's distinguishing physical attributes than any other. And the reciprocal is true -- one is more familiar with his lover's body than anyone else in the world. This acute awareness of each other's bodies allows for the most profound experience of masculinity and femininity. One becomes aware of his sexuality through perceiving a member of the opposite sex and observing the differences. This experience is heightened through psychological visibility. With a lover, one can not only observe the differences between the sexes, but he can also be observed by his lover as an integrated, physical whole. One's lover perceives him fundamentally as a man.

Based on the arguments I have presented in the first 5-parts of this essay, I am now fully justified in proclaiming the following: Sex in the context of a romantic love relationship is the most pleasurable, most profoundly spiritual experience possible to human beings.

In part 6 of this essay, I will provide a summary of the arguments and conclusions from the first 5 parts, then suggest some applications for these principles.

--Dan Edge

Karl Rove's Legacy

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Here are two Republican reactions to Karl Rove leaving. First, from John Hawkins:

Rove is generally considered to be a political genius and undoubtedly, he knows a lot about politics and running a campaign. However, his reputation seems a bit undeserved given how disastrous the last two and a half years of the Bush Administration have been.

I mean, if you're the primary political adviser to a candidate who hasn't even been polling consistently in the forties since early 2005, you're either doing a terrible job, the candidate is a nightmare, or some combination thereof.

Given how well Bush did in his first term and some of the really terrible ideas Rove has reportedly been behind, like comprehensive immigration reform and the Medicare Prescription drug benefit, you have to think that he has had a lot to do with Bush's lack of political acumen in his second term.

There are rumors floating around that Rove may be leaving to help one of the GOP candidates in 2008, but honestly, with his track record over the last couple of years, would anyone really want to base their political future on Karl Rove's advice?

I agree with this. I think the case against Rove is even worse than what Hawkins says. Why did spending go through the roof under Bush? Because Rove's strategy, as far as I can figure, was, "To hell with all that old fashioned talk about free markets and less government. In a welfare state you have to increase spending to buy votes. Cutting spending is too risky."

Bush bears the ultimate blame for his administration, but you have to think that Rove's pragmatism urged the more government/big spending approach.

Now here is Hugh Hewitt's take:

Democrats have to be worried that when Karl Rive exits the White House in August, he'll take a month off and end up at the virtual elbow of Mayor Giuliani, Governor Romney, or Senator Thompson. They should be worried. Of course that's what he (and Ken Mehlman) will be doing. All-stars whose franchise can't play for the title often show up in the heat of the hunt. Politics is like sports in many ways. And Rove is the Tiger Woods of politics. (That would almost make Bob Shrum Greg Norman, but Norman won two majors. I need a better analogy for Shrum.)

Rove is 5 for 6 in the big elections he has skippered, and despite more attacks than any presidential aide in history, he is strolling out of the White House with a smile on his face and the admiration of nearly everyone in the GOP. If he gets bored, there will be plenty of opportunities for him to return to the thing he does best --beating Democrats in November. When he does return, Dems will panic again.

Rove wins elections, and that is all that matters to Hugh Hewitt. Better yet, Rove makes leftists lose their mind. The mention of his name has the ability to cloud a Democrat's mind with fear and loathing, and that's always a good thing, isn't it?

Hewitt's position, by implication, is, "Screw small government principles, screw the free market, screw Goldwater, screw that extremist laissez-faire capitalism stuff and you know what? Screw the United States of America. Karl Rove wins elections for the Republican party. Case closed."

Until we get Republicans who can look past the next election, who can think in principles such as individual rights and who put America ahead of the Republican Party, then the GOP will continue its march to fascism.

The Most Pathetic Solicitation Ever

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The following is surely the most pathetic e-mail solicitation I've ever received:

Hello, I am Robert. I am a single father of 3. Two of my children live 5 hours from me. To help raise them, I decided to write a book. It is a non-fiction book about relationships. They are too young yet, but when the become adults, I know they will benefit from it.

I am also trying to teach them a lesson. When I told my daughter about writing a book, she asked "is it going to be in some stores?" I paused and answered that of course it would. Truth be told, I cannot do this alone. It is my first book, and it is self-published, but I do not have the money to have my book sold in stores.

I would really like to prove to my children that it is possible to do something when you put your mind and heart into it. I believe that I could have my book in-store if I could sell 500 copies from the online store where I published it.

It is my intention to give 10% of my profits to a charity.

I would really appreciate your help. If you or someone you know is interested in relationships, please have a look at my book. You can go online to preview and buy it.

The web address is: http://www.lulu.com/content/1022330

Thank you greatly for taking the time to read this letter.

Best to you,

Robert Charest

So, I'm supposed to consider advice on relationships from...

• A man who chooses to live five hours from his children.
  
• A man who makes serious promises to his children that he cannot keep by his own actions -- in the hope that random strangers will pick up his slack for him.
  
• A man who attempts to induce people to buy his book by appealing to pity and altruism -- without any mention of the supposed merits of the book in question.

Gee... I think I'll pass.

Out of curiosity, I checked out the preview of the book. It's even more pathetic -- in both style and content -- than I would have imagined. Oddly enough, that's what I expected: my capacity to imagine the banal only stretches so far.

Republicans and Health Care

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

FIRM is a non-partisan organization, and hence is not a supporter of either political party, nor any particular political candidate. And although Rudolph Guiliani makes some good points in this recent opinion piece in the August 3, 2007 Boston Globe, others have taken issue with his statement that, "Most Republicans believe in expanding individual choice and decision-making."

In particular, the FreeMarketCure.com weblog notes:

Let's see: When the GOP was in charge of the Senate and the Oval Office, it passed COBRA and EMTALA, two major expansions of government regulation into health care. When the GOP controlled both house of Congress, it passed HIPAA, another big expansion of government regulation into health care, plus a new government health insurance program, the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Now, Republicans like Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley are leading the charge for a big SCHIP expansion. Finally, Republican Senator Pete Domenici is pushing for a nationwide "mental health parity" benefit mandate, one that President Bush says he will sign if it passes.

"Most" Republicans believe in believe in expanding individual choice? Heck, I'd settle for half.

Although individual Republicans may vary, I don't see any principled opposition to socialized medicine coming from them as a party. Certainly, the health care proposals of high-profile Republicans such as Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger are as bad as any that have come from Democrats such as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.

The Deadly FDA

Irvine, CA--The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit recently ruled that terminally ill patients do not have a right to take medicines that have not been approved by the FDA.

"Barring individuals from choosing what medicines to take is immoral and destructive," said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute.

"The decision about what drugs to put in one's body rightfully belongs to each individual, not to FDA bureaucrats. To deny individuals this right is to impose a death sentence on those who, in the face of certain death, would rationally choose to accept the risks of an experimental treatment, but are barred from doing so until the urgently needed drug completes the FDA's onerous, years-long approval process. Indeed, this case was initiated by a group founded by the father of a girl who died after she was denied access to an experimental anti-cancer drug the FDA later approved.

"Individuals, in consultation with their doctors, should be free to assess the evidence of a drug's effectiveness and safety, taking into account their own personal context (such as their unique risk factors, or the fact that they are certain to die without the treatment). Some people may take ineffective or harmful drugs, but FDA approval does not eliminate such risks. The individual always assumes some level of risk when deciding on a course of treatment, and it is capricious--and too often deadly--for the FDA to usurp the individual's right to decide which risks it is in his interest to accept.

"Some claim that, freed from the necessity of gaining FDA approval for new medicines, 'greedy' drug companies will sell ineffective and dangerous drugs. But a company that sells such drugs is only ensuring its own financial destruction. And if a company knowingly misleads the public about a drug's safety or reliability, or is negligent in putting a dangerous drug on the market, it should properly be prosecuted. The solution is not to give FDA bureaucrats the power to condemn sick people to certain death.

"Some claim that allowing individuals to take unapproved drugs will make effective clinical testing impossible, since, as they say, no rational person would willingly submit to the double-blind, randomized tests that are currently used in clinical trials required by the FDA. In such tests, some of the participants are unknowingly given a placebo, which, it's said, no one would chance if he could ensure that he received the drug by paying for it. But, contrary to those who make this argument, individuals are not lab rats who may be blackmailed by the government into becoming test subjects. It is chilling that defenders of the FDA's current trial system are, in effect, advocating as an incentive to take part in such trials: 'join or die.'

"Moreover, such twisted ultimatums are not necessary in order to make effective drug research possible. Were individuals free to take untested medicines, new incentives to take part in clinical trials would surely arise, such as, for instance, an offer of free treatment to those who choose to take part--an inestimable value to people unable to afford the drugs.

"Anyone who values human life, and the freedom of judgment required to maintain it, should oppose this disgraceful ruling--and demand an end to the unnecessary deaths caused by FDA drug regulations."

Hillary Clinton’s Uncle Ellsworth: A Correction and a Postscript

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

In my August 8th commentary, I wrote:

“When Keating abandons her to marry Dominique Francon – an action encouraged by Toohey for his own malign ends – Catherine collapses spiritually. That is the last we see of her until much later in the novel (Part 4: Howard Roark, Chapter 10, pp. 621-628)”

This actually is not the last we see of Catherine Halsey. She reappears briefly on p. 398 (in the Centennial Edition of The Fountainhead). Through Ellsworth Toohey’s influence, she is given a position in charge of occupational therapy in the Hopton Stoddard Home for Subnormal Children – Roark’s vandalized Stoddard Temple. She is depicted as being ecstatic when “the least promising” of the children exhibits signs of intelligence or an awareness of reality.

Ayn Rand may have implied that Toohey meant the “occupational therapy” to be for Catherine herself, as a kind of finishing touch to his malevolent handiwork – finishing in the sense that such a job would complete the destruction of her identity and even corrupt her measure of “normalcy,” in herself and in others. What she says about the “art” produced by the genderless Jackie is, ironically, what she never heard from her uncle Ellsworth or anyone else when she attempted to apprehend reality.

That whole section on the Home, on pages 395 to 398, also underscores Toohey’s value-destroying methodology, in this instance the conversion of a temple to the human spirit into a clinic for the contemplation of the irrational and the diseased.

Also, I neglected to mention another thing that Hillary Clinton fears and which she would wish to bypass in Americans through statist legislation (or force): the element of volition. The volition (implied in the concept of independence) of individuals would confound any of her well-laid plans to impose mandatory compliance with her wishes (or the wishes of virtually any politician, for that matter). Further, she would want all Americans to become public service drudges in spirit, if not in fact.

"Privatizing" Our Infrastructure

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

Steven Malanga of City Journal has written a fascinating piece on a nascent trend among state and local governments: the quasi-privatization of infrastructure such as airports and tollways.

One thing I found very interesting was the following description of how government intervention stopped private highways in the first place just as the automobile was becoming popular:

Private investment in infrastructure, especially bridges and roads, was common in early United States history. Immediately after the Revolutionary War, for instance, investors put up $465,000 to build the Philadelphia-Lancaster Turnpike, a 66-mile toll road that proved so popular that it led to further waves of private investing in highways. During the first half of the nineteenth century, private funds provided the young republic with some 600 toll roads. And as the country spread westward during the second half of the century, infrastructure investors helped ease the way, with 100 toll roads in California alone. In fact, the private sector kept building roads until the automobile's arrival prompted more extensive -- and costly -- government safety regulations, which at the time made toll roads a largely unprofitable venture. Government turned to new methods -- especially municipal bonds, which investors like because they aren't taxed -- to finance infrastructure. [bold added]

Over-regulation of existing businesses coupled with the removal of some of the more onerous restrictions on their subsidized competition is a great way to set up for failure the remnants of free enterprise in an industry.

So have state and local governments in America seen the errors of their controlling ways and begun to turn back the statist clock at last? Not quite....

As with so many other "free market" proposals put forth mainly by conservatives these days, these "privatizations" -- although having some economic effects similar to actual privatizations -- are not, in fact, privatizations. Furthermore, they are not being conducted with the proper purpose of government (i.e., the protection of individual rights) in mind, but usually for some other purpose, like increased revenue for the state or greater "efficiency".

And so, it should come as little surprise that the new "owners" often find themselves very heavily regulated -- because (surprise!) those in charge of such "sales" do not understand the the first thing about the great incentives actual freedom provides for doing a good job. How, after all, can someone who does not understand capitalism have any confidence in it?

Note how regulations are used to "defend" "capitalism" here:

Privatization foes also claim that profit-hungry private operators will squeeze taxpayers dry by raising tolls or fees precipitously and skimping on maintenance. This charge ignores the detailed operating requirements written into privatization contracts, which limit how much new operators can hike tolls over time and punish owners who fail to meet standards. "The agreement for the Indiana tollway lease is far more detailed than anything InDOT [the Indiana Department of Transportation] had to live up to when it was operating the road," says Matt Will of the University of Indianapolis. "I don't know if InDOT could have lived up to these standards." [bold added]

This same paragraph ends with the following piece of evidence that the hysteria over "squeezing" is misplaced: "The owners of the Dulles Greenway in Virginia initially didn't meet their traffic projections, so they lowered tolls to lure more traffic."

Although this massive wave of "privatization" looks and feels like capitalism in some ways, it is not. In fact, it is merely a shifting from socialism (i.e., government ownership of the means of production) to fascism (i.e., government control of the privately-owned means of production) being done in the name of capitalism -- and with, I suspect, just as much potential to unjustly tarnish the reputation of capitalism as the mess created by the so-called deregulation of electric utilities in several states some time ago.

This alone should give pause to anyone calling deals like the Indiana tollway lease "privatization" -- or touting them as substantive retreats from a mixed economy to a free one.

-- CAV

Hillary Clinton’s Uncle Ellsworth

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

While truth can be stranger than fiction, the one can complement the other.

This thought occurred to me when I began to read Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 1969 political science thesis, written in “partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Arts degree under the Special Honors Program, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts.” Its title is: “’There Is Only the Fight…’: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.”

Four or five pages into this paper, I was struck by the similarities between the relationships of Ellsworth Toohey and Catherine Halsey in Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead, and of Saul D. Alinsky and young Hillary D. Rodham, college student. Copies of this 91-page typewritten paper, interspersed here and there with handwritten corrections, are now circulating all over the Internet, accompanied by commentary that is largely critical and often deprecatory in nature.

Ellsworth Toohey, as readers probably know, is the power-seeking arch villain in Rand’s novel, and Catherine Halsey his niece, whose self-esteem he mercilessly attacks at every opportunity and succeeds in destroying, reducing her to a selfless, public service drudge.

Saul David Alinsky (1909-1972) was a real-life “radical” who specialized in organizing “communities” for local political agitation rather than attempting the broader political machinations of Toohey. He was a second-rank power luster – certainly less charismatic than Toohey, to judge by his biography – but his fundamental methodology of acquiring power – not for himself, he always said, but for whomever he deemed the “dispossessed” – is essentially the same as Toohey’s, which Rand so brilliantly dramatized in Toohey’s character.

This commentary will focus on the parallels between the pairs – Toohey and Catherine, Alinsky and Clinton – though not to the exclusion of the political aspects of the relationships.

First, here is a description of Catherine Halsey when she is introduced in The Fountainhead, and, incidentally, into Ellsworth Toohey’s life:

“Toohey had not intended to keep her in his own home. But when she stepped off the train in New York, her plain little face looked beautiful for a moment, as if the future were opening before her and its glow were already upon her forehead, as if she were eager and proud and ready to meet it. It was one of those rare moments when the humblest person knows suddenly what it means to feel as the center of the universe, and is made beautiful by the knowledge, and the world – in the eyes of witnesses – looks like a better place for having such a center. Ellsworth Toohey saw this – and decided that Catherine would remain with him.” (The Fountainhead, pp. 310-311, Centennial Edition).

In subsequent scenes that feature Catherine Halsey, she is depicted as having a self that struggles to understand the world and her uncle, a self that progressively loses the struggle under her uncle’s malicious guidance. She is intellectually unarmed to defend herself against Toohey’s attacks, which are aimed at disarming her mind by denigrating it and her values. Her sole consolation or value in this period is Peter Keating and her love for him.

When Keating abandons her to marry Dominique Francon – an action encouraged by Toohey for his own malign ends – Catherine collapses spiritually. That is the last we see of her until much later in the novel (Part 4: Howard Roark, Chapter 10, pp. 621-628). Here is how Peter Keating, who once wanted to marry her, sees her after years of being out of contact:

“…But when he lifted his eyes to Catherine, he knew that no caution was necessary; she did not react to his scrutiny; her expression remained the same, whether he studied her face or that of the woman at the next table; she seemed to have no consciousness of her own person.

“It was her mouth that had changed most, he thought; the lips were drawn in, with only a pale edge of flesh left around the imperious line of their opening; a mouth to issue orders, he thought, but not big orders or cruel orders; just mean little ones – about plumbing and disinfectants. He saw the fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes – a skin like paper that had been crumpled and then smoothed out.”

When Keating asks her what she felt when he failed to elope with her and when she learned that he was married to Dominique, that is, if she suffered, Catherine answers:

“Yes, of course I suffered. All young people do in such situations. It seems foolish afterward. I cried, and I screamed some dreadful things at Uncle Ellsworth, and he had to call a doctor to give me a sedative, and then weeks afterward I fainted on the street one day without any reason, which was really disgraceful. All the conventional things, I suppose, everybody goes through them, like measles. Why should I have expected to be exempt? – as Uncle Ellsworth said.”

At this point, even Keating, who himself has not only betrayed her and everything else he might have valued, is appalled by the dead, utter selflessness of Catherine. She has become what Toohey intended her to be, an interchangeable manqué, in her own eyes no better or no worse than anyone else, a person who finds “self worth” only in serving others, or the public good. She has become a humorless, miniature clone of Toohey. Instead of aiming for control of the country’s political life and directing it to collectivism, Catherine is satisfied with overseeing “plumbing and disinfectants” as a government social worker.

And the world was no longer a better place for the glow on her forehead. That glow had been methodically extinguished by Toohey.

“Plumbing and disinfectants” best describes Saul Alinsky’s brand of Toohey-ism. His whole political philosophy was definably collectivist. It was Marxism wearing a plastic Halloween mask. For all her adulation of him, Hillary was not satisfied with the range of Alinsky’s achievements in the political realm. They were, to her, not ambitious enough. He advocated merely “activism” on the part of the poor and ethnic to achieve “social justice,” and organizing “communities” or neighborhoods to engage the “establishment” in direct conflict. However, he thought in terms of groups.

Lessons were to be learned from Alinsky by young Hillary.

The ultimate goal of such groups, he wrote, was to acquire power. He had the hubris to rank himself as “radical” as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Patrick Henry, overlooking the fact that these men advocated liberty and individualism in their political philosophy. Alinsky advocated rule by chain gangs and mobs via “democracy” – which in the Left’s lexicon is a euphemism for socialism or collectivism.

Hillary Clinton quotes Alinsky from his book, Reveille for Radicals, published in 1946:

“What does the Radical want? He wants a world in which the worth of the individual is recognized…a world based on the morality of mankind…The Radical believes that all peoples should have a high standard of food, housing, and health….The Radical places human rights far above property rights. He is for universal, free public education and recognizes this as fundamental to the democratic way of life….”

But, all this was government policy by the time Hillary wrote her thesis. She even acknowledges it in the paragraph immediately following the quotation:

“Much of what Alinsky professes does not sound ‘radical.’ His are the words used in our schools and churches, by our parents and their friends, by our peers. The difference is that Alinsky really believes in them and recognizes the necessity of changing the present structures of our lives in order to realize them.”

Alinsky’s means for attaining “social justice” is for groups to mobilize to achieve power, for power can “compel negotiations.” Only by “organizing” can otherwise powerless and voiceless groups win concessions from the “establishment.” In an article cited by Hillary, Alinsky asserted that,

“We have become involved in bypaths of confusion or semantics…The word ‘power’ has through time acquired overtones of sinister corrupt evil, unhealthy immoral Machiavellianism, and a general phantasmagoria of the nether regions.” Hillary comments, with implict approval, “For Alinsky, power is the ‘very essence of life, the dynamic of life’ and is found in ‘…active citizen participation pulsing upward providing a unified strength for a common purpose of organization…either changing circumstances or opposing change.”

The speech that reflects the spirit and contains the germs of everything that Alinsky advocated is on page 103 of The Fountainhead, when, during a building-trades union strike in New York, Toohey addresses a hall of strike supporters:

“…The lesson to be learned from our tragic struggle is the lesson of unity. We shall unite or we shall be defeated. Our will – the will of the disinherited, the forgotten, the oppressed – shall weld us into a solid bulwark, with a common faith and a common goal. This is the time for every man to renounce the thoughts of his petty little problems, of gain, of comfort, of self-gratification. This is the time to merge his self in a great current, in the rising tide which is approaching to sweep us all, willing or unwilling, into the future. History, my friends, does not ask questions or acquiescence. It is irrevocable, as the voice of the masses that determine it. Let us listen to the call. Let us organize, my brothers. Let us organize. Let us organize. Let us organize.”

This was Alinsky’s credo in a nutshell, a perfect encapsulation of his means and ends. It is doubtful that Ayn Rand had even heard of Alinsky while she was writing The Fountainhead – his first book, Reveille for Radicals did not appear until three years after publication of The Fountainhead – but Hillary certainly had read her novels while in college (as a passing “phase,” as has been reported elsewhere). If she was lost in the “bypaths of confusion and semantics” – searching for a “cause” that would sanction her own life and give it direction – one can imagine that she would reject the notion that Toohey was a villain. She would have been as impressed with Toohey’s ideology and methodology as she was with Alinsky’s, but with fewer reservations.

The important point here is that Alinsky remains one of her primary ideological mentors, her denials and those of her defenders to the contrary notwithstanding. Her career after leaving Yale Law School was a frantic scramble to find a way to enter politics. Carl Bernstein, who wrote a biography of Hillary, A Woman in Charge, in a July 20th interview with Jon Wiener on the Truthdig site, claims that she is not an ideologue of the collectivist or any other stripe. “One of the real problems Hillary has had is a difficult relationship with the truth….One of the things she’s been most truthful about is that she’s not easy to compartmentalize in terms of ideology.”

But the power hungry do subscribe to an ideology of sorts, one of opportunism, of snatching at every issue or chance that would boost one’s place in the political power grid. Hillary found that opportunity in Bill Clinton, himself a consummate opportunist, whom she met at Yale. She rode on his political coattails all the way to the White House. She miscalculated when, as the power behind the Oval Office, she attempted to maneuver Congress into adopting full-scale socialized health care.

Whether she was slavishly working to apply Alinsky’s rules of thumb, to work both from “within” and “without” the system,” to effect change by organized confrontation, or adhering to some other leftist ideologue’s formula for acquiring power, is a moot issue. It is interesting to note that during Bill Clinton’s two administrations, Hillary’s Wellesley thesis was kept locked up by the school at the request of the White House, doubtless to prevent the public from getting the “wrong” ideas concerning her ideological leanings. But her actions before and since have tipped everyone off to her true leanings. The school did not need to keep her thesis a secret.

The London Daily Telegraph of August 7 reported Republican candidate Rudy Giuliani as saying that Hillary “wouldn’t admit she’s a liberal.” He made the remark when Hillary recently “disavowed the label and said she was a ‘modern progressive.’” One wonders what distinction there is between an old and a “modern” progressive. The labels “liberal” and “progressive” are virtually synonymous, and simply stand for the incremental creep towards a total welfare state.

In her thesis, Hillary seems to have mastered the sociological jargon necessary for anyone thinking of dedicating his life to “public service.” In one paragraph, she writes:

“Societal comparisons raise again questions about the meaning of ‘radical’ and even ‘revolutionary’ within a mass production/consumption state, particularly the United States. Must definitions perhaps be as fluid as the actions they purport to describe?….Alinsky would answer affirmatively.”

So would Hillary. It presages her future husband’s retort of what the meaning of “is” is. Bill and Hillary were and would remain soul-mates.

On July 29, the New York Times ran an article about Hillary’s college year letters to a high school classmate, John Peavoy (“In the ‘60s, a Future Candidate Poured Her Heart Out in Letters”). What is most interesting about the letters the article discusses is that they reveal how emotion-driven she was in choosing her ultimate politics. Upon entering Wellesley, she morphed from being a Goldwater Republican and a member of the Young Republicans to a volunteer for Eugene McCarthy’s antiwar presidential campaign. No doubt her intellectual and moral rudderlessness made her susceptible to the antiwar rhetoric and activism of the period. This was also the period in which she discovered Saul Alinsky and his brand of activism.

I don’t think a glow of the future ever graced Hillary’s forehead. Catherine Halsey had a more adult and advanced sense of herself and what was possible to her than Hillary evidently had at the same age. No eagerness or pride is evident in Hillary’s letters or her thesis, just a kind of inverse narcissism, or a concern for what she thinks of herself through others’ eyes. In one of her letters to Peavoy, she remarks that she has “not yet reconciled myself to the fate of not being the star.”

By page 375 of The Fountainhead, Catherine is experiencing a personal crisis over her social work and turns to her uncle for guidance. “I have no selfish desire left, I have nothing of my own – and I’m miserable.” She tells Toohey that she has grown to hate the poor who depend on her.

Toohey tells her that her problem is that she expected to feel virtuous and personally happy for “doing right,” and that this was vicious and egotistical.

She replies, “But if you have no…no self-respect, how can you be anything?”

Toohey tells her that she must stop wanting anything. “You must forget how important Miss Catherine Halsey is. Because, you see, she isn’t. Men are important only in relation to other men, in their usefulness, in the service they render….You must be willing to suffer, to be cruel, to be dishonest, to be unclean – anything, my dear, anything to kill the most stubborn of roots, the ego. And only when it is dead, when you care no longer, when you have lost your identity and forgotten the name of your soul – only then will you know the kind of happiness I spoke about, and the gates of spiritual grandeur will fall open before you.”

“But, Uncle Ellsworth,” she whispered, “when the gates fall open, who is it that’s going to enter?”

Toohey, momentarily surprised by the perceptiveness of her question – he knows it was an important rebuttal, but she does not – replies with a put-down about her having made a “smart crack.” Catherine, intimidated by his “wisdom” and utterly ignorant of its nature, concedes. Alinsky and Toohey agreed that “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” (Alinsky enunciated it in his Rules for Radicals [1971]; Toohey expounded on it to Peter Keating in Part 4, Chapter 16, p. 665.)

Compare that with Hillary’s quest for the meaning of her life in her letters to Peavoy. One letter to him she signs “Me,” parenthetically adding “the world’s saddest word.” That one brief signature can stand to represent the self-deprecatory remarks in all her other letters discussed by the Times. I do not think Hillary suffered from a crisis of self-respect, as Catherine Halsey did; I do not think she ever had a self to respect. She would have agreed with everything Toohey told Catherine, without Toohey having to exert much effort to convince her or having to resort to vicious put-downs.

It takes a village, or a Toohey, or an Alinsky, to fill such a void. This is a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. Hillary has progressed from doubting the effectiveness of massive government programs to help the poor to seeing them as the only answer, in the name of “social justice.” Like Alinsky, like Toohey, she wishes to crush the individualist independence of Americans and replace it with dependence on the state – and she would be the state – chiefly because she has grown to fear and hate independence in anyone.

No matter how slickly “human” she presents her made-over self to the public in debates or during interviews, one can still detect in her the desire to kill in every American his integrity, self-respect, sense of values, the heroic, and happiness. When she left Wellesley, she decided to become the “star,” someone whom uncounted others would come to depend on and thank for that dependence.

This is a would-be dictator, and dictators, as I have noted in other commentaries, are only as real to themselves as the number of people they need to rule and command.

Your Home-Grown Moslem Terrorists

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

Despite the fact that, as Stratfor puts it, "fringe Muslim groups ... figure prominently on the watch lists of law enforcement and intelligence agencies[, and] often are shut down before they actually kill anyone," an editor of a Bay-Area newspaper was gunned down by just such a group in California recently.

When I first learned of the story, it was this weekend while I was perusing The Chicago Tribune. The headline was something like, "Bakery Linked to Killing of Newspaper Editor". You had to read at least a third of the article before you got to the following little detail: The "bakery" was a Black Moslem outfit called, "Your Black Muslim Bakery".

Well. I did read the article. After all, why would a bakery want someone murdered? I can't honestly say I was too surprised at what I read. Since I was curious today for more detail, I was glad to see that Christopher Hitchens has provided the low-down -- and asked a few pointed questions:

Here is the situation regarding the enterprise known as Your Black Muslim Bakery, located on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, Calif. Its founder, a man named Yusuf Bey, was arrested in 2002 and charged with forcing an underage girl to have sex. Subsequent investigation suggested that he had a long history of rape and abuse of his followers and had by this means fathered numerous children out of wedlock. Bey died in September 2003 before his case could come to trial. His son Yusuf Bey IV has since been arrested twice, first on suspicion of leading a gang that had trashed two Oakland liquor stores and intimidated their owners, and second (and perhaps less Islamically) for running over a San Francisco bouncer with his car. Nedir Bey, one of Yusuf Bey's "spiritually adopted" sons, is also alleged to have beaten a possible business rival with a flashlight, while another member of the gang tortured the victim with a heated knife.

These and several other crimes of violence were investigated by the East Bay Express, a local community weekly. Reporter Chris Thompson was subjected to threats and to aggressive stalking, and, for his own safety, worked in a different county for several months after his series about YBMB ran. The paper's editor, Stephen Buel, has been quoted as saying that his office and staff were deluged with threats and haunted by unpleasant characters and that the threats indicated that they originated with Your Black Muslim Bakery. "We have several threats left on voice mail that we obviously had a record of. One of the threats featured a taped quotation of a speech from Yusuf Bey the elder," said Buel. At a certain point, Buel admits, it became more trouble than it was worth to write about YBMB.

...

Now, I'm just asking, but: rape, polygamy, intimidation, torture, murder, all these actions emanating from one address and some of them performed in the name of a fanatical ideology. What does it take before the police decide to raid the premises? Should we wait until unveiled women are attacked on the street or until honor killings or female circumcision take hold? (There is no official connection between YBMB and Louis Farrakhan's racist and cultish Nation of Islam, though it seems that Yusuf Bey Sr. did convert to some form of Islam under that sinister organization's auspices.)

My question was answered last Friday, when the Oakland Police Department finally did storm the premises, along with three neighboring homes, and arrested seven people, including Yusuf Bey IV. This, however, was too late to save the life of Chauncey Bailey [pictured -- ed], the well-liked editor of the black-owned Oakland Post, who had decided to take up where the East Bay Express had left off and to investigate the finances of YBMB. He was shot dead last Thursday in broad daylight on an Oakland street. A young handyman from YBMB named Devaughndre Broussard has been charged in the Bailey case, and other members of the group are being investigated for involvement in the earlier crimes. The "bakery" itself owes more than $200,000 in back taxes and filed for bankruptcy protection last October. [bold added]

So is this murder an example of domestic terrorism? Hitchens doesn't go so far as to call it that, and it could be argued that it was committed merely for the purpose of this crime syndicate attempting to avoid prosecution.

However, Hitchens has also described how the "bakeries" generated an atmosphere of fear as they attempted to "cleanse" their neighborhoods of "ungodly" influences (i.e., impose Islamic law) -- and the reluctance of the police to be quoted about it. I would again fail to be surprised to eventually learn that this terroristic context is the one in which this murder occurred. If so, then this murder was an act of domestic terrorism. (Whether this is in fact why the murder occurred, and this is what the authorities pronounce as their official verdict are two separate matters.)

Plainly, there is at least a history of domestic terrorism here, and I commend Hitchens for noting how it has been enabled by both the "no-snitch" culture and multiculturalism. His warning must be heeded: "This has to stop, and it has to stop right now, before sharia baking comes to a place near you."

-- CAV

Mt. Rockmore

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

A Classic Rock station in St. Louis, K-Hits 96, has an amusing promotion, Mt. Rockmore. Listeners vote on the station web site for the four rock artists who should be carved into stone like Mt. Rushmore.

What four artists would say rise above the rest?

I would go with:

Elvis Presley

Chuck Berry

Jimi Hendrix

Bob Dylan

Those four are the innovators who were more influential than the rest. If I were to pick my personal favorite four, it would be:

John Lennon

Jimi Hendrix

Jimmy Page

Neil Young

If I could add a fifth, I'd put Alvin Lee, but that is a very idiosyncratic pick that only a guitarist would make. Sixth? Probably David Bowie.

Ezra Klein and Co. on Ayn Rand

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Earlier today, Noumenal Self alerted me to this discussion of Ayn Rand on a notable liberal blog. It might be worth chiming in with a comment or two. The comments are all quite nasty until Noumenal Self and some Greg (not our Mr. Perkins, I don't think) chime in. So, like Mr. Self, I encourage other Objectivists (and admirers of Ayn Rand) to post "their own polite and evenhanded comments."

Update: A far more friendly discussion by someone in partial agreement with Objectivism can be found here.

Giuliani: Reform the Tax Code

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

His plan is far from perfect, but Rudy Giuliani has further fleshed out his proposal for reforming the way Americans pay for the best medical care in the world. He brings up many issues other candidates have completely ignored, such as the role of our tax code in bringing about the current mess, and sounds almost like a real capitalist at times:

America has the best medical care in the world. People come here from around the world to take advantage of our path-breaking medicine and state-of-the-art treatments.

But the healthcare system is being dragged down by decades of government-imposed mandates, wasteful bureaucracy, and massive distortions in the US tax code that punish self-employed and low-income workers. Since 2000, Americans have seen their health insurance costs nearly double. Frivolous lawsuits have led to defensive medicine and doctors leaving the profession. More than 45 million Americans are without health insurance.

America is best when we solve our problems from our strengths, not our weaknesses. Healthcare reform must be based on increased choice, affordability, portability, and individual empowerment.

We need to begin by bringing fairness to the tax treatment of healthcare. The current tax system penalizes millions -- including the rising ranks of the self-employed and 40 percent of employees at small firms -- who pay for insurance on their own and receive no tax benefit. [bold added]

This proposal sounds somewhat like an acceptable program to transition our medical sector from the current unholy mix of capitalist innovation and fascist controls -- except that in fact it is not.

As I have indicated before, Rudy Giuliani's past record on economic issues is hardly one of principled support for capitalism, and this proposal does not deviate substantially from his established pattern. Although he opposes outright nationalization of our medical sector, he still does not oppose government entanglement there -- the very thing that must eventually be completely eradicated.

Empowering people with real choice will improve markets and lower premiums. Expanded tax-free Health Savings Accounts could be used for insurance premiums, deductibles, and other expenses. With more flexibility and individual control, Health Savings Accounts can become a major source of tax-free savings and security for America's middle class. As savings are created and there are reductions in the cost of health insurance, we will develop a new health insurance credit for low-income individuals and families so they can purchase private insurance tailored to their needs. We want to empower individuals, not the government.[bold added]

So much for "empowering" the individuals whose money will have to pay for this new government handout....

Although the election is still over a year away and it remains remotely possible that another candidate will float a superior proposal, I suspect that this is the best we will see in this election. Should this proposal or a similar one end up being implemented, our medical sector will have once again dodged a bullet.

Nevertheless, those of us who favor capitalism must make it clear that this proposal, as it is, does not represent a true "free-market cure". It would be a remission in the disease that is slowly killing our medical sector at best. If we allow an endorsement of continued government interference like Giuliani's stand unchallenged, knowledge of the true nature of the real free market cure will remain absent from the public debate.

And, when the government controls in this plan inevitably cause problems, it could be "capitalism" that ends up, once again, unjustly taking the blame.

In sum: This proposal offers short-term relief of some of the symptoms -- at the possible expense of a long-term cure.

-- CAV

Pharmaceutical Price Controls: A Prescription for Disaster

Irvine, CA--The prices of many U.S.-made prescription drugs are lower in places such as Canada, Australia, and Europe than in the United States. In order to allow Americans to take advantage of these lower prices, the House recently passed a bill that would permit the re-importation of these cheaper drugs to the U.S.

But according to Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, "The supporters of this measure fail to ask one crucial question: why do prescription drugs cost so much less in other countries?

"The answer is that, unlike the U.S., countries such as Canada impose price controls on prescription drugs, forcing drug companies that want to do business there to sell their products for less than they would in a free market. Drug re-importation schemes, like the one passed by the House, are in effect 'back-door' price controls. They enable Americans to buy the foreign price-controlled drugs at a lower price than their U.S. counterparts--just as if the U.S. government itself had capped prescription drug prices.

"But price controls violate the rights of drug makers. Neither the Canadian government nor the American government has a right to tell drug makers what prices they may charge for their products.

"Proponents of prescription drug price controls claim they are necessary in order to protect consumers from 'excessive' drug prices. But if a consumer determines that a drug price is 'excessive,' he already can protect himself--by refusing to buy the drug. He has no right to buy the drug for less than the drug company is willing to sell it, anymore than he has a right to buy a car for less than a car dealer is willing to charge.

"Indeed, the ultimate result of forcing drug makers to offer their products for less is to ensure that fewer such products are available. As with any commodity, price controls lead inevitably to shortages, as it becomes unprofitable for companies to produce enough drugs to meet the rising demand created by the artificially low price. And such controls hamper the creation of new life-saving medicines, as drug companies find it less profitable to invest the millions upon millions of dollars necessary to discover new drugs and bring them to the market.

"The sole reason Canada has been able to institute its price controls without severely hampering the discovery and production of prescription drugs is because it is 'free riding' on the backs of Americans. It is only because the American market is free from price controls that drug companies are able to recoup their enormous R&D costs, and thus find it profitable to sell additional units of the drugs at a lower cost in other, price-controlled countries. Should America impose price controls either directly or by proxy, the house of cards will collapse.

"We should protect the rights of pharmaceutical companies--and the welfare of consumers--and demand an end to price controls, direct and indirect."

America was not Gilead

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

A reader queried CAC wanting sources that would substantiate the assertion in my letter to the Wall Street Journal (“State Department’s Faith-Based Initiatives,” July 31) that the U.S. was not founded on Christian principles, but secular ones. Here is my reply, and the instances cited below do not begin to exhaust the amount of proof:

From Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia (1782):

"The returning good sense of our country threatens abortion to their hopes, & they [the clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: & enough too in their opinion, & this is the cause of their printing lying pamphlets against me . . ."

Jefferson endorsed individual freedom; he argued that any form of government control, not only of religion, but of individual mercantilism, was tyranny. He maintained that our rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, that is, that individual rights do not derive from religious dogma or belief, but from observable nature. Whether or not a “God” was responsible for that nature, was to him and to most of his fellow Founders, utterly irrelevant.

Also:

“Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.” – Letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787.

From James Madison, fourth president of the U.S.:

“Every new & successful example of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters is of importance.” – Letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822.

“And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Govt will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed.” – Letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822, in Saul K. Padover, ed., The Complete Madison: His Basic Writings (1953).

“The civil government…functions with complete success…by the total separation of the Church from the State.” – Madison, Writings Volume 8, p. 432, quote from Gene Garman, “Essays in Addition to America’s Real Religion.”

From Benjamin Franklin:

"I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies."

"Lighthouses are more helpful then churches."

From John Adams:

“The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?” – Letter to Thomas Jefferson, June 20, 1815.

“The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.” – Adams, “A Defence of the Constitution of Government of the United States of America” (1787-88), from Adrienne Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free Society (1965), p. 258, quoted from Ed and Michael Buckner, “Quotations that Support Separation of State and Church.”

“Thirteen governments [of the original thirteen states] thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind.” – Adams, “A Defence of the Constitution of Government of the United States of America” (1787-88), from Adrienne Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free Society (1965), p. 258, quoted from Ed and Michael Buckner, “Quotations that Support Separation of State and Church.”

“We should begin by setting conscience free. When all men of all religions ... shall enjoy equal liberty, property, and an equal chance for honors and power ... we may expect that improvements will be made in the human character and the state of society.” – Letter to Dr. Price, April 8, 1785, quoted from Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom (1991).

“As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?” – Letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, December 27, 1816.

Regarding the 1797 Treaty with Tripoli, cited in my letter/article, here is the wording from it regarding the query:

In 1797, six years after the adoption of the Bill of Rights, the United States government signed a treaty with the Muslim nation of Tripoli that contained the following statement (numbered Article 11 in the treaty):

“As the Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the law, religion or tranquility of Musselmen; and as the states never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mohometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinion shall ever produce an interruption of harmony existing between the two countries.” (Italics original)

The treaty was approved by President John Adams and his Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, and was then ratified by the Senate without objection. Of course, today, the U.S., as a secular nation, should harbor a natural enmity “against the law, religion and tranquility of Islam,” since Islamist jihadists and states that sponsor terrorism have declared war on America, and it should bear hostility against any Muslim nation that seeks to harm America.

The historical instances are legion that support the contention that the Founders did not intend America to be a Judeo-Christian state. The Founders may have been deists, but their position was that if God existed, he played no role in human affairs; it was left to men to find the means to achieve happiness on earth through reason, especially in their political arrangements. The Founders were reality oriented; they asserted repeatedly that religious beliefs or fantasies were the purview of individuals, not to be regulated or commanded by the state.

To claim otherwise is to reveal a sorry ignorance of the philosophical and political origins of America; or a patent dishonesty passing for “revealed” truth and masking a frightening political agenda.

The fundamental problem is that our President believes – and I stress believes – that America is indeed a nation governed by Christian principles. It is the altruistic, self-sacrificing tenets of the Christian morality that have enmeshed the U.S. in a no-win war in Iraq and Afghanistan against belligerent “Musselmen.”

It was clergymen of Bush’s ilk who accused Jefferson of wanting to declare war on religion. But it was their “schemes” to impose religion by force that he opposed. It is noteworthy that even in Jefferson’s time, while the majority of Americans were nominally Christian, very few of them would likely have disagreed with him (or with Madison or Adams) that the nation was founded on a secular, natural rights philosophy, not a religious one.

Presidential candidates should also take note of it, as well, especially those who in the past evinced no particular religious bent, but who are now jumping on the Gideonite bandwagon. An Associated Press article of July 30th, “Religion Looms Large over 2008 Race,” reported:

“…All the Democratic and Republican presidential hopefuls have been grilled on their religious beliefs. Most seem eager to talk publicly about their faith as they actively court religious voters.”

Further into the article, it says:

“The links between religion and governance intensified with the presidency of George W. Bush, said Joan Konner, former dean of the Columbia Journalism School. ‘He brought it up when he ran for office and he said his favorite philosopher, in answer to a question in a debate, was Jesus….And then he followed up on that by faith-based public funding and various other actions that started to erode what Americans took for granted as the separation between church and state,’ said Konner….”

One of the Associated Press article’s examples of a candidate exploiting the religion angle is Democratic Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who “emphasizes her Methodist upbringing and says her faith helped her repair her marriage.”

So she might claim. It is a more credible likelihood that it was her faith in Bill Clinton’s political guidance and savvy and arm-twisting skills that “repaired” her marriage than her belief in the literal truth of the Bible’s chapter and verse. Why sacrifice a political career and a chance to satisfy one’s power-lust over such a petty thing as a cuckolding spouse? That she is willing to “forgive” her husband’s sexual escapades to facilitate her quest for political power is a measure of this ambitious harridan’s selflessness and consequent need to “serve society.”

However, all the presidential candidates are of the left – name me one Republican who is advocating, for example, repeal of the 16th Amendment, or unregulated laissez faire capitalism, or the absolute right of Americans to be secure in their property – and all of them want to serve “society.”

But, as Jamie Whyte writes with sardonic wit in an excellent article in the Financial Times of London (“Thatcher was right about society, David,” August 2), “Society is for the left what God is for Christians. Its mere existence creates moral obligations, with no need for contracts and with no need for tiresome debate about the merits of making these obligations law. Those who deny the existence of society are simply trying to evade their responsibilities.”

Whyte agrees with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women….”

Another way of saying it is that “society” is as much a phantasm as God, and those who believe in it also claim that being a member of it entails duties, responsibilities and debts to it, just as one must obey God’s commandments, if one is a conscientious Christian. But if “society” is only the people one encounters in one’s lifetime, or sees on television, where is that entity called “society”? And if such a thing does not exist, what is the source of all those duties, obligations and debts? That amorphous mass of strangers sociologists call “society”?

As Ayn Rand would put it: Blank out.

Both Republicans and Democrats are attempting to wed God and Society in their venal campaigns to win first, the primaries, and then the national election, by appealing to the delusional worst in the electorate: Christian collectivists.

If the left and conservative right combine to create a political force, we may today be witnessing the beginnings of the establishment of a nation the Founders would have abhorred: a theocracy – but with a socialist base.

A Kossack Handicaps the Republicans

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Trapper John at Daily Kos ponders the chances of the Republicans running for President and concludes, "Jesus, this is a weak field." The piece is worth reading as an example of how leftists delude themselves.

First, he concedes that a Republican could win if there are "Scandals, terrorist attacks, dramatic cultural shifts"; apparently, these events make people vote Republican.

Then Trapper John looks at Giuliani, Thompson, Romney, McCain and "Everyone else." He bubbles over at the prospect of scandal taking down Giuliani; he mocks Thompson's anemic fund-raising; he asserts that Evangelical Christians will not vote for a Mormon, so Romney is dead; and he notes McCain's organizational and fund-raising woes.

In the entire piece there is only one thing missing: the Republicans' ideas. This is the left's big weakness in politics. They don't understand the importance of ideas. They think people vote Republican out of fear, tradition, racism, nastiness, greed, nationalism, superstition, homophobia, rage, hatred and more fear.

Since he does not address ideas, Trapper John misses that Giuliani stands for strong defense and recently unveiled a health care policy that is a step in the direction of a free market, not a government takeover. Next November, these are the issues Americans will be evaluating, and the common man is more rational than leftists give him credit for being.

It is obvious from this piece (and from the Democrats' record in the last few decades of elections) that if Giuliani is the nominee, the liberal-left will have their smear machine working overtime. They will ease their consciences with such banalities as, "Politics ain't bean bag," then throw all the mud they can at the Republican.

I get the sense that people are tired of scandals. I think they're ready to listen seriously to new ideas. If I'm right, then this trend would be the greatest catastrophe to hit the Democrats since the Civil War. Forget scandals and terrorist attacks, although you could call this a "dramatic cultural shift." If Americans shift toward taking ideas seriously, the Democrats will fall apart because they have succumbed to the nihilism and subjectivism of modern philosophy and no longer understand that ideas move the world.

Gunboat Pragmatism

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

Broadcast news coverage is becoming as chummy and surfacy as “Entertainment Tonight” and “Access Hollywood.” Driven by “personality” and photogenics, the kidding banter and annoying silliness of the morning and evening anchors for ABC, CBS and NBC almost makes one pine for the serious, dour days of Walter Cronkite.

Listening to the current political debates between the presidential candidates – or perhaps they should be called “personality” debates, for their political content is virtually nil – has become, to date, as deafening as a forest full of croaking tree frogs at midnight. These human tree frogs may be communicating something to each other, but not to the public’s ears.

And reading about the U.S.’s efforts to bring “peace” and “stability” to the Mideast and to Iraq is akin to being sentenced to read the entire dismal oeuvre of Franz Kafka, a special edition illustrated with etchings by Edvard Munch.

Instead of acknowledging our enemies – after first identifying them – and taking the proper military actions to neutralize or destroy them to ensure this country’s safety, our policy is has been to treat them all as potential or imagined allies, to deem them “forces of moderation” in the pursuit of peace and stability in the region, and to reward them with military hardware.

The most recent instance of this foolishness is the Bush administration’s proposed $20 billion weapons sale to Saudi Arabia and its neighboring feudal kingdoms, tyrannies, and regimes, every one of them hostile to the U.S. and to its only regional ally, Israel.

To “balance” this the U.S. is also proposing to sell about $30 billion in slightly more advanced military hardware to Israel, a country every one of our Arab “allies” would prefer to erase from existence in the name of the same Mideast “peace” and “security.”

The New York Times of July 28 reports, under the headline “U.S. Set to Offer Huge Arms Deal to Saudi Arabia”:

“The proposed package of advanced weaponry for Saudi Arabia, which includes advanced satellite-guided bombs, upgrades to its fighters and new naval vessels, has made Israel and some of its supporters in Congress nervous. Senior officials who described the package on Friday said they believed that the administration had resolved those concerns, in part by promising Israel $30.4 billion in military aid over the next decade, a significant increase over what Israel has received in the past 10 years.

“Along with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are likely to receive equipment and weaponry from the arms sales under consideration, officials said. In general, the U.S. is interested in upgrading the countries’ air and missile defense systems, improving their navies and making modest improvements in their air forces.”

Ostensibly, all this aid is meant to “protect” these fiefdoms from Iranian military designs. And every one of those fiefdoms holds the U.S. hostage via their expropriated oil production. This would not be a problem, if the U.S. were not held hostage by environmentalists, who refuse to allow the development of known offshore oil reserves and the construction of new refineries.

The U.S. will “insist” that that the weaponry not be used against Israel. In the meantime, Iran is not acknowledged by the Bush administration as an enemy, either. Consider the contrast: When Nazi Germany invaded Poland and France, we did not send envoys to Berlin to plead for “peace” and “stability” in Europe. When we secured a defeated Germany and Italy, Britain did not accuse the U.S. of an “illegal occupation,” as Saudi Arabia has publicly charged the U.S.

Perhaps the most revealing sentence in this report is:

“In talks about the package, the administration has not sought specific assurances from Saudi Arabia that it would be more supportive of the American effort in Iraq as a condition of receiving the arms package, the officials said.”

That is, the U.S. will not demand that Saudi Arabia stop sending Sunni “insurgents” into Iraq to kill American troops. Also, the U.S. is “certain” that Saudi Arabia is not only financially supporting Sunni groups in Iraq, but that it is working to bring down the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government. Another Times article from July 27, “Saudis’ Role in Iraq Frustrates U.S. Officials,” reports:

“…Bush administration officials are voicing increasing anger at what they say has been Saudi Arabia’s counterproductive role in the Iraq war. They say that beyond regarding Mr. Maliki as an Iranian [or Shiite] agent, the Saudis have offered financial support to Sunni groups….Of an estimated 60 to 80 foreign fighters who enter Iraq each month, American military and intelligence officials say that nearly half are coming from Saudi Arabia and that the Saudis have not done enough to stem the flow.”

Elsewhere in the article, the Times related:

“The American officials in Iraq also say that the majority of suicide bombers in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia and that about 40 percent of all foreign fighters are Saudi. Officials said that while most of the foreign fighters came to Iraq to become suicide bombers, others arrived as bomb makers, snipers, logisticians and financiers.”

But the U.S. continues to regard Saudi Arabia as an “ally” and a “force for moderation.” Franz Kafka could not have conceived of a more existentially obscene and futile a policy.

Literary lights consider Kafka’s short story, “The Metamorphosis,” in which a man overnight turns into an insect, as his pièce de résistance. “Insects” properly characterizes the formulators and purveyors of current U.S. foreign policy, and they have been insects for at least the last half-century.

Pragmatism, after all, in the name of practicality in pursuit of a “Platonic” peace, eschews making moral judgments and taking actions based on those judgments. In the run-up to the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, pragmatism will prove to be not so “practical” after all. The current Iraqi government, created and propped up by the U.S. at the expense of American lives and treasure, on the transparent fiction that such a “stable” government will ensure America’s security, will either eventually fall from Saudi efforts, or be “co-opted” by Iran (and there is evidence that this is already the case) to threaten Israel and Saudi Arabia. Iranian “fighters” are already competing with Saudi “fighters” on many American lives they can take.

In the 19th century, Western powers, including the U.S., applied a policy of “gunboat diplomacy” to protect American and Western lives and commercial interests in countries whose governments would not protect them from killers and looters. A warship need only appear in the waters outside such a country, and the crisis would be over.

Today, we are proposing to give those renegade governments the weapons with which to threaten or destroy American lives, not only in those countries, but in the U.S. itself.

Philosopher Harry Binswanger remarked recently:

“America’s security does not require that a proper government be installed in Iraq, Iran, Syria, etc. Our security requires only that the various fanatical bands in the region know full well that the moment they raise a hint of a threat to Americans, they will be crushed. We should let Baathists, Shiites, Hamas, the PLO, Al Qada, and Hezbollah all fight each other – as long as they all know they must keep clear of America….If the Arab/Muslim populations are not culturally advanced enough to embrace the institutions of a free society, that is their problem, not ours….”

I endorse that thinking one hundred percent. We should adopt Rhett Butler’s attitude towards Scarlett O’Hara at the end of Gone with the Wind: Frankly, we shouldn’t give a damn whether or not they discover those institutions or continue to butcher each other in the name of a ghost. Just don’t point your guns on our direction – or else.

Colorado Anti-Shakespeare Festival

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Since I find plays difficult to read, I've been making a modest effort in recent years to see productions of worthwhile plays (read: the classics, particularly Shakespeare) when possible. The Denver Center Theater Company's winter production of King Lear was excellent. I plan to see its production of The Merry Wives of Windsor next spring. (One Shakespeare per year seems to be the tradition.) Last year, Paul and I also saw Twelfth Night at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. It was enjoyable, largely due to the fidelity of the production to the original. (The director merely made an insignificant change in setting.)

This summer, I was hoping to attend all three plays of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival: A Midsummer Night's Dream, All's Well That Ends Well, and Julius Caesar. I was particularly eager to see A Midsummer Night's Dream, since my eighth grade class produced it. (It was an all-girls school: I played the king.)

My hopes for Midsummer and All's Well were pretty solidly squashed last week in reading the reviews. All were substantially changed to some point beyond rational comprehension.

The review of Midsummer begins as follows:

To quote poor Hermia, "I understand not what you mean by this!"

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival opened its 50th season Saturday with "A Midsummer Night's Dream," but it would take a magic potion to decipher what was going on.

From what I've gathered from various sources, the director made the play a dense commentary about theater itself. Ick.

As for All's Well, all is not well. According to this review, the play includes gender-swapping gimmicks:

Prior to King Charles II's decree that reversed the order in 1660, women were not allowed to act on the stage in England. In CSFs "All's Well," what we're witnessing when the lights come up is an acting company rehearsing "All's Well" circa 1660.

In the first scene, an actor/director gives orders and male actors squeeze into corsets and wigs preparing to play women's roles, while women are relegated to sewing costumes pieces or helping with makeup.

The rehearsal is soon interrupted by the King's declaration that women are no longer banned from the stage. The news is met with both merriment and consternation, and quickly, the show is recast, with women taking the female roles.

It's a surprisingly visceral moment. When Motyka moves from seamstress to Helena, we witness both the realization of a dream and the birth of a character.

Oy, give me a break! Can't the play just be what the play is about?

I was hoping that the production of Julius Caesar would be more traditional, but the review in the Denver Post showed it to be the worst of the lot. As if making Cassius a woman and drawing inapt parallels between Caesar and George Bush weren't enough, just consider the following:

If only [director] Croot had left well enough alone. Instead she piles layer after layer of impenetrable interjections, starting with a bizarre set design: A couch. Harsh fluorescent lighting. A massive drawing of a lion (Caesar?) that from left to right fades from a regal, fully fleshed head to a skeletal tail. Massive mounds of rubble and discarded junk, mostly old black and white TVs that occasionally flicker but are put to no other discernible use.

Random visuals like Antony's first entrance as a studly jogger; a "Minority Report" "pre-cog" soothsayer who's half-human, half-machine -- and half-blind. A huge, sliding shower curtain that seems utterly incongruous until the action in front of it turns into a "bloodbath." (Get it?).

Wait, it gets stranger: Just as Caesar is about to be set upon, the action freezes. Thieriot is made to step out of character and announce the intermission as if teasing the next episode of "Bat Man." Totally off-putting. Worse, when we return for the killing, suddenly, for those few, odd seconds, we're at Lipgloss: Trance music and flashing lights. It ends as soon as Caesar does. The audience has no choice but to guffaw, and do you really want your audience laughing - the one time they will laugh all night - as Caesar is being slain?

There's more "stuff" - A stuffed lion (or is it a deer?) is gutted simultaneous to the gutting of Caesar. A stuffed Caesar body-double substitutes for Buckley during Antony's big speech, and Thieriot is made to bandy it about as if he were in a "Monty Python" skit. And at the end, an "Indiana Jones" visual gag trashes another death scene. None of these carried out with confidence or obvious meaning.

I think I understand Shakespeare well enough, but after an equally head-scratching "Midsummer," I'm not much understanding what the Colorado Shakespeare Festival is doing with him this summer. Whatever happened to making Shakespeare easier to understand, not harder? Whatever happened to "serve the story first"?

I would offer my usual "Blech!" but a friend with far more expertise in such matters told me that seemed "far too laudatory." So it is.

If only the world of theater could find some genuinely daring directors to produce actual Shakespeare, as in this hysterical story from The Onion: Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play In Time, Place Shakespeare Intended!

I'm not wholly opposed to Shakespeare modernizations. So long as the language and plot remain faithful, a somewhat more familiar setting can make the characters and events of the play more clear. For example, I do like the uber-modernized 1996 Romeo + Juliet with Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio. It made clear to me the exact nature of the blood-feud between the Capulets and the Montagues for the first time: it's gang warfare, plain and simple. The uber-modern setting is also uber-stylized, which I definitely like.

If the reviews are even remotely accurate, no such virtues can be found in the productions of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival this summer. It's Shakespeare -- filtered though Lois Cook's less talented little sister.

Five Amazing Options for Studying American History!

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

MacDonald: "The Abduction of Opera"

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

Via email, a reader pointed me to a morbidly interesting article in City Journal on the latest manifestation of nihilism in the arts, a trend seen across Europe that is now threatening to rear its ugly head in America: Regietheater (meaning "director's theater" in German).

Mozart's lighthearted opera The Abduction from the Seraglio does not call for a prostitute's nipples to be sliced off and presented to the lead soprano. Nor does it include masturbation, urination as foreplay, or forced oral sex. Europe's new breed of opera directors, however, know better than Mozart what an opera should contain. So not only does the Abduction at Berlin's Komische Oper feature the aforementioned activities; it also replaces Mozart's graceful ending with a Quentin Tarantino--esque bloodbath and the promise of future perversion.

Although I was at first tempted to fault the article for dwelling too much on what particular desecrations are being committed in European opera houses, past attacks on beauty in our age arguably make this necessary. Otherwise, how else would one grasp that the oft-cited Piss Christ no longer represents the cutting edge in the expression of hatred of beauty done in the name of art?

If you can bear her descriptions of what is being done to opera in Europe today, you will find a thoughtful exploration of why this is occurring. MacDonald correctly notes that the heavy government subsidies which insulate European opera from the marketplace have accelerated this trend, but have not alone caused it. Such travesties required a context of general cultural decline, which she correctly notes results in attacks against Enlightenment values.

Although correct as far as that goes, MacDonald does not quite make it to a proper identification of the roots of the cultural context in which opera is being mutilated:

The current transgressive style of opera production is better understood as a manifestation of the triumph of adolescent culture, which began with the violent student movement of the 1960s. Even as West Germany forged ahead economically, its intellectuals, students, and artists became infatuated with the prosperity-killing Marxism practiced in stumbling East Germany. West German opera houses began inviting East Berlin directors to bring their heavy-handed critiques of capitalism, staged on the backs of Wagner and other composers, to Western venues. The situation was the same across Europe. "Student dissatisfaction with materialism . . . echoed in the theaters, notably in repertory and styles of production that were critical of bourgeois values and the status quo," writes Patrick Carnegy in Wagner and the Art of the Theatre. In Paris in the late 1960s, City Opera manager-in-waiting Gerard Mortier led a group of student provocateurs who loudly disrupted opera productions that they considered too traditional.

Yes. This is a triumph of "adolescent" culture in the sense that nihilism appeals to the rebelliousness of many adolescents, and MacDonald correctly identifies German intellectuals as the ultimate wellspring for this trend, but she does not go far enough. The sixties, although viscerally repulsive and blatantly anti-Western, could never have occurred in the absence of a long and systemic erosion of Western culture.

The nihilistic sixties and the current offenses against good taste MacDonald documents are more constructively viewed as opportunistic infections appearing in a host whose real problem is a weakened immune system. Accordingly, the real question is not the one she asks -- whether one doctor (The Metropolitan Opera) can stave off an opportunistic infection -- but this one: What trashed the immune system of Western Civilization in the first place and what can be done about that?

Another article on the decline of art I encountered recently, Dianne Durante's "19th-Century French Painting and Philosophy", which appeared in the Fall 2006 edition of The Objective Standard, asks this question and points us to the right answer after exploring the trajectory of art during that period along with what sorts of opinions relevant to aesthetics several representative artists and critics expressed. Here is her penultimate paragraph:

As a result of the changes in philosophical ideas from Enlightenment assumptions to Kantian premises, we have seen the subjects of French 19th-century paintings move from the heroic to the ordinary to the unrecognizable, and style move from careful evocation of texture and atmosphere to dabs and smears applies with a palette knife. By the early years of the 20th century, the works being produced by the French avant-garde were bizarre and incomprehensible, but were defended vehemently by the artists and critics. Hence, although it is startling that Matisse's Luxe, calme, et volupte (fig. 2) was accepted as an admirable work of art a mere century after David painted Madame Recamier (fig. 1), it is understandable in the context of the time. Art is, after all, subject to cause and effect. Most artists, like most other people, uncritically adopt the ideas circulating in their culture. The philosophical ideas circulating by 1900 were horrendous. Art followed suit.

The German intellectuals alluded to by Heather MacDonald, who helped deliver opera to these wolves in directors' clothing are merely the last in a long line of anti-reason philosophers going all the way back to Immanuel Kant, and whose influence has been eroding Western aesthetic sensibilities for quite some time. To reverse this philosophic trend -- and ultimately save the West and its great art -- will require a long and patient reintroduction (and defense) of Enlightenment values to Western culture, as Ayn Rand pointed out and attempted to begin during her lifetime.

-- CAV

Inappropriate headline of the day

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

You have to savor this Washington Post headline for an article on News Corporation's purchase of Dow & Jones & Co., for it beautifully encapsulates how voluntary trade in the free market is equated with bare-knuckled coercion. According to the Post, "Murdoch Seizes Wall St. Journal In $5 Billion Coup," but there's no word if he's had anybody lined up and shot.

State Department's Faith-Based Initiatives

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

I sent this letter to The Wall Street Journal on July 28th. It may or not be printed. I sent a copy of it to the State Department; there has been no response to it. But, I thought it important to post here, as well.

Sirs:

I read Alina L. Romanowski’s letter of July 27 in response to Bret Stephens’s Global View column, “Public Diplomacy for Dummies” (July 10). I have two questions for the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Educational and Cultural Affairs at the State Department:

First, where in the Constitution is any branch of the federal government empowered to “reach out” to any religion or to any of its adherents? Didn’t the Founders go to great pains to ensure the separation of church and state? Many of the Founders asserted quite rightly and unequivocally in their letters and public correspondence that the United States is in no way a “Christian” nation, nor was it founded on Christian moral principles.

For example, the treaty of 1797 between the U.S. and Tripoli stated that since the U.S. is not a “Christian” nation, neither Tripoli nor any of the other Barbary States had an excuse to capture “infidel” American merchant vessels and enslave their crews and passengers. (Not that this made much difference to the North African Islamist pirates, who raided Western European coastlines for slaves as far away as Iceland until well into the 18th century, acting on orders from their caliphs and sultans back home. Estimates of Europeans and Americans taken as slaves range between a million to one and a half million persons, most of whom presumably perished in servitude under their Islamic masters. But, I’m betting that neither Condi nor Karen Hughes raise this subject on their glad-handing junkets to Islamic dictatorships.)

Jefferson, Madison and John Adams remarked succinctly on the fact that the U.S. was founded on the secular, natural rights philosophy of John Locke and other political philosophers of the age, a rights philosophy that had little or nothing to do with God. “God” and “nature” were, in their deist minds, nearly synonymous. (Though Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in their recent books suggest that Jefferson especially was a “closet” atheist.)

Doubtless the “out reach” programs described by Romanowski in her letter are extensions of President Bush’s wholly unconstitutional faith-based initiatives.

Second, what makes Romanowski or anyone else in the State Department think that there could be such a thing as a “more moderate version of Islam”? Since the term “Islam” means submission, the inference is that those who submit to the creed are either converted or conquered. However, Islam can no more be made “moderate” than Christianity. It is as bloody-minded and bent on conquest as the Old Testament. It cannot be “tamed” as Christianity was in the West. It is fundamentally a political-religious moral system.

The programs Romanowksi describes constitute an unacknowledged concession that Islam is a political force, not just a religious one. Why else refer to one program as “Citizen Dialogue”?

Strip Islam of its political attributes, and most of its “moral” and religious precepts would be eviscerated, as well. What would be left would not be “Islam,” but a creed as pacific as the Amish’s.

In short, there is no accommodation of a separation of mosque and state to be found anywhere in the Koran, the Hadith, or in any Islamic jurisprudence based on Sharia law, which is to Muslims as much a guide to “moral” action as the Ten Commandments are to Christians. There is no statement in Islamic literature that even closely approximates the Christian dictum, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” Caesar and God, in Islam, are the one Allah, and Mohammed is his “prophet.”

On the whole, the programs that Romanowski boasts of implicitly promote religion. Sending American Muslims to engage in “dialogue” with foreign Muslims is no better than sending American Christians overseas to banter with foreign Christians. Or is the State Department also engaged in that unconstitutional, taxpayer-supported activity, as well?

Sincerely,

Edward Cline
Yorktown, VA

The Psycho-Epistemology of Sexuality - Part IV

By Dan Edge from The Edge of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Gender as an Integration of Individuating Elements

This is part 4 of a 6-part essay on the Psycho-epistemology of Sexuality. Parts 1 and 2 can be found here, and part 3 can be found here.

In parts 2 and 3 of this essay, I argued that man values individuating elements of self, like the particulars of his body, because these elements are integrated by one's mind with his pursuit of objective values. I also indicated why, when one perceives a concrete (like the artist's hands) which symbolizes a host of values, the subconscious responds with a positive emotion. I will now apply these ideas to gender and sexuality specifically.

One's sex is an element of self which is a significant factor determining the range of physical attributes possible to him. The essential difference between men and woman is physiological. Men are generally taller and heavier, have deeper voices, straighter figures, have greater physical strength, more facial hair, etc. Women are generally smaller, have higher voices, hourglass-shaped figures, are relatively weaker, etc. Granted, a wide variety of attributes are possible within each gender. These physiological tendencies are not absolutely universal -- borderline cases exist -- but it cannot be denied that there are fundamental physiological differences between men and women in general.

For example, within the population of males there is a great variety in vocal pitch. However, men are much more similar to each other in this regard when contrasted with women. Being male or female determines - in part - the range of vocal pitch that is possible to a person. To use a simple numerical representation: Assume that the entire range of pitches of the human voice could be measured from 1 to 10. And for the sake of argument, assume that 99% of men fell within the 2-6 range, and 99% of women fell within the 6-9 range. (These numbers are entirely made up, but are close enough to the truth for our purpose.) There is some overlap between the pitch ranges of men and women, but not much. Again, borderline cases exist, but they are just that: borderline cases.

While the range of one's vocal pitch is limited by his gender, his particular voice can be highly distinctive. The sound of one's own voice is certainly an individuating element of self, like the artist's hands. It is one's voice that gives reality to his ideas and communicates them to others. If my argument up to this point holds, then the distinctiveness of one's voice can legitimately be experienced as a value, as could one's distinctive walk, style of dancing, etc. Each of these physical attributes individuates a person, and at the same time places him firmly in the category of his gender.

Why is this important? If it were only vocal pitch that separated men and women, then it wouldn't be important at all -- just as skin color or eye color alone are not significant individuating aspects of self. But the existence of the two sexes is a fundamental, universal fact of human beings as such. A huge number of physical individuating aspects of self are limited to a certain range by one's sex. This is why it is legitimate for a person to experience his sex as an essential element of his self. It is why - in fundamental terms - I experience my physical self as primarily a man, and Kelly thinks of herself primarily as a woman.

We have here a great range of distinguishing physical attributes which are in some respects physiologically integrated. This is an extremely important point. There is one concrete fact -- one's gender -- which gives rise to and integrates a huge number of individuating elements of self. One cannot perceive one's "man-ness" or "woman-ness" as a whole through introspection. There are so many individual physical elements which are associated with one's gender in his subconscious, it would be impossible to hold them all in his focal awareness simultaneously. But what if one could perceive another single, concrete entity which symbolized and reflected all of these individual physical elements at once? It's easy -- simply take a long, hungry look at your lover.

Because it is the difference between the sexes that gives rise to and integrates so many individuating elements of self, perceiving a member of the opposite sex gives one an immediate, perceptual frame of reference -- one which places a special stress on those differences. This is why men are more aware of their own masculine qualities in the presence of women, and vice-versa. A man on a desert island, unaware of the existence of women, would not understand what it felt like to be masculine. But for one in a romantic relationship with a member of the opposite sex, this feeling permeates his entire physical sense of being.

I have not yet touched upon the most easily recognizable difference between the sexes -- the sex organs themselves. Of all the physical elements of self determined by one's gender, clearly none are more important than the way he actually has sex. (I must stress that I am delimiting my arguments to heterosexual sex on this point.) We have arrived at another critically important fact: Man possesses a great number of individuating attributes that are physiologically integrated by his gender, and one of those elements is the form in which he experiences the greatest physical pleasure possible to him. In the act of sex, this physical pleasure is enhanced by the direct perception of a being which symbolizes a host of values - namely, the integration of many of one's distinguishing attributes - by stressing the essential differences.

But the joy of sex does not stop there. Man is not only a physical being -- he is also a conceptual being. Not only does he possess physical individuating elements, but also mental and spiritual individuating elements. One's lover can symbolize and reflect these values, as well. The final result has been named psychological visibility.

In part 5 of this essay, I will discuss the concept of psychological visibility, and how sexuality is a critical component of this process.

--Dan Edge

OCON in the News

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Ari and Linn Armstrong published a column in the Grand Junction Free Press about the then-upcoming OCON two weeks ago: Happy birthday, Atlas Shrugged. Also, Ari has altered his "Liberty and Prosperity Challenge" in ways that might of be interest:

As many of you have read, in response to calls to increase tax spending on food stamps, my wife and I proposed the six-month "Serious Food Economy Challenge," during which my wife and I were prepared to spend no more than $3 per person per day on food. However, for every dollar we came in under budget, advocates of higher food-stamp spending had to donate $10 to our nonprofit of choice. The minimum amount to activate the challenge was $2,000. Unfortunately, only two people responded, pledging $200 combined.

But now there's a new challenge: The Liberty and Prosperity Challenge.

During "The Liberty and Prosperity Challenge," scheduled for the entire month of August, my wife and I will spend no more than $180 jointly on food, or less than $3 per person per day. We will donate every dollar we save out of that budget to the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI). Others may participate in the challenge by agreeing to donate the same amount of money either to ARI or to the nonprofit of their choice.

So you can participate by agreeing to donate one dollar to a nonprofit of your choice for every dollar we come in under budget. You can also send me 200 words promoting your nonprofit of choice, which I will publish with the article. Finally, you can help promote the challenge.

Green Consumerism?

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

As much as I've been irked by the "green invasion" into consumer products, I imagine the true greens are so very much more upset by it. The millions of people buying recycled paper, organic strawberries, hybrid cars, and natural potato chips are just as much filthy capitalist consumers as ever! They just don't understand the whole-life change that Mother Earth requires! So I'm glad to see that the true greens are fighting back, as that'll alienate the pseudo-greens from the environmental movement that much faster, leaving it without substantial support.

Here's the Ayn Rand Institute Press Release on the backlash:

Environmentalists Against "Buying Green"
July 30, 2007

Irvine, CA--With organic food in every grocery store and hybrid cars on every stretch of freeway, "green consumerism" has become commonplace. But a backlash against such allegedly "earth friendly" shopping is arising; critics within the environmentalist movement are condemning the trend as superficial and contradictory. Says one environmental activist: "green consumerism is an oxymoronic phrase."

"This criticism is extremely revealing about the true nature of environmentalism," said Dr. Keith Lockitch, resident fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute. "For decades, many environmentalists have insisted that protecting the environment is not incompatible with industrial civilization. To make their ideology more palatable, they regularly promise that living 'sustainably' doesn't have to come at too great an economic cost or personal hardship. But when people finally begin to come on board and make allegedly 'pro-environment' choices, they are condemned as 'light greens' and 'eco-narcissists.'

"The truth is that environmentalism is not compatible with human flourishing. It does demand economic destruction and unbearable hardship. The claim that its goal is to protect the environment for the sake of mankind is a Big Lie. Its goal is to protect nature, not for man, but from man--to preserve an untouched environment as an end in itself, no matter what cost or hardship that imposes on human beings.

"Anyone who thinks that 'eco-chic' is consistent with the principles of environmentalism had better think harder about the true nature of the ideology they are trying to support. What environmentalism truly demands is sacrifice to nature--the rejection of our modern, industrial civilization in favor of the decidedly un-chic, unglamorous hardship of a primitive, pre-industrial, stone-age existence."

I'll be teaching a class on "the value of nature" in my upcoming "Introduction to Philosophy" course. We'll be reading Aldo Leopold's 1954 essay "The Land Ethic," a classic of environmental ethics. I've not settled on an opposing article yet, although I like Gregg Easterbrook's "The Case Against Nature" found in the Sommers' Virtue and Vice in Everyday Life. It's a selection from his book A Moment on the Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism, which I've just ordered from Amazon. Other pro-man recommendations would be welcome.