The Cocktail Hour

The end of WWII in Europe

2005-05-07T10:27:00.000-04:00

We're at the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. Arthur Herman reflects on how close it came to going the other way:

It is important to remember how many people, especially Europeans, wanted democracy to lose and hoped Hitler would win. They included the world's Communist parties, who followed the directions of their leader Josef Stalin in enthusiastically embracing his alliance with Nazi Germany. They included politicians and intellectuals who, after Hitler's lightning victories in Poland and France, saw a new world order arising and wanted to be part of it. Denmark's elected government enthused in July 1940 that Hitler had "brought about a new era in Europe, which will result in a new order in an economic and political sense..." France's Robert Brasillach saw Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin as the men of the future and Roosevelt and Churchill as "grotesquely antiquated" relics of the past. Catholic mystagogue Teilhard de Chardin proclaimed that "we are watching the birth, more than the death, of a World....the Germans deserve to win..." Holland's Paul de Man, later the darling of the deconstructionist Left at Yale and other universities, announced that Europe's future under Nazi rule was brighter than ever and that "we are entering a mystical era, a period of faith and belief, with all that this entails," with the Third Reich at its center.

Today, it is sobering to contemplate how close Hitler came in the early summer of 1941 to achieving that new order. Had he followed the advice of his naval advisers and completed his rout of the British from the Mediterranean by seizing the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf, Germany would have secured control of the world's oil supply and the world's sea routes to India and the Far East. After Pearl Harbor, Hitler and the Japanese could have divided the resources of Asia — from Bombay and Afghanistan to Australia and Singapore — between them.

But Hitler was not interested in following in the footsteps of the British and Americans, in building an empire built on economic power instead of conquest. Instead, he turned on his ally Stalin and invaded Russia — again hoping this would complete the isolation of Britain and deter the United States from going to its aid. Like all totalitarians, he assumed the democratic response to forthright force would be hesitation, weakness, and retreat.

What's wrong with the Democrats?

2005-05-07T10:02:00.000-04:00

Victor Davis Hanson knows. America's most important writer, in an article titled "Democratic Suicide," says that Democrat won't start winning again until they start acting like normal folks. Here's his take on why Democrats can't get away with their old class warfare routine:

The old class warfare was effective for two reasons: Americans did not have unemployment insurance, disability protection, minimum wages, social security, or health coverage. Much less were they awash in cheap material goods from China that offer the less well off the semblance of consumer parity with those far wealthier. Second, the advocates of such rights looked authentic, like they came off the docks, the union hall, the farm, or the shop, primed to battle those in pin-stripes and coiffed hair.

Today entitlement is far more complicated. Poverty is not so much absolute as relative: "I have a nice Kia, but he has a Mercedes," or "I have a student loan to go to Stanislaus State, but her parents sent her to Yale." Unfortunately for the Democrats, Kias and going to Stanislaus State aren't too bad, especially compared to the alternatives in the 1950s.

A Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, John Edwards, Howard Dean, George Soros, or Al Gore looks — no, acts — like he either came out of a hairstylist's salon or got off a Gulfstream. Those who show up at a Moveon.org rally and belong to ANSWER don't seem to have spent much time in Bakersfield or Logan, but lots in Seattle and Westwood. When most Americans have the semblance of wealth — televisions, cell phones, cars, laptops, and iPods as well as benefits on the job — it is hard to keep saying that "children are starving." Obesity not emaciation is the great plague of the poorer.

So the Democrats need a little more humility, a notion that the country is not so much an us/them dichotomy, but rather all of us together under siege to maintain our privileges in a tough global world — and at least one spokesman who either didn't go to prep school or isn't a lawyer.

"The Perfect Child"

2005-05-05T12:24:00.000-04:00

George Neumayr points out the mainstreaming of eugenics in America. He doesn't quite get at the utter monstrosity of it, but he comes damn close:

The slogan, Every Child a Wanted Child, always gave off a eugenic chill, implying that unwanted children weren't fit for life. But it didn't quite spell out what makes a child unwanted. Were the meaning of the slogan unpackaged and given more eugenic precision, it would read: Every Child a Perfect Child.

Imperfect children aren't wanted children -- this is the logical terminus of a society obsessed with choice and control, and the culture is hurtling towards it. If you doubt this, note the growing impatience with imperfection in children, both unborn and born, that increasingly dominates the culture of reproductive choice and control. The New York Times ran a story earlier this week titled, "Ugly Children May Get Parental Short Shrift." The article doesn't even mention the shortest shrift they receive: eugenic abortion. To the extent that the numbers are known, most unborn children deemed ugly by virtue of a disability detected through prenatal screening are aborted, and research surveys have shown that many parents will choose abortion once doctors become able to diagnose nothing more than "obesity" prenatally.

You should read the whole thing, of course. I just have to wonder what people think they are doing. Do they understand that to get at the child who looks perfect in his blue blazer at prep school that they might be "weeding" out the most special human talents, gifts, and genius, hidden in the genes of the "imperfect," and mocking human posterity.

A real horror story

2005-05-02T08:06:00.000-04:00

Dorothy Rabinowitz has worked the "false sex-abuse allegations" beat for a long time. This story, about the conviction and life sentence of Father Gordon MacRae, should make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.

While rooting for the fascists in Iraq...

2005-04-27T12:19:00.000-04:00

...Scott Erb throws (April 27, 2005 entry) a reductio ad Hitlerum argument at David Horowitz and FrontPageMag.com. This is something that Scott does when he's feeling insecure, and perhaps a bit worried. One of the things that Horowitz and FrontPage do best is to out committed anti-American university professors, of which Scott Erb is a very good example.

One way to gauge how upset Scott is is to watch which of his voodoo dolls he is shaking. If he shakes his "talk radio" (meaning Rush Limbaugh) voodoo doll, he's a little upset. If he shakes his Joe McCarthy voodoo doll he's very upset. But when he shakes his fascist voodoo doll and mentions Hitler, he's just beside himself.

In the Iraq part of his post Scott is very excited by the prospect of civil war in Iraq, an excitation that was no doubt itself excited by the upsurge in terror attacks in the past week to ten days. Civil war in Iraq would be a great relief for Scott, given that he has always opposed success in the mission. Success, you see, would have portrayed the U.S. in a good light, and we can't have that.

In the second part of today's entry Scott adds some more drivel to his "Spirit and Belief" "series." He ends with this stunning conclusion: "modern spiritualism and religion can co-exist with modern science." Forget the misuse of "spiritualism" for "spirituality," the purpose of this conclusion is to allow that clear-thinking and rational people of science can allow people to feel all warm and fuzzy about the universe, if they insist upon it.

That's so big of Scott, don't you think?

Jay Nordlinger delivers...

2005-04-27T09:48:00.000-04:00

...a good Impromptus column today. It hits several marks dead on. Here's his item on historian Paul Johnson:

This week in The Spectator, we find Paul Johnson at his most cheerful: “I foresee a sorrowful procession of events in which the triumph of the Darwinians may ultimately lead to the extinction of the human race. Evolution to destruction, or self-destruction, is part of the Darwinian concept, but if the theory itself should bring it about, that indeed would be a singularity. Not inconceivable, though.”

Thanks, Paul! See you next week.

A three-pack

2005-04-26T07:54:00.000-04:00

Making my usual rounds through the conservative sites this morning I found three articles, all on completely different subjects, that shared an off-beat sensibility. Thomas Sowell writes about "black rednecks." William Voegeli takes a chop at the "cynical idealism" of Social Security. And in an occasionally overwrought piece at the American Spectator, James Poulos riffs away on Hunter S. Thompson as a "reactionary." All three make interesting reading, if you're in the mood.

More idiocy

2005-04-25T15:10:00.000-04:00

Scott Erb continues today to prove that not a single thing ever said about him by his worst critics was undeserved. Tacked on to today's entry at his blog (April 25, 2005 entry) is some rambling nonsense about "Spirit and Belief." You have to read it to appreciate its essential weaselishness, but that essence climaxes with this statement about evolution: "Evolution is something that cannot be denied. Every respected biologist and almost all educated people recognize that it is a well developed theory so well supported by evidence that no one can honestly and reasonably deny its existence."

It's a plain fact that evolution, as a theory, has long faced an internal crisis, with various evolutionists at each other's throats, even as it has over the past decade come under a withering critique from the intelligent design theorists. Philip E. Johnson ("Darwin on Trial"), Michael J. Behe ("Darwin's Black Box"), David Berlinski (in his famous Commentary magazine article "The Deniable Darwin"), William Dembski ("The Design Inference") and a host of other authors have shown that the Neo-Darwinian synthesis that is the backbone of contemporary evolutionary theory is so weak that it depends on the huffiness unto hysteria of its advocates to fend off its critics.

One of the favorite evolutionist ploys is to routinely confuse people by not making a distinction between the fundamentalist Biblical literalism of "Creation Science" and the simple creationism implied by intelligent design theory, which infers from the complexity of life the reasonable premise that it is improbable (to the point of impossibility) that said complexity is the result of mere accident.

The irony of Erb's comment that "Evolution...cannot be denied" is that he's criticizing the Catholic Church for being slow to accept changes in scientific understanding, when virtually the entire edifice of evolutionary theory is imploding from the forces of its own internal contradictions. Yet materialists, those who believe that all that exists is the natural order and that there is nothing outside that order, cling to evolution as a dying faith, lashing out at those who dare to question it.

As Philip Johnson points out, evolution as a theory has become a number of things, some larger than others. The larger the claims, the less water they hold.

The only brief I ever held against evolution was that it seemed to me to be improbable. Then I gave my attention to the ID theorists and they made quite a case for just how improbable it really is. The irony is that evolution is the high church of materialistic naturalism, which is a philosophy, not a science. For people like Erb, it's a matter of belief.

The thing that bothered people most...

2005-04-25T00:13:00.000-04:00

...about Scott Erb during his disastrous (for him) years on Usenet was that he was a university professor who was both shallow and stupid, an indication that today's Ph.D.s should come with a disclaimer, particularly when they are lodged by tenure at the front of classrooms.

The latest example -- just to isolate one moment among the vast continuum of moments -- of Scott's shallowness and stupidity, is found in the latest post to his blog (April 25, 2005 entry). Let's listen to that moment:

The good news to me is that the new Pope will remain a strong voice against war, carrying on the tradition of John Paul II. I still can't fathom the hypocrisy of some Catholics who praise John Paul and his stance on life, but somehow support a war of aggression. They are in conflict with their own church.

Unfortunately for Scott, the Church has no teaching against war. It has a doctrine that establishes criteria for a "just war." It has no teaching or doctrine against war per se. It is, in fact, the teaching of the Church that it is left to the civil authority to determine when a war must be fought. I think that this has been explained to Scott more than once, but the fact that he has been corrected before on any number of errors has never stood in the way of him repeating them. That's why Scott's audience of choice is chiefly students unexposed to facts and disinclined to look into them.

John Paul II believed that war per se is a defeat for mankind, and like all popes urged that belligerents find ways to settle matters without war, but he never changed the Church doctrine.

On the other hand, Scott is perfectly content to see a million unborn children killed by abortion each year in the United States. Abortion is, of course, something that the Church strictly condemns as grievous evil. But Scott is in no position to defend a right to life, particularly when he is incapable of claiming a right to his own life.

Even Maureen Dowd...

2005-04-23T07:53:00.000-04:00

...should eventually be made nauseous by the infantile column she wrote for today's New York Times. If one wonders why self-identifying liberals are down to about 20% of the population in America, embarrassment over the likes of Maureen Dowd might be a good reason.

VDH on the lessons of the war that began on 9/11

2005-04-22T09:25:00.000-04:00

The most important writer in America, Victor Davis Hanson, assesses the lessons of U.S. engagement with Islamic fascism. Lesson number five:

5. Do not look for logic and consistency in the Middle East where they are not to be found. It makes no sense to be frustrated that Arab intellectuals and reformers damn us for removing Saddam and simultaneously praise democratic rumblings that followed his fall. We should accept that the only palatable scenario for the Arab Street was one equally fanciful: Brave demonstrators took to the barricades, forced Saddam’s departure, created a constitution, held elections, and then invited other Arab reformers into Baghdad to spread such indigenous reform — all resulting in a society as sophisticated, wealthy, free, and modern as the West, but felt to be morally superior because of its allegiance to Islam. That is the dream that is preferable to the reality that the Americans alone took out the monster of the Middle East and that any peaceful protest against Saddam would have ended in another genocide.

Ever since the departure of the colonials, the United States, due to its power and principled support for democratic Israel, has served a Middle Eastern psychological need to account for its own self-created impotence and misery, a pathology abetted by our own past realpolitik and nurtured by the very autocrats that we sought to accommodate.

After all these years, do not expect praise or gratitude for billions poured into Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, or Palestine or thanks for the liberation of Kuwait, protection of Saudi Arabia in 1990, or the removal of Saddam — much less for American concern for Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Somalia, the Sudan, or Afghanistan. Our past sins always must be magnified as much as our more recent benefactions are slighted.

Beck meets the entrenched entrenchment

2005-04-20T08:40:00.000-04:00

Beck had an e-mail exchange with a "professional philosopher" that left him with that empty feeling one gets around empty heads that are stamped with the academic seal of approval.

I suspect, but have no certain knowledge, that Beck's interlocuter was Keith Burgess-Jackson, who runs a blog called The Conservative Philosopher. Anyway, the professional philosopher, whoever he might be, sounds very much like he, like Burgess-Jackson, is from the reduced-to-very-little-at-all "Analytic" school of philosophy, which is a name change designed to protect the guilty from being accused of logical positivism. Other aliases include “linguistic analysis” and “logical empiricism.”

In very limited circumstances these people can be of some use. Having a discussion about philosophy with them is not one of those circumstances.

The line of descent of positivism, in modern terms, is from David Hume, a radical empiricist and skeptic who doubted the possibility of knowing very much at all about the world. As this peculiar insight evolved, metaphysics as the pursuit of ultimate meaning, essence as the source of immediate meaning, and transcendence as the very key to the power of ideas were all barred from the philosopher's lounge. What was left over is what Beck got from the professional philosopher in his exchange with him: philosophy reduced to logical statements about not much.

When these guys try to go outside of their small pens in the academic farmyard, they wind up all goofy and foolish.

Where, therefore, does one start philosophizing for real: By turning to the things themselves, by turning to them in their immediacy in search of their essence and therefore their meaning. Philosophy is about meaning and from meaning is derived its vector, purpose. When you get there, "moral oughts" are not simply "sentiments," as the modern originator of hard skepticism, Hume, observed. They are formidable and objective modes of essential human being.

That's the short answer.

Andrea Dworkin and Cathy Young

2005-04-18T17:04:00.000-04:00

Billy Beck points out a bit by Cathy Young, the summary of which is that Cathy Young makes a reasonably good case that Andrea Dworkin was insane -- based on all that man hatred Dworkin espoused. It was some seriously nasty stuff.

On the other hand, Cathy Young doesn't sound too well herself, yielding to her own psychological imperative to drag in, via an update to her original post, conservatives like Terry Jeffrey of Human Events and someone named Charlotte Hays from the Independent Women's Forum for a short flogging. It seems that the New York Times collected a handful of brief but kind words for Dworkin from conservatives like David Frum and Richard Brookheiser, who met the old hag in her later years and found her to be....a human being, well-read, capable of flattery, etc.

Was the sexual revolution the equivalent of "violence against women" as Jeffrey once said, earning Young's contempt? No, but neither does that make the sexual revolution a good thing nor Jeffrey someone who has earned a mention in a post-mortem attack on Dworkin.

Young's charge is the equivalent of the "all sex is rape" equation attributed to Dworkin (as the essence of her feminism, not something, apparently, that she actually said). Young similarly equates conservatives' respect for women, their virtue, their traditional roles with "neo-paternalism." If that's not as wacky as Dworkin, it's still just as stupid.

The terror of stupidity

2005-04-18T10:01:00.000-04:00

People not thinking leads to a culture of people unable to think. By thinking I don't mean having thoughts and the will to express them. By thinking I mean the commitment made to sorting things out carefully, seeing them in as much context as possible from one's vantage point, and then weighing whatever needs to be weighed against whatever it needs to be weighed against and arriving at a rational conclusion. This precludes laziness, as it precludes believing that whatever happens to pop into one's mind is worth expressing.

This piece by Paul Jacob made me think of politics, and the name Rudolph Giuliani came to mind. Jacob's piece is about cops and the fact that "a dominant strain of contemporary police culture wants citizens to limit their involvement in their own protection." When Giuliani ran for Mayor of New York City he made a huge compromise, typical of the compromises that New York City mayors make that essentially make the job a political dead end. In New York City abortion is a sacred practice, central to the well-being of everyone, especially men, who don't want the vicissitudes of women's bodies controlling a man's life.

Giuliani is a Catholic who did a turn in the Reagan-era U.S. Justice Department, including a somewhat celebrated stint as a U.S. Attorney. When he ran for mayor of New York City, he examined his conscience and discovered that he could not get elected mayor without changing his position on abortion. So he moved from the pro-life position to the pro-death position and was thereby made acceptable, minimally, to the local priest- and priestesshood. For his late adaptation to the pro-death position, Giuliani and all New Yorkers were penalized by him losing his first bid for mayor to David Dinkins, about whom the kindest thing that can be said is that he looked good in a strong aftershave lotion.

But if statecraft is soulcraft, as George Will once contended, Giuliani had made a trade on the level of soulcraft that allowed him to be elected mayor of New York City, where he actually succeeded at a job that no one succeeds at, which would make his success extraordinary in the highest sense of the word.

After he was elected but I think before he was actually sworn in Giuliani expressed another view that was more than a little offensive to the local priestcraft: he thought that it ought to be made easier for citizens to own and carry guns in New York. So out of tempo was this sentiment that it got stepped on by none other than Giuliani's brilliant, but subordinate to him, police commissioner, William Bratton. Bratton simply said something like "no, that would endanger cops," etc., and Giuliani never said another word about making it easier for citizens to have guns.

But, Giuliani and Bratton, both brilliant men, did go on to make the need for citizens having guns in New York City less immediate. They did what they said they were going to do, which was cut the crime rate in the city dramatically. And that reduction has lasted, long enough that some people, mostly transplanted out-of-towners and people in their 20s and younger, probably don't remember how bad it had been, and how it looked like it was only going to get worse.

Then again, Giuliani had made a second compromise, this time trading the personal security of every New Yorker, including those who would reflexively refuse to exercise their right to defend themselves, in order to stay on the good side of "a dominant strain of contemporary police culture." Giuliani needed cops on his side to do what he wanted to do in New York, and thus he contributed to a growing everyday culture where only the cops and the criminals have guns. That formula works something like this: Criminal A shoots Citizen B, after which Cop C arrives and says: "a shooting has taken place, let us analyze the bullet."

Thus any woman working the evening shift in Manhattan can arrive by subway train after midnight back in her Brooklyn or Bronx neighborhood safe in the knowledge that any bullets found in her body will be carefully scrutinized by trained experts in criminology.

Now, every once in a while someone will be working somewhere in the city late at night and someone with a gun will try to rob him and the working stiff will pull out an illegal, unregistered, unsavory handgun and shoot the filthy robber right dead, or maybe just wing him good. The working stiff is invariably placed under arrest for the illegal handgun, put through the usual legal ringer, and only after his heart has been made to skip many beats will he be verbally chastised and "let off" for protecting himself. In the future, however, We may not be so lenient.

Something, one wonders what, has...

2005-04-15T14:48:00.000-04:00

...had the oft-seen sorcerer's apprentice effect on the pristine narcissism of Scott Erb. As you can see (April 14 & 15, 2005 entries), he has decided to have a cocktail party in the faculty lounge to which he is the only one invited. The expected stream of banalities and absurdities ensues.

For anyone who has paid any attention to Professor Erb on Usenet, these latest babblings will come as no surprise, even the part where his tired old song and dance is presented as though it had just occurred to him.

I suppose if you lay down a circle of pabulum, squirt lighter fluid on it, and light it up, it is still a ring of fire, to someone.

Richard John Neuhaus...

2005-04-15T11:06:00.000-04:00

...is blogging from the Vatican, with insight into who the leading candidates are to become the next Pope.

VDH gets rough with foreign policy experts

2005-04-15T08:43:00.000-04:00

The most important writer in America, Victor Davis Hanson, turns over the tables in the temple of the foreign policy establishment. Following what is excerpted below, Hanson analyzes a series of five policy options, so you should follow the link and read the whole thing:

Brent Scowcroft predicted on the eve of the Iraqi elections that voting there would increase the risk of civil war. Indeed, he foresaw “a great potential for deepening the conflict.” He also once assured us that Iraq “could become a Vietnam in a way that the Vietnam war never did.” Did he mean perhaps worse than ten years of war and over 50,000 American dead, with the Cambodian holocaust next door?

Zbigniew Brzezinski feared that we could not do what we are in fact presently doing in Iraq: “I do not think we can stay in Iraq in the fashion we’re in now…If it cannot be changed drastically, it should be terminated.” He added ominously that it would take 500,000 troops, $500 billion, and resumption of the military draft to achieve security in Iraq. Did he mean Iraq needed more American troops than did the defense of Europe in the Cold War?

Madeleine Albright, while abroad, summed up the present American foreign policy: “It's difficult to be in France and criticize my government. But I'm doing so because Bush and the people working for him have a foreign policy that is not good for America, not good for the world.” Elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, troops out of Saudi Arabia, democratic demonstrations in Lebanon, West Bank voting, promises of change in Egypt — all that and more is “not good for the world”?

For the last year, such well-meaning former "wise people" have pretty much assured us that the Bush doctrine will not work and that the Arab world is not ready for Western-style democracy, especially when fostered through Western blood and iron.

But too often we discuss the present risky policy without thought of what preceded it or what might have substituted for it. Have we forgotten that the messy business of democracy was the successor, not the precursor, to a litany of other failed prescriptions? Or that there were never perfect solutions for a place like the Middle East — awash as it is in oil, autocracy, fundamentalism, poverty, and tribalism — only choices between awful and even more awful? Or that September 11 was not a sudden impulse on the part of Mohammed Atta, but the logical culmination of a long simmering pathology? Or that the present loudest critics had plenty of chances to leave something better than the mess that confronted the United States on September 12? Or that at a time of war, it is not very ethical to be sorta for, sorta against, kinda supportive, kinda critical of the mission — all depending on the latest sound bite from Iraq?

Some serious questions about AIDS in Africa

2005-04-14T10:00:00.000-04:00

Michael Fumento argues somewhat persuasively that the prevailing idea that the AIDS epidemic in Africa has been spread mainly by heterosexual sex is wrong. If Fumento is right, then the future of Africa might depend on uncovering the real routes of transmission.

The idiocy continues

2005-04-13T17:57:00.000-04:00

See the April 13, 2005 entry. Now it seems that "Iraq is already a failure," so there's no need to even expect a favorable outcome, just like Scott always said:

Victory? I'm constantly amazed at the level of spin in modern politics, where truth is irrelevant as long as one protects ones policy or political party. Iraq is already a failure. Even if we get out and democracy manages to continue, the costs were tremendously higher than anticipated, the goals at the start were not achieved (look at the claims made before the war of Iraq easily paying for its reconstruction, the implications of a 'victory'), and the disadvantages immense. One is that it invigorated the Islamic extremist movement, benefited Iran, and weakened American influence in the region.

I'm particularly impressed that with 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, American political pressure being brought to bear througout the region, and military bases established in the heart of the Arab world that Scott thinks this has "weakened American influence in the region." That must be why Libya has abandoned its WMD programs, Syria is withdrawing from Lebanon, Iran is negotiating with the IAEA, Saudi Arabia is finally on its toes in pursuit of terrorists, and the regime in Egypt is making some tentative moves toward something resembling an election. And Scott thinks that there's a lot of spin in modern politics?

My advice to any students at UMF: avoid this narcissistic lunatic like the plague.

You've read novels or seen movies...

2005-04-13T11:45:00.000-04:00

...where the hero is a scientist who works like a detective to find the source of a disease and/or the cure?

Well, here is that scientist: Maurice Hilleman. He died a couple of days ago at the age of 85.

Listen to this from his New York Times obituary:

Much of modern preventive medicine is based on Dr. Hilleman's work, though he never received the public recognition of Salk, Sabin or Pasteur. He is credited with having developed more human and animal vaccines than any other scientist, helping to extend human life expectancy and improving the economies of many countries.

Dr. Hilleman probably saved more lives than any other scientist in the 20th century, said two medical leaders, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Paul A. Offit, chief of infectious diseases at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia.

"The scientific quality and quantity of what he did was amazing," Dr. Fauci said. "Just one of his accomplishments would be enough to have made for a great scientific career. One can say without hyperbole that Maurice changed the world with his extraordinary contributions in so many disciplines: virology, epidemiology, immunology, cancer research and vaccinology."

Dr. Hilleman developed 8 of the 14 vaccines routinely recommended: measles, mumps, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, chickenpox, meningitis, pneumonia and Haemophilus influenzae bacteria (which brings on a variety of symptoms, including inflammation of the lining of the brain and deafness). He also developed the first generation of a vaccine against rubella or German measles. The vaccines have virtually vanquished many of the once common childhood diseases in developed countries.

Dr. Hilleman overcame immunological obstacles to combine vaccines so that one shot could protect against several diseases, like the MMR vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella.

He developed about 40 experimental and licensed animal and human vaccines, mostly with his team from Merck of Whitehouse Station, N.J. His role in their development included lab work as well as scientific and administrative leadership. His colleagues said he routinely credited others for their roles in advances.

Vaccine development is complex, requiring an artistry to safely produce large amounts of weakened live or dead micro-organisms. "Maurice was that artist: no one had the green thumb of mass production that he had," Dr. Offit said.

The hepatitis B vaccine, licensed in 1981, is credited as the first to prevent a human cancer: a liver cancer, known as a hepatoma, that can develop as a complication of infection from the hepatitis B virus.

One of Dr. Hilleman's goals was to develop the first licensed vaccine against any viral cancer. He achieved it in the early 1970's, developing a vaccine to prevent Marek's disease, a lymphoma cancer of chickens caused by a member of the herpes virus family. Preventing the disease helped revolutionize the economics of the poultry industry.

Dr. Hilleman's vaccines have also prevented deafness, blindness and other permanent disabilities among millions of people, a point made in 1988 when President Ronald Reagan presented him with the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest scientific honor.

Dr. Hilleman also discovered several viruses and made fundamental discoveries about the way the influenza virus mutates.

Because scientific knowledge about viruses was so limited when he began his career, Dr. Hilleman said that trial and error, sound judgment and luck drove much of his research.

An upbeat report on Iraq...

2005-04-13T10:44:00.000-04:00

...from Col. Jack Jacobs, U.S. Army, retired, on Imus this morning.

He spent two weeks in Iraq in the Sunni Triangle, touring places like Fallujah and Tikrit.

First, he says that U.S. troop morale is remarkably high. Whether regular service or National Guard the soldiers are synched to the mission.

Second, Jacobs reports that the relationship between the troops and Iraqis in the Sunni Triangle is excellent.

Third, the Iraqis are, as a result of that excellent relationship, supplying the troops with good intelligence on insurgents.

Fourth, U.S. troops routinely thwart the tactics of the insurgents. For every roadside bomb (IED) that explodes, nine more are destroyed before they can do harm. This is the result of good intel and surveillance. Also, advanced radar technology instantaneously plots mortar and rocket fire and returns automated fire to the precise location from which the attack is launched before the mortar shell or rocket even hits. This limits the enemy to one shot per attack and eliminates barrages.

Overall, Jacobs says that he was surprised at how well things are going and that the situation even impressed him despite his generally cynical outlook on all things.

Britain at Nightfall

2005-04-13T09:27:00.000-04:00

Belmont Club has a magnificent presentation of, and commentary on, excerpts from an article by Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal. It's about the "end of evil" in the U.K., and how that is the evil that will finally lay the place to rest. It will send a chill through your bones.

This article by...

2005-04-12T10:14:00.000-04:00

...George Neumayr, last Thursday, stopped me in my tracks. It reaches back into modern history to the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the early moments of liberalism. Just two paragraphs from it:

Why would people who hate the Church pose as reformers who know what's best for it? Why would they care so passionately about the direction of a religion to which they don't belong? For the same reason the French philosophes and revolutionaries monitored and pressured the Church: it is a force that they must either neutralize or hijack in order to achieve their designs for the world. Look at the immense, obsessional energy that the left spends on trying to pressure the Church into green-lighting their favorite sexual sins. Why do they care so much about what the Church teaches? The reason is that they know that if they could just get the Catholic Church's imprimatur on the Sexual Revolution it would spread everywhere. A liberal Pope, as far as they are concerned, would be even better than a liberal Chief Justice on the Supreme Court.

Modern liberalism is an acid that burns through everything it touches. The Church has shriveled in proportion to its exposure to it. Now those who have long sought its death present themselves, carrying more of this acid, as its healer, and even, as Thomas Cahill wrote in the New York Times, finger Pope John Paul II, who resisted it, as the Church's enemy. "He may, in time to come, be credited with destroying his church," writes Cahill, who blames the Pope for "intellectual incompetents" and "mindless sycophants" in the episcopate. "The situation is dire. Anyone can walk into a Catholic church on a Sunday and see pews, once filled to bursting, now sparsely populated with gray heads." He then proposes a "solution," which amounts to trading the teachings of Jesus Christ for modern liberalism.

Is there a game out there called...

2005-04-11T16:12:00.000-04:00

..."Let's Pretend You're a College Professor"? If there is I think that Scott Erb is playing it right now (April 11, 2005 entry). Anyone who has a better explanation for that is welcome to offer it.

"Missing His Holiness"

2005-04-05T19:57:00.000-04:00

George Neumayr has a brilliant column on the liberal media's need to use John Paul II for it's own purposes:

Pope John Paul II knew that a worldly liberalism had derailed the Church and was trying to remove it. The project of the next pope is to finish that job. The media's "whether or not you agreed with them, you respected the intensity of his principles" formulation is nonsense: they didn't respect Pope John Paul II for his principles but for his power, a power they have long wanted to appropriate for their own liberal purposes.

Their idea of honoring Pope John Paul II is to mau-mau the Church into embracing heresies that he deplored. The greatness of his life consisted in what the press ignores and seeks to undo in the Church: holiness, the measure of which is never the will of men but of God. The Pope made such a powerful impression on the world not because he was wordly but because he was otherworldly. A godless age had left an enormous vacuum; only a man who conformed his life to God could fill it.

Billy Beck is right

2005-04-05T09:13:00.000-04:00

I have to distinguish between Beck's anarcho-capitalist tenets and his passionate defense of American, and human, freedom. I don't agree with the former, but I readily understand the latter. To the extent that he thinks the two are inseparable is the extent to which we disagree.

But right here, in this post to his friend and gentleman scholar Bruce McQuain, Beck makes the case in irrefutable terms that the American system of governance -- federal, state, local -- has lost any sight of its moorings in freedom and that about as close as it gets to freedom at this point is a free floating drift toward technocratic oblivion if not stampeding socialism. The one-step ahead, two-steps back efforts of conservatives since Reagan (inclusive of their libertarian instincts) to bring it under control have failed. The extent to which conservatives have had to adopt the practices of liberals in the effort to defeat them has in itself been a defeat for conservatives.

I have noted that the best that can be claimed for it is that it has been a holding action against a historical tide, and that if the levee holds there might be a path back. But from an immediate objective viewing, that is not a good prospect.

Conservatives are not only about economics, just as America is not only about economics. But when it comes to property and wealth and the way it's treated by the various governments (it's theirs, not yours), there can be no mistaking that Beck is right. That's the main reason that I consult his blog every day: he has a clear conscience about what they are doing to America. On other points we don't agree. But on the question of owning what one owns and what one produces, Beck is saying that tolerating a lifetime of government taking as it pleases is too long. Just as John Brown looked around and saw that it was intolerable to him that men should be owned as slaves for another day, let alone their whole lives, until the "process of law" discovered that they were free.

I'm not taking sides in the usual libertarian schismatic troubles. I'm not a libertarian because I don't believe that liberty survives as liberty when it is framed as an ideology. But the truth is the truth, and Beck is telling the truth about what has happened to freedom in the United States. Measure it by Europe or China and say it is still the best in the world if you like, but in its own terms it has been in the red zone of disaster at least since the 1970s and the best efforts of sincere men to compromise on a road out of the red zone of disaster have been inadequate, to put it mildly.

The ridiculous Scott Erb

2005-04-04T20:25:00.000-04:00

Never let it be said that Professor Scott Erb's narcissism was lacking when it came to finding a way to spout his propaganda over the corpse of Pope John Paul II.

This (the April 4 entry) consists of one mischaracterization after another, edging into outright lying. I often had occasion to tell Erb that he was incompetent, deceitful, and shouldn't be anywhere near a classroom as a teacher. This ridiculous post about John Paul II and Reagan is ample demonstration of exactly what I meant.

The most egregious claim is Erb's suggestion that JPII shared a friendly agreement with Castro on some matters. JPII knew communists like Castro better than they knew themselves. He knew that they were dangerous liars and killers. If the Pope managed to find something nice to say to Castro it was an indication of how gracious JPII was as a visitor to Cuba, not because he thought that Castro should have anything to do with leading Cuba or any other country. The Pope went to Cuba for the Cuban people, whose primarily Catholic faith Castro had suppressed for four decades.

That Erb would attempt to get in a good word for the likes of Castro at JPII's expense is typical. The rest of his comments are just as misleading.

You don't belong anywhere near a classroom, Erb.

"Be not afraid"

2005-04-04T11:45:00.000-04:00

Larry Kudlow writes a very touching and very personal tribute to John Paul II:

It was sometime in 1993 when I first read the great papal encyclical “Splendor of Truth,” written by Pope John Paul II. The slender book was recommended by Fr. C. John McClosky while he was counseling me during the worst personal crisis of my life: Alcohol and drug abuse were dragging me down. The problem got much worse before I finally surrendered to God, literally on my knees, and began a new life of faith — and sobriety.

John Paul’s book had no direct advice on drugs or alcohol. But, then again, as I came to realize later, it had everything to do with these things. The book is about the need for spiritual and moral courage in choosing good over evil in our daily lives. It is about being personally accountable for our actions. It is about abiding by our conscience so that we may hear the voice of God and follow His direction.

As a full-fledged member of a twelve-step fellowship, I later learned that the biggest problem facing all those who suffer from chronic addiction is “sickness of the soul.” That’s exactly what John Paul II talks about in “Splendor of Truth.” He tells us to “be not afraid” in pursuit of the life of faith. Be not afraid to trust God. Be not afraid to stand for the right values. Be not afraid to be faithful to your spouse, or unselfish to friends, or diligent in work and the many duties of everyday life.

On a much grander scale the pope tells us to pursue right values concerning the sanctity of human life, human rights, freedom, democracy, and the redemptive value of suffering in life. He preaches a moral theology that applies to everything: Be not afraid in the pursuit of God’s will and the teachings of Jesus Christ. To live such a life requires courage, but it is precisely this moral courage that gives our lives meaning and purpose.

John Paul II, 1920-2005

2005-04-02T15:07:00.000-05:00

"Moral good is objective and a properly formed conscience can perceive it."

--John Paul II, August 14, 1993, 10:30 p.m.

As he passes...

2005-04-01T11:53:00.000-05:00

...The Holy Father, as theologian and philosopher:

Fides et Ratio

(Faith and Reason)

"The Humane Holocaust"

2005-04-01T11:40:00.000-05:00

George Neumayr on the killing of Terri Schiavo:

The initial event that disabled Terri Schiavo didn't end up killing her. But in her obituary notice, what will the cause of death read? Will it read: murder? It should. The heart attack that disabled her didn't doom her; a husband without a heart did.

Under judge-made law, euthanasia has become America's most astonishing form of premeditated murder, a cold-blooded crime in which husbands can kill their wives and even turn them into accomplices to it through the telepathy of "their wishes." To wonder if we're on the slippery slope sounds like an obtuse moral compliment at this point. The truth is we're at the bottom of the slope and have been for quite some time, standing dumbly as the bodies of innocent humans pile up around us. As we sift through them -- puzzling over how they got so numerous -- we're reduced to mumbling sophistries about compassion and consent.

This is the "humane holocaust" of which Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, a culture that kills the weak, from deaf unborn children to mute disabled women, and calls it mercy. Those responsible for this humane holocaust look into the mirror and see Gandhi, but it is Hitler who glances back. If someone had taken the passages of Mein Kampf that speak of euthanizing "unfortunates" and inserted them into the columns from newspapers and magazines cheering Schiavo's death, would anyone have known the difference?

A long morning's journey into late afternoon

2005-03-31T15:56:00.000-05:00

The most horrible thing about the death of Terri Schiavo was how everyone who wanted her to live, who might have done something about it, got to stand around with their dicks in their hands.

They can't be blamed, of course, for letting this Judge Greer character nail the woman's casket closed while her parents stood there begging to be allowed take care of her. There were three very funny moments throughout this episode that made me want to just puke until I got down to that green stuff that my mother told me was bile, but maybe isn't.

The first hysterically funny moment came when Judge Greer (is that how his name is spelled? if not, I could care less), was offered affidavits wherein witnesses claimed that Terri had tried to speak when asked if she wanted to live. It was one of the many last minute attempts to save her. Greer complained that he should have been told about it a week earlier, when it happened, and rejected the new evidence as suspiciously late. How funny is that? Hysterically funny when you consider that Michael Schiavo waited about seven years before he made it known that Terri had once told him she didn't want to be kept alive in the condition that she was in.

The second hysterically funny moment (a few different moments to be more exact) came when the various appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court were rejected unanimously, without a single voice of dissent. Here's a tip of the hat to the "natural law" justice, Clarence Thomas, who clearly didn't want to step out of his federalism garment to opine against the deliberate killing of a non-terminal patient whose parents wanted to care for her. It looks like you've finally "evolved," Justice Thomas, and just in case you're nominated as the next Chief Justice, at least one embarrassing question has been foreclosed. Those hearings are going to be difficult enough, for certain.

The third hysterically funny moment came when Laura Bush was interviewed while Schiavo was still dying and she repeated one of my favorite conventional responses from the whole ordeal. She noted how important it was for everyone to have a "living will." Well, isn't that nice. Not important to save the life of an innocent person being sentenced to die by a judge as the parents of the person begged for her life and said they would take care of her. No, what this was really all about was the pain caused by the absence of a living will. It was a great First Lady moment.

All are forgiven, of course. Even the stupid prick judge whose "legal process" processed someone to death.

As damaged as she was, Terri Schiavo had the aura of personality. As limited as her life was, that life might have been very precious to her. She might well have had a very rich consciousness that had triumphed over her profound impairments. Her parents and her brother and her sister loved her, felt her presence, and wanted to care for her. Yet the dubious claims of the husband and some doctors with queer antiseptic charts overrode the love of the loved ones. Ignominy. Disgrace. Hysterically funny moments. Ignominy. Disgrace. Forgiveness because this Dredd Scott II called a vital moral question and morality lost, in our faces, and the grudge is simply too big to hold.

Jay Nordlinger wakes up to the European Union

2005-03-31T10:18:00.000-05:00

My Eureka moment about the European Union (EU) came in the course of my typical discussions with this academic numbnuts on Usenet. The academic numbnuts had boxed himself into the startling contradiction of at once pretending to oppose the enlargement of the powers of the state while rhapsodizing the coming of the European superstate. His underlying ineptitude in these discussions was easily overmatched by his refusal to deal with facts, let alone their implications, in either direction of the contradiction.

But my basic cue on the EU was taken from Arnold Toynbee, who observed that the formation of a "universal state" was the harbinger of a civilization's collapse. What I noted about the EU was that its first effect would be to destroy the diversity of the great nations and cultures of Europe by forcing them into a modern empire that would immediately begin to compete for power with individual states within it. This was before I even knew what was actually happening over there.

Jay Nordlinger, who is the furthest thing from an academic numbnuts, today admits that he finally gets the implications of the EU. I say welcome aboard. It's the first item of his Impromptus column and I'm quoting the entire item:

Begin with a quick word about the EU — about which I am awakening, at last. Years ago, I would hear my British friends — very bright, very balanced — talk about the EU in the most severe terms. They said it was a kind of Soviet Union in the making, and would lead to a host of ills. Frankly, I thought this talk was a little overblown. I thought it could be interpreted as hysterical. But my friends knew far more than I, and I was given pause.

Now I am something like a believer. As David Pryce-Jones tells us in our current issue — his piece is found here (subscription required) — Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov have put out a pamphlet on the EU. It bears the arresting title EUSSR. I wish to quote from the introduction (and bear in mind that Bukovsky was one of the leading Soviet dissidents, a great, clear-eyed man):

"For anyone even remotely familiar with the Soviet system, its similarity with the developing structures of the European Union, with its governing philosophy and 'democracy deficit,' its endemic corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude, is striking. For anyone who lived under the Soviet tyranny or its equivalents across the world, it is frightening. Once again we observe with growing horror the emergence of a Leviathan that we had hoped was dead and buried, a monster that destroyed scores of nations, impoverished millions, and devastated several generations before finally collapsing. Is it inevitable? Is the human race bent on self-destruction and doomed to repeat the same mistake time and again until it dies in misery? Or is the EU, indeed, simply a clone of the USSR imposed upon reluctant nations of Europe by the same political forces that created the first one?"

Look, if Bukovsky talks this way, who am I to scoff? He may not be right — but anyone who ignored him would be a fool.

At my old Union Square Journal site (dormant but not dead) I've always kept posted Jamie Glazov's article about Bukovsky's claim that it was the West that had lost the Cold War, a somewhat startling conclusion that Bukovsky nonetheless makes a very strong argument in support of. It wasn't the Russians we were battling in the Cold War, or even the Soviet Union. It was the ideology of international socialism. The contemporary understanding that most Americans have of Europe is that it's the still pretty-as-a-picture Old World whence most of their ancestors came, and the place in which the values of Western civilization, to which we are the most favored heirs, were established. Americans need to think again. Nordlinger has come awake. Bukovsky was right there for him with the terrible truth

Coulter on Schiavo

2005-03-31T09:14:00.000-05:00

It's a grim matter, the Schiavo case. Every time I start thinking that I've got a grip on the erosion of human dignity and meaning, I get yet another wake-up call telling me that I haven't even begun to see how deep the gorge has grown. Ann Coulter mocks the "legal basis" for killing Terri Shiavo:

Opinions about the Schiavo case seem to break down less on morals than on basic knowledge of the facts of the case.

There are a lot of telling facts, but two big ones are:

[1] The only family member lobbying for Terri's death is her husband, who is affianced to a woman he's been living with for several years and with whom he already has two children. (Today's brain twister: Would you rather be O.J.'s girlfriend or Michael Schiavo's fiancee?)

[2] Terri's husband has refused to allow her to be given either an MRI or a PET scan, which are also known as: "The tests that could determine whether Terri is even in a permanent vegetative state." (I believe his exact words were, "PET scan? MRI? What do I look like, a guy who just won a $1 million malpractice settlement?")

On the basis of these facts, Pinellas County Judge George Greer found that it was Terri's wish to be starved to death. She requires no life support; all she needs is food and water. If being (a) on a liquid diet, and (b) unresponsive to one's estranged husband are now considered grounds for a woman's execution, wait until this news hits Beverly Hills!

"Secularization Doesn't Just Happen"

2005-03-30T11:00:00.000-05:00

When I saw that title at the top of Richard John Neuhaus's "The Public Square" column at First Things (the story links on the March issue just lit up) I didn't expect light fare, but neither did I expect such an extensive erudite note on the secularization of modern societies. I caught it just last night when I was almost off to bed, and it kept me plenty awake for another hour (along with sufficient skimming of the rest of the column and the issue). If you're ready, here's a sample:

“As society became more modern, it became more secular.” That sentence has about it a certain “of courseness.” It or its equivalent is to be found in numerous textbooks from grade school through graduate school. The connection between modernization and secularization is taken for granted. Christian Smith, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, challenges what everybody knows in an important new collection of essays by several sociologists and historians, The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (University of California Press, 484 pp., $60). The challenge is not novel with Smith. Social scientists who had long propounded “secularization theory,” Peter L. Berger very notably among them, have in recent years undergone a major change of mind. The contribution of Smith’s big book is in his detailed analysis of the dubious (sometimes contrary to fact) assumptions underlying the theory, and in the case studies he and his colleagues present showing how various interest groups have employed the theory in the service of their own quest for power, usually at the expense of religion and religious institutions.

There are, writes Smith, seven crucial and related defects in conventional secularization theory. Over-abstraction: the literature of the theorists routinely spoke of “differentiation,” “autonomization,” “privatization,” and other abstract, if not abstruse, dynamics disengaged from concrete factors of social change such as interests, ideologies, institutions, and power conflicts. Lack of human agency: the theory was big on process without protagonists. It depicted secularization without secularizers. According to the theory, secularization just happens. Overdeterministic inevitability: “Religion’s marginalization from public life is portrayed as a natural or inevitable process like cell mitosis or adolescent puberty.” Secularization theory reflects a view of linear social evolution in the tradition of Comte and Spencer. “If there is one truth that history teaches us beyond doubt,” wrote the great Durkheim, “it is that religion tends to embrace a smaller and smaller portion of social life.” Any questions, class?

Human non-persons and the organ harvest

2005-03-29T09:04:00.000-05:00

Wesley Smith isn't offering a selection here from a novel he's writing as a sequel to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. What he's doing is putting the current state of "bioethics" in a nutshell. The culture of death marches along:

Allen’s perspective is in fact relatively conservative within the mainstream bioethics movement. He is apparently willing to accept that “minimal awareness would support some criterion of personhood” — although he doesn’t say that awareness is determinative. Most of his colleagues are not so reticent. To them, it isn’t sentience per se that matters but rather demonstrable rationality. Thus Peter Singer of Princeton argues that unless an organism is self-aware over time, the entity in question is a non-person. The British academic John Harris, the Sir David Alliance professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester, England, has defined a person as “a creature capable of valuing its own existence.” Other bioethicists argue that the basic threshold of personhood should include the capacity to experience desire. James Hughes, who is more explicitly radical than many bioethicists (or perhaps, just more candid), has gone so far as to assert that people like Terri are “sentient property.”

So who are the so-called human non-persons? All embryos and fetuses, to be sure. But many bioethicists also categorize newborn infants as human non-persons (although some bioethicists refer to healthy newborns as “potential persons”). So too are those with profound cognitive impairments such as Terri Schiavo and President Ronald Reagan during the latter stages of his Alzheimer’s disease.

Personhood theory would reduce some of us into killable and harvestable people. Harris wrote explicitly that killing human non-persons would be fine because “Non-persons or potential persons cannot be wronged” by being killed “because death does not deprive them of something they can value. If they cannot wish to live, they cannot have that wish frustrated by being killed.”

And killing isn’t the half of it. Some of the same bioethicists who have been telling us how right and moral it is to dehydrate Terri Schiavo have also urged that people like Terri — that is, human non-persons — be harvested or otherwise used as mere instrumentalities. Bioethicist big-wig Tom Beauchamp of Georgetown University has suggested that “because many humans lack properties of personhood or are less than full persons, they…might be aggressively used as human research subjects or sources of organs.”

Such thinking is not fringe in bioethics, a field in which the idea of killing for organs is fast becoming mainstream.

Moral short-circuits

2005-03-29T06:51:00.000-05:00

George Neumayr surveys Easter weekend's parade of "Lying Jesuits and Journalists." Every paragraph is fully loaded; I'll pull just the first three:

Former Massachusetts congressman Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest who supported legalizing abortion when he served in Congress, still uses the authority of his collar to cheerlead for evil causes. On Easter Sunday, he turned up at various television studios to praise the starvation to death of Terri Schiavo. Drinan was apparently Tim Russert's idea of a sturdy Catholic authority on this matter. Even as Drinan praised the killing of a disabled woman he mused nostalgically about passage of the "Americans with Disabilities Act," a glorious piece of legislation, he said. A host not willing to play the stooge to a snow-job artist might have asked Drinan: So why doesn't the ADA prevent murdering a disabled woman like Terri Schiavo? Why does the ADA give the disabled ramps at restaurants but permit trapdoors at hospitals?

Warming to the old Democratic creed, Drinan also spoke of the need for gun control. "Why don't we ban guns?" he said at one point. This from a proponent of legalized violence at the beginning and end of life. If Michael Schiavo took out one of the guns that Drinan wants banned and shot his wife to death, how would that be morally different from the methods of starvation and dehydration?

The media's instinctual use of "authorities" who are frauds -- the Drinans who clog their rolodexes (priests appear on television in proportion to their willingness to upend Catholic teachings) -- was just the tip of the iceberg during a weekend of torrential bias. Whenever a cultural controversy pops up, the bias that mainstream reporters furiously deny comes rushing back. Reporters and commentators were thrilled with the chance to try and nail Republicans for "overreach." To embarrass the Republicans and ensure that everyone would feel good about killing Schiavo, the media dug down into their bag of malicious tricks, using tendentious polling, a smear job against Tom DeLay, reports of faux-concern about conservative division (worrying about a cohesive Republican Party is of course foremost in their minds), and flat-out Orwellian propaganda to confuse the matter as much as possible.

The Resurrection of Christ

2005-03-27T13:24:00.000-05:00

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

--William Wordsworth
from Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

My very personal grasp of the Resurrection of Christ is that it is an event not remote in history, but an immediately present fact. But before I get to what I mean by that, I want to briefly consider the more mundane question of resurrection itself.

If you believe there is a god, let alone believe that that god is God himself, then there should be no problem in accepting that the resurrection of a corpse is not a matter of difficulty for a god or for God. He is the creator and owner of the natural order, and he can do with it what he likes.

If you believe in no god, let alone God himself, then you must be skeptical about the concept of resurrection. Therefore, if you were offered Christ's Resurrection as the most important nexus of his human and divine natures, you would tend to reject such an event as impossible and therefore not evidence of anything. Additionally, you would reject a priori any such thing as a "divine nature." So you reject the evidence as impossible and the concept of "divine nature" as both non-existent and a contradiction in terms. This is the position of confirmed atheism.

Without sinking into a vulgar science fiction scenario to explore the scientific possibility of resurrection, I will only respond that life and death are ascertainable states, and that there were witnesses who saw Jesus dead and then said that they saw him alive again in a greatly transformed state. It will always come down to a matter of faith as to whether one accepts or rejects that testimony. No one can reject the fact, however, that the New Testament records such testimony.

But what of Christ's Resurrection as an immediately present fact?

I compare the Resurrection to the beginning of the universe itself, an event ascertainable in a phenomenon known as "cosmic background radiation."

And I argue that Wordsworth's insight as recorded in Tintern Abbey, about the "presence" that disturbs him "and rolls through all things," is a perception in things themselves of the "cosmic background radiation" of the Resurrection. But the analogy holds only so long, because the "cosmic background radiation" left over from the Big Bang origin of the universe is but a meager physical trace of an incomprehensible physical event. The light of the Resurrection, on the other hand, is the immediate spirit of the world, that now "impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought," and is the means by which we truly see the world.

It is my contention that the Resurrection was a physical event that overrode and changed the nature of physical reality itself. The Resurrection infused physical reality with itself and re-contextualized the immediacy of the material world in its transcendence. As such the Resurrection is present as its own light and as the change and imprint that it left in all things.

It is the fullest expression and the full data of Truth. In Christian theology this is generally seen as the realm of the Holy Spirit. But I'm distinguishing here between the immediate presence of the Resurrection as the light and fact of Truth and the Holy Spirit as the shepherd, guide, and voice of that Truth.

And I do not think that this is any more a mysticism than is the astonishing presence to us at any given moment of the world itself. Rather than mysticism, it is logical insight into the meaning of the Resurrection. If one seeks that meaning logically, then the immediacy of the Resurrection is found. It must dominate the presence of the world, and found in the immediate presence of the Resurrection is the presence of Christ and with that presence of Christ is the presence of the Holy Spirit. All of it is suffused into every moment of every object and every life as well as into every moment of consciousness. It is the secret and the mystery of our lives because it is the immediate presence to us of the Creator.

Before the Resurrection the presence of the Creator was but dimly perceptible as a logical insight into the context of the world, which accounts for the presence of the religious spark in virtually all cultures stretching back into the recesses of pre-history. After the Resurrection, the Creator of the natural order had merged with it and transformed it.

It was for the purpose of salvaging creation itself, that God himself incarnated as a man, died at the hands of merciless men, redeemed the world from abject sin, and rose from the dead in conquest over death and a wrongly ordered and evil world. The truth in all things was no longer the truth of a fallen material world of pain and suffering and death. It had become the Truth of the immediate fact of Christ's Resurrection, the triumph over the fallen material world. In a mere moment all inquiry was answered. Men remained who they were, but now they lived in the presence of the immediate fact of the Resurrection. They would see by its light, whether they acknowledged it or not. If they had ears to hear the Holy Spirit and eyes to see the Resurrection, then they could hear and see the final Truth.

To demonstrate to all men how weak they were, how faithless they would be, and what they would have to overcome, Jesus chose from his apostles a man who he knew would deny him three times and made that man the head of his Church. And in choosing twelve apostles he chose one who would betray him into torture and crucifixion for money. And he chose another who would doubt his Resurrection until he had seen it with his own eyes.

And so why with the weakness and skepticism of men would anyone even believe that such an event as the Resurrection could occur, let alone did occur? It was, after all, 2,000 years ago that it was said to have happened. Why believe it now? Wasn't Christ supposed to have already returned? Isn't there still suffering, and death, and evil in the world? Don't we have science now to distinguish between the possible and the impossible and to lay out the probability of the possible? Isn't nature self-contained, with nothing outside or beyond it because nature is all that there is? Is not nature, finally, the living proof that there is no god, let alone God?

The answers come just as rapidly. The event of the Resurrection is immediately present and is immediately perceptible in all things. It began in time and is of time, but its 2,000 years is barely a half-tick in time, if that. The Resurrection can be believed because it can be immediately perceived now. Christ's promised return will be on his schedule, not on the schedule of men. Suffering, death, and evil are still in the world because men and the Father of Lies still co-habitate, even in the very light of the Resurrection. Science is a plodding human endeavor that turns over another rock only to find more questions than answers, endless complexity and mystery, paradoxically knowing less as it knows more. Nature is itself an impenetrable mystery, from one angle seeming to be nothing but a projection of designs, from another angle having no bottom, from another angle posing questions too large to be answered from within it. Scientists who think otherwise engage in folly.

But the Resurrection is immediate, sweeping mindfulness into what was once mere cognition, filling perceptual voids with insight, transforming indifference into inspiration.

That is the light of the Risen Christ. It is the broadest yet most focused and detailed knowledge of right and wrong and good and evil. It is the immediate light of conscience and is common sense. It is the gift, the legacy, the Truth between the embrace and the embraced. And that light is as drinkable as water. And it is also called Love. It brims over the edge of every moment in every thing.

Revised on March 29, 2005

Good Friday

2005-03-25T13:42:00.000-05:00

I am a religious man. But mine is not the great faith of the peasant in the field who believes because God is simply present to him. Nor is my faith the result of a road to Damascus experience. My faith developed from a thought process so long and tedious that it took me years to get to the point where I made the leap. But it wasn't really a leap, because I was so faithless in my reasoning that I made sure my leap of faith was but a footstep, one footstep left at the end of the faithless, tedious, years-long process.

This was the tedious process of the cynic who had grown so cynical, in the words of my old friend John Franco, that he had even become cynical about his own cynicism and so had unaccountably become an optimist.

How I got to the point where I believed that the blood of Chirst, falling to the ground in this world, had transformed it, can only be understood in its full implications if you first know that I had so disbelieved in Christ that I mocked him with the most terrible mockery. I detested Christianity, I laughed at Christ, I proclaimed myself a pagan, I was a cult of one.

What actually started the turnaround was a simple conversation with a friend of mine, Michael Gorman, a surfer dude who had washed up on the shores of upstate New York. All that he did was say a kind word about Jesus as a "great teacher" in a conversation with me about some profound metaphysical question that we were examining. It was not remarkable for someone to speak of Jesus that way. But it was remarkable for me to listen to it and not immediately dismiss it out loud. Michael said it with sincerity and I can still see his face when he said it, and he seemed almost as though he was being very careful to say it in a certain way, perhaps because he was worried that I would, in fact, dismiss it out loud. But I didn't. I allowed and affirmed a kind word about Jesus in my presence.

How arrogant was I that I needed to condescend to allow and affirm a kind word about Jesus in my presence? More arrogant than I can even understand today. It seems as though it was another life. But the special gift of that moment was that I thereafter allowed myself to think about Jesus and even to take him seriously as a historical figure.

I was the postmodern poster boy. Two decades before I had even heard of "deconstructionism," I had deconstructed every aspect of the world and history that I could bother to turn my attention to. Was I good at it? I was incredibly good at it. In fact, I spent all the time and energy available to me engaging in it. I felt as though I owed no respect to anything or anyone. Institutions were meaningless to me. I considered marriage a joke. No, actually, I didn't consider it a joke, because there was nothing that even struck me as funny about it. I found it utterly bizarre that anyone would even consider it. When friends got married, I regarded it as insulting to me personally.

That should put some perspective on how deeply I resented religion, particularly Christianity, and more particularly Jesus Christ who, as I said, I mocked as ridiculous.

Is it clear, then, how much I was committed to never having anything at all to do with the Christian faith?

My next admission of Christ into my vocabulary came from conversations with another friend, Raymond, who spoke of Christ as a "principle," the "Christ principle." That was consistent with my somewhat scholarly interest in things that generally fall into the category of "the occult." No, I was not interested in "the occult" as a lifestyle, but rather after the fashion of the writer Colin Wilson, who saw in the occult a body of evidence for human potential. My friend's use of the term "Christ principle" was inoffensive to me because for me it didn't directly refer to either Christianity or the person Jesus, but to a notion of human transcendence that appealed to my own desire to be superior.

I was so comfortable with my own atheism that it didn't bother me in the least to throw around the "Christ principle." It had its own attractiveness as a way of framing human potential.

But the importance for me was that I had, in my sublime arrogance, indirectly readmitted Jesus Christ as something that I was even willing to think about.

The real and tedious process of reaching my faith, however, came with my allowing the world I had so thoroughly deconstructed to be reconstructed in my mind. For that I can thank the great philosopher Edmund Husserl who, as poorly as I understood him, helped me have my deconstructed cake and eat it too. It was Husserl who helped me understand how I understood the world and helped me clarify how I thought.

That clarification brought me to a place where I was able to gain great results when I undertook professional projects. And just as I began to gain mastery over certain phases of my work, and began to think clearly about things in my deconstructed world, I realized that I was even more alien to that world than I had ever understood. I say alien to, not alienated from, because despite my long efforts at deconstruction, my sense was never that of simple alienation. Despite my low regard for the construction of society, I nonetheless felt absolutely present in that world. So it came as something of a shock to realize how alien I was to that world, without the characteristic sense of alienation. I wasn't alienated because I could only feel on top of a world that I had so thoroughly deconstructed. And there I was putting it all back together again, wonderful arrogant intellectual snot that I was.

But I'm not getting you, dear reader, anywhere near the truth here. I had terrible moments of fear as well. Fear of death. Fear of sickness. Fear of losing myself to anything other than myself. I was still a human being, arrogance notwithstanding. With women I was possessive, then dismissive, always jealous. "Womanizing" wouldn't exactly capture it. If it had been money instead of women that I wanted, I would have been a billionaire by the time I was thirty, but probably not as unhappy. I had very early on even dismissed happiness as an idiotic goal for human beings. Who, I used to say, wants to be happy? What was the point of that?

At some point along the way I started to take more notice of one other thing, and that thing was evil itself. I had been a Nietzschean on the question of evil. In other words, I didn't worry about evil because I was beyond it. My motto was "never pity, never regret." Power was the real deal, but not the traditional "power" of the world, not financial power or political power, that sort of power. But rather the power of a person free of the world's petty concerns. I should hasten to add that none of this was to be at the expense of others, not in theory anyway. I liked people. I cultivated friendships. I always wanted to be a good friend. But I was nonetheless committed to a sort of power that no one really has, and yet I had no interest higher than that. As I said earlier, I had become my own religion, and therein came the falling apart.

But now I was actually pondering evil as an independent thing, as a palpable existing thing, and not something merely attached to the actions of men. Evil, I began to think, was a thing in itself, and that it was not merely the sum of a billion daily evil acts committed by men and women in the world. Not only could I sense its existence; I could sense it pushing up against me.

I must have begun to think my way toward God because I somehow understood that I was going to need him, not because I loved him. It was a sorry thoughtless thoughtfullness about God that started me on my way toward him. It was, as I often accuse my friend Frank Evans of doing with regard to his life, an endless calculation and re-calculation of the deconstructed and then reconstructed world in front of me. I was to go over these things again and again. What were these things in front of me? How did they get here? What do they mean? Why this instead of that? Why this instead of nothing? What lay beyond it? What lay behind it?

Somehow, after years of that, it began to fall into place. There had to be a god, and that god would in fact be God. He made the whole thing. Designed it all. And he was no less a person than a human person, but infinitely more a person, more himself than anything was itself.

And so my poor weak faith began. It blossomed into the conviction that God would not leave us here simply to our own flimsy devices. He would speak directly to us, at some point, and let us know where we stood with him. Ask how I came to that conclusion and I can only say that it was a gift that I found at the end of a long road of intuition into the nature of things. And there, just a little farther beyond the end of that road was, of course, Jesus Christ. He was God speaking directly to us. Demonstrating with his miracles that he had power over the world. Demonstrating with his teachings that he was the truth. Demonstrating with his death and resurrection that he had transformed the world and altered the very shape of reality.

It might all sound like a monumental struggle within me to get to that place, but "monumental" and "struggle" would barely capture it. I got knocked around pretty good. I got my ass kicked because my path, which wound and wound its way around the abyss, was a wavering path through experience. My interest in things went through a way of dispossession of things, as T.S. Eliot would put it.

And so, as it always does, it came down to a simple precipice, with no "my way" but down. God's way was the only alternative. And my leap of faith that day in 1982, probably in late September, brought with it the first of the three little miracles that God gave me.

I went into the church that day, St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York (I needed a big church), because I literally had nowhere else to turn. I had simply painted myself into a corner and the paint just wouldn't dry this time. A better way of saying it was my cousin Bill Peterson's favorite expression: up shit's creek without a paddle.

On my knees in front of St. Joseph's altar inside St. Pat's, I didn't offer love, I just begged for help. I believed for the first time as an adult, in that moment. When I entered the cathedral I was still in doubt. Only on my knees did the faith finally wash over me. Prior to that I had only thought my way up to that point. My leap, my step, only put me in the place where I could receive this gift, which only God can bestow.

And I could only pray for help and ask for forgiveness for the rotten bastard that I had become.

On the very next day, the first of the the three little miracles occurred. My friend Ben Smith called me and told me that there was a job open at the small publishing firm where he worked. If I came in and spoke to the boss, I would probably be hired. I was suddenly lifted out of the painted-in corner or handed a paddle on shit's creek. Take your pick.

Not so strangely, that job, as flimsy as it was in economic terms, put me in a position to do and learn things as a writer that would take me down a whole new path. I was, needless to say, still freakishly stupid about a lot of things, but at that point I had turned my accounts over to God and God alone. As I began to love God, I began to love people again. As I began to love people, I began to love my country again. As I began to love my country, I began to feel as though my time and my place in the world were suddenly synchronized. The deconstructing was finally over. The reconstructing had equalized the deconstruction, brought it back to par, so to speak, and the energy of deconstruction was now the energy of discovery, and the principal thing being discovered was the full texture of the moral universe.

I don't mean to imply that these changes produced an unbreachable happiness. It was quite breachable, but it was happiness. I was going to have to make so many more mistakes from that point that a detailed account of the next several years would be enough to dissuade anyone that any change had occurred with me at all. The struggle to align myself with God had only begun. That was a miracle in itself. That was the really big miracle. That God had washed over me with faith at all. Simply for my homely act of falling on my knees, God had come by and picked me up in his limousine. Everything had changed.

The second of the three little miracles occurred in late July, 1986. It was, I think, a Sunday night. I was at another job, working a weekend shift. I got a call from my sister. Our beloved mother had had a stroke. She wasn't expected to survive. I left the office building where I was working in midtown Manhattan and walked a few blocks to, of course, St. Patrick's. Inside I went to my favorite place, the chapel of the Virgin behind the main altar. I prayed for my mother and asked for only one thing, that the Virgin bring her gently to God. I was only there for fifteen minutes, because the Cathedral was closing. I went back to work. My sister called back a while later. Mother was dead. She had died while I was praying in the chapel to the Virgin to take her gently to God.

I've always been grateful for that, the second little miracle.

All of this is so abstract, so lacking in real detail, that I can only thank any reader who has made it this far and wrap up with the third little miracle.

It was 1993, in the Spring. My wife and I were struggling financially. I was going through a crash and burn business venture, and was also involved in a threatening and difficult effort to drive a handful of drug operations first out of our building and then out of the neighborhood. People were threatening to kill me nearly on a daily basis. More and more of my time was going into putting pressure on the police to get busy working on the situation and less and less time was available to keeping my little business afloat. I frankly did not understand why I felt compelled to fight these drug operations so ferociously, and I didn't like the financial collapse, especially at that point in my life.

I went over to the Church of the Immaculate Conception a few blocks away. By habit, I was now watching my back everywhere, even in church, so I sat in front of a pillar so that no one could see me from the back of the church and no one could sit behind me. This was far more a practical matter than it was paranoia. It was simply taking into account the daily threats.

I prayed very personally. I said, "you know Lord, this is just painfully uncomfortable, to again be broke like this." I think that I literally had less than a dollar's worth of change in my pocket. "Could you explain this whole deal to me, Lord?" At the exact moment that I was having those thoughts as my prayer, a very attractive Asian woman sitting on the other side of the church got up and crossed in front of the altar, genuflected, and then came directly up the aisle to where I was sitting. She reached out and handed me a hundred dollar bill. She said to me exactly these words: "The Lord told me to give this to you. I don't know why." As my jaw fell open she walked away. I never saw her again.

After that day, things improved immediately, and have stayed steadily on the good side for us. I still have the hundred dollar bill. That was the third little miracle.

It would be a good thing to end this by saying that as kind as those three little miracles were to me, the deepening of my faith to the point where I can write, as I did at the beginning of this that "I am a religious man," is the very kindest thing that God has done for me. Far more important than God pulling me out of the abyss is my ability to write those words and mean them.

That's my meager attempt to thank God on this Friday that we call Good.

"The Seven Faces of 'Dr.' Churchill"

2005-03-24T09:47:00.000-05:00

Victor Davis Hanson reflects on the man who isn't, Ward Churchill:

Does Ward Churchill even exist?

Dr., Native American, original artist, serious scholar, combat veteran, highly recruited and sought-after academic, ex-Weatherman mentor: How many — if any — of these seven faces of our real-life Dr. Lao are true?

Professors outside the arts at major research universities are supposed to have Ph.D.s. The phantom Ward Churchill does not. How he was hired, promoted, and tenured without a doctorate is a mystery — the equivalent of a high-school teacher credentialed with an AA degree, or a medical doctor operating without an M.D.

Ward Churchill proclaimed that he is a Native American of various tribal affiliations; he is not. Even his ridiculous costumes, occasional threats, and puerile rants cannot disguise that fact.

He seems to be a pop artist of sorts, but his canvasses are not quite his own either. Those of like political mind have praised his scholarship, but much of what he writes seems derivative, or misrepresents or outright plagiarizes others.

Churchill has spoken of the firsthand trauma of battle service as a combat veteran, both as a paratrooper and as a sniper — among the most hazardous of corps in the United States military. Once again, there is no such evidence that he served in any capacity other than what his official duties in a motor pool and as a projectionist entailed.

Embarrassed officials claim Churchill was sought after by other universities — so they had to reel in this trophy catch before he got away — but no one can find any proof other than Churchill’s own mendacious claims.

No one knows what to make of his various arrests, boasts of bomb-making, trip to Libya, angry and traumatized ex-wives, braggadocio about petty vandalism, tales of phone threats, and the variety of other sordid stories that surround this fabricated man. Churchill’s presence on campus is like the weaving driver who is pulled over by the state police, who quickly find no license, registration, or insurance, but plenty of warrants — and thus wonder how many other paroled miscreants they’ve missed out there, one accident away from being a public-relations nightmare.

So, again, does this Ward Churchill even exist?

Of course not: His faces are made up of whole cloth.

"The bizarre passion of the pull-the-tube people"

2005-03-24T07:33:00.000-05:00

Peggy Noonan regains form today as she takes notice of the "in love with death" crowd's feverish clamor in support of starving and dehydrating Terri Schiavo. Here's a sample, selected because it mentions the demonic countenance of the most foul individual in American politics:

Everyone who has written in defense of Mrs. Schiavo's right to live has received e-mail blasts full of attacks that appear to have been dictated by the unstable and typed by the unhinged. On Democratic Underground they crowed about having "kicked the sh-- out of the fascists." On Tuesday James Carville's face was swept with a sneer so convulsive you could see his gums as he damned the Republicans trying to help Mrs. Schiavo. It would have seemed demonic if he weren't a buffoon.

Why are they so committed to this woman's death?

They seem to have fallen half in love with death.

What does Terri Schiavo's life symbolize to them? What does the idea that she might continue to live suggest to them?

That's my boldface emphasis, added to draw attention to Carville's name.

"Why are they so committed to this woman's death?" There are short and long answers to that question. The long answer demands an examination of how seemingly iron-clad American and Western values have been inverted, and how this particular case stands up as a test of that inversion in the minds of the culture of death crowd. So, let's try the short answer. These are the people who also hope that the person out on the ledge jumps, who want to watch the plunge and steal a thrill from the agony of the jumper and the "naivete" of those who care and don't want the person to do it.

While that short answer neglects all of the profound challenges laying siege to the values of our civilization, it gets right down to the immediate essence of a horrible slob like James Carville and the benighted crazies at Democratic Underground that he cultivates. Not to suggest that the culture of death brigades are restricted to that sad realm.

Acanemia becomes Acadeania

2005-03-23T08:04:00.000-05:00

Fred Siegel captures the "mood on campus" in the Age of Dean:

When Howard Dean hit New York several weeks ago, he made two stunning but characteristic comments. Speaking with fervor at the final DNC forum prior to his election as party chairman, he explained to the assembled flock that he didn’t just disagree with Republicans on specific issues, but rather that "I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for." If the Democrats are to combat this elephantine evil, he went on, "we cannot change our faith."

Back in the fall of 2003, when Dr. Dean was still riding high in the Presidential primary, I’d listened in on a conversation among undergraduate Deaniacs outside my office at Cooper Union in the East Village. "This just doesn’t feel like America any more," one of them said to a friend, who replied, "F-ck Bush," and pointed to a button on his jacket bearing the same slogan.

It’s an old professor’s habit, but I had to engage them. "What does that mean?" I asked the fellow with the button. "Bush is bullsh-t," he replied, "the most evil man in the world." When I said that wasn’t an argument and pressed him, he acknowledged that "Saddam isn’t a good guy," but "who are we"—he pointed both to me and his like-minded friend—to "judge Saddam Hussein?"

"Why not?" I asked. He replied with an answer right out of the postmodern playbook. Americans can’t judge another culture, he insisted, because there is no common morality. But if that’s the case, I asked, why then was George Bush "undoubtedly the most evil man in the world?" He seemed puzzled by the idea that his version of an emotional truth might seem incoherent to others.

Like the fascist writers of the 1930’s from whom their postmodern teachers had drawn their ideas, these Deaniacs were both engaged in politics and deeply cynical about democracy, which they saw as a game manipulated by nefarious forces led by Fox News. As they see it, there is little to argue; the only question is "which side are you on?" Doubtful that informed debate could settle much, they hoped to impose their will on a backward country that wickedly refused to see the appeal of a "Fuck Bush" platform.

Claudia Rosett continues...

2005-03-23T07:34:00.000-05:00

...to track the movements of the unctuous, slippery, mealy-mouthed Secretary-General (question: did Alger Hiss come up with that title?) of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, my nominee for "The Worst Person in the World." Here's a paragraph that goes right to the heart of the matter:

The grand failure of the U.N. is that its system, its officials and most visibly its current secretary-general are still stuck in the central-planning mindset that was the hallmark of dictators and failed utopian dreams of the previous century. Mr. Annan's plan takes little practical account of a modern world in which competition, private enterprise and individual freedom are the principles of progress. He has his own agenda, which he would like the rest of us to follow and fund. The words sound lofty: "development, security, and human rights for all." The devil is in the details, and because this is a blueprint for the future of the entire earth, that means a lot of room for big trouble. This report is not a benign document.

Sommers on the Summers kerfuffle

2005-03-22T09:24:00.000-05:00

Christina Hoff Sommers deftly tackles the debacle wherein the Harvard faculty voted that they had "no confidence" in Harvard President Larry Summers because he made some politically incorrect remarks. There's nothing new about the educated elite making bigtime asses of themselves over very small matters, but this time it comes as a watershed event in the sick history, such as it is, of political correctness at American universities:

To an outsider, the controversy must look very strange. Nothing Summers said was a threat to the advancement of a single competent woman in any of the sciences. The statistical fact that more men tend to score in the top-five percent of math-aptitude tests makes no predictions whatsoever about the abilities of any particular man or woman. Far from being outrageous or sexist, Summers's comments were completely respectable and altogether mainstream. But not in the academy. As one outraged Harvard feminist professor of ethics, Mahzarin Banaji, told the Harvard Crimson, "In this day and age to believe that men and women differ in their basic competence for math and science is as insidious as believing that some people are better suited to be slaves than masters."
....
Think of these women [Summer's feminist critics]: Nancy Hopkins, Natalie Angier, Megan Urry, and Virginia Valian. It is rare to meet such people in everyday life — but the academy is their natural habitat and there you find them in dismayingly large and indignant numbers. A few Harvard women have come to Summers's defense: the literary scholar, Ruth Wisse, the economist Claudia Goldin. But few women and even fewer men stand up to the hard-liners in the academy, who are ever eager to show that "men just don't get it." Some male faculty have openly supported Summers (most notably, Steven Pinker and Stephan Thernstrom) but it appears that most have run for cover, or joined the pack of Summers's tormenters.

The Harvard faculty is in very bad shape right now. Summers could be forced out and replaced by a right-thinking woman. The forces of resentment have the power to do that. But, what they do not have is the power to repeal the laws of nature. Mother Nature does not play by the rules of political correctness. And not even Harvard can flourish when intellectual freedom is forced to play by twisted feminist rules.

George Kennan

2005-03-22T09:00:00.000-05:00

Arthur Herman offers a hard critique of George F. Kennan, the great American diplomat and author of the doctrine of containment who died last week at 101. I honestly don't know whether Herman is being selective here, i.e., whether he is purposely focusing on one aspect of Kennan's overall view and arguing that it dominated all the rest of Kennan's thinking, or whether Herman has identified the essential thread that did in fact run through all of Kennan's thinking. I just haven't read enough of or about Kennan to know which is true. But I am sure that Herman is not making up this damning item of Kennan's biography:

The human factor left him unmoved. When he served in the embassy in Berlin in 1940, he complained bitterly about how keeping track of the fate of German Jewish refugees was adding to his workload. He blamed it on "powerful congressional circles at home," who had been spurred into action by Jewish interest groups. In fact, Kennan believed America's foreign policy was far too vulnerable to the demands of "vocal minorities," and he had his solution for it.

Two years earlier, he had begun writing a book about how to guide America "along the road which leads through constitutional change to the authoritarian state." The first step, he argued, was to create an enlightened elite pre-selected "on the basis of individual fitness for authority." The second was to deny the vote to certain segments of American society: to blacks, whom Kennan believed would be happiest becoming wards of the state; to women; and to immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, including presumably Jews from Poland and Russia. After all, Kennan asked, would not the Founding Fathers "turn over in their graves at the mere thought of the democratic principle being applied to a population containing over ten million Negroes and many more millions of southern Europeans to whom the democratic principle is completely strange?"

My sampling of Kennan's writings suggests that he was fortuitously insightful about the Soviets at a time when they were still putatively our allies, at the end of WWII, but that as he drifted out of the elite corps of policy makers he simply became more and more contrarian in his viewpoints. He seemed to me to be more dissatisfied with the craftmanship of policy than he was with any prevailing ideology. Herman's article paints a much different picture, that Kennan for instance had no faith whatsoever in democracy, including American democracy. I'm inclined to take at least some of what Herman says at face value. I'm waiting for reactions to his article from others who have studied Kennan.

"Drop Dead"

2005-03-22T08:14:00.000-05:00

As usual, George Neumayr, perhaps the second most important writer in America, nails it on the Schiavo case. Three paragraphs:

The party of abortion and euthanasia says that the absence of meaningful mental activity justifies starving and dehydrating a human being to death -- a criterion for killing that should give Democrats not known for their lucidity considerable pause. Not much meaningful mental activity is coursing through a party that considers it prudent to weep for tortured terrorists at Abu Ghraib while approving the torture of starvation for the disabled back home.

Were Terri Schiavo a dog or a terrorist, she would have received a more vigorous defense from Democrats on Sunday night. Even vegetation in Florida's wetlands inspires more concern from Democrats than a human being dismissed as "being in a vegetative state."

While some Democrats had the good sense to stay home on Sunday night, Barney Frank and company couldn't resist appearing on C-SPAN. They recited the usual sick sophistries -- and without even bothering, as Steny Hoyer's pathetic faux-oracular final speech illustrated, to coordinate their sophistries. The Democrats had faked up an interest in federalism for almost three hours, then Hoyer stands up and exposes it all as a sham by saying, "If I thought that Florida courts had dealt with this in a careless or superficial way, I might think we should intervene." In other words: we agree with the judicial activists in Florida who overturned the people of Florida's law protecting Schiavo, so we won't meddle this time.

Political Bilingualism

2005-03-21T13:18:00.000-05:00

David Frum makes an excellent point in his diary note today on the reaction to Mark Levin's new book on the Supreme Court, Men in Black. The book is on its way up bestseller lists, but law professors aren't interested in it:

Why are these academic experts on the Supreme Court so uninterested in a book that is likely to have a large impact on public opinion about the courts – and incidentally the next nomination to the highest court of them all? People are busy of course, and nobody can read everything, but still …. I’m reminded of something that John Podhoretz said many years ago: The great advantage that conservatives have over liberals is that we are bilingual. We can speak our language and we also know theirs. They however even now still don’t know ours and cannot be bothered to learn.

That's my boldface emphasis on the last two sentences. That has long been my exact predicament with liberals. I once was a liberal, a radical even. I know the song and dance, the lack of intellectual rigor, the lack of circumspection that's involved in the typical posturing of liberals from the inside, from experience. I've been there and done that. I know their arguments better than they do, and it is a tiresome task to listen to them. And the bottom line is that they simply have no ability to hear most of what conservatives have to say.

It rarely even occurs to them to listen. Liberalism is like a cult, where anyone with a big enough mouth can anoit some foolish idea as progressive and soon enough the parade begins. Witness the acceleration of this process in our universities, most recently in the monumental kerfuffle over Harvard President Larry Summer's declaration that men and women have different abilities, etc.

For all of my years arguing with liberals on Usenet or in the occasional tavern (including some liberals who have decided they no longer like paying taxes and have declared themselves libertarians, but still fully support the Leftist cultural revolution), I've encountered no more than two or three who will engage in an honest discussion. The problem, as I see it, is that the fundamental tenets of modern liberalism rest on quicksand, and the moment that a discussion is directed toward fundamentals the liberal hysteria gets ramped up and the exchange is dead. One must walk on eggshells to keep a liberal in a conversation, and under those conditions not much progress is possible.

"Rights and Schiavo"

2005-03-21T10:46:00.000-05:00

Mark Levin does an excellent job, in a comment to NRO's Corner, addressing the fundamental "right to live." Here's the first of Levin's four paragraphs, but please follow the link and read the entire comment:

The right to live, or more specifically, the right not to be killed, is a fundamental right. And it's a right recognized in our founding document, the Declaration of Independence. So ingrained in our society is the notion of life, that the 8th Amendment prohibits "cruel and usual punishment" (even short of death) and the 14th Amendment prohibits states from depriving any person of life without due process of law. This has nothing to do with federalism, unless you ignore the 8th and 14th Amendments. (Unlike the Left, that contorts the 14th Amendment, I'm recognizing its literal meaning.)

After you yawn, just realize he wants more money

2005-03-21T10:27:00.000-05:00

Kofi Annan, my nominee for "Worst Person in the World," responds to UN corruption by offering a UN makeover that requires more of your money:

UNITED NATIONS - Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for the boldest changes to the United Nations in the history of the world body, saying they are needed to tackle global threats in the 21st century. But getting leaders to agree on the package won't be easy.

Some questioned the timing of his appeal, just before former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker releases the results of his investigation into corruption in the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq. In particular, Volcker is looking into the activities of Annan and his son, Kojo, who worked in Africa for a company that had an oil-for-food contract.

The scandal is one of several that have dogged the world body this year. The sex abuse by peacekeeping troops in Congo and the resignation of the U.N. refugee chief amid sexual harassment charges have also tainted the U.N. image.

Think that's a pretty good joke? Well, make sure you don't miss the punch line:

Mark Malloch Brown, the secretary-general's chief of staff, dismissed media comments that Annan's report was "a panicked response" to the U.N.'s problems.

"Look at it as the secretary-general refusing to be distracted," he said

And then, way, way down in the AP dispatch comes the bill for Kofi's world government wet dream:

The secretary-general also urged all rich countries to establish a timetable to reach the goal set 35 years ago of earmarking 0.7 percent of gross national product for development assistance no later than 2015, starting with a significant increase no later than 2006. The United States currently has one of the lowest levels — about 0.15 percent.

The Terri Schiavo Case

2005-03-21T08:55:00.000-05:00

I was struck by something about Terri Schiavo's case the last time her feeding tube was removed, several months ago, when the issue came up in Usenet newsgroup discussions.

And this time around many others have seen it as well.

There are liberals, many but certainly not all, who feel compelled to take the side of death in this case. They are positively committed to the idea that this woman must die, and that her death will somehow serve the greater good.

This case has defined a fork in the road of the American conscience. Bob and Mary Schindler, the parents of Terri Schiavo, along with other members of her family, have affirmatively stated their desire to care for Terri as her guardians. They claim that Terri is very much present within her damaged body, and that to kill her by starvation and dehydration would be to kill someone who they say is aware and wants to live. They base this judgment on their knowledge of her as her parents and their direct experience of her in her current state.

Holding out against this claim is Terri's husband, Michael Schiavo, who claims that Terri made her wishes known to him (though she never made them known in any legal instrument) that she did not want to be kept alive if she fell into a state of disability like the one she is in today. He is supported by doctors who insist, despite Terri's appearance of wakefulness and her parents claims that she is responsive to them, that she has no cognitive abilities and has ceased to exist, essentially, as a thinking human being capable of knowing her own experience. She is portrayed by the medical types as no more than an animated corpse kept alive for no purpose at all.

Not an easy case, but clearly not that difficult to resolve. As President Bush said in a statement as he signed the law that will allow the Schindlers to ask a Federal judge to order the feeding tube reinserted, the legal presumption should be in favor of life.

The final moral argument in favor of Terri continuing to live is that the signs that she shows of wakefulness and awareness mean that she is entitled to die in her own time, not dispatched by starvation because she has become an inconvenience to her husband, who has moved on with his life. There may well be other cases where feeding a person in an advanced state of disability would be clearly unnecessary. The case of Terri Schiavo is not such a case. Doctors can say what they want, but Terri shows wakefulness and some minimal awareness to her parents, and that is reasonably confirmed by video recordings of her.

I am as amazed by her life and the love her parents have for her, as I am appalled by those who are desperate to see her die. I very much get the former. I very much do not get the latter.

Garry Kasparov on Chess

2005-03-20T14:24:00.000-05:00

The world champion chess player explains why he is retiring at 41 and what he got out of the game:

I feel that I am no longer playing an essential role in chess. With reclaiming the unified world championship out of reach due to political chaos in the chess world, I am reduced to unfulfilling repetition.

I have always set ambitious goals, and I have been lucky enough to attain most of them. I have achieved everything there is to achieve in the chess arena, arguably more than any other player in history. Meanwhile, there are other areas where I can still make a difference, where I can set new goals and find new channels for my energy. At the age of 41, I believe there is still much I can accomplish. My experiences in the chess world have provided me with an excellent foundation for these new challenges.
....
Th[e] analysis of chess history synthesized in my mind with my extensive experience of playing against computers. For over 50 years, back to the earliest days of computing, chess has been recognized as a unique cognitive battleground. The world watched my matches with "Deep Blue," "Fritz," and "Junior" as man-versus-machine competitions and a way to see how computers "think." To me they were also helpful in revealing how humans make decisions. These computers looked at millions of positions per second, weighing each one to find the mathematically best moves. And yet a human, seeing just two or three positions per second, but guided by intuition and experience, could compete with the mighty machines.

The nature of the decision-making process is little explored and I have become fascinated with the possibility of using my expertise to illuminate these questions. I am currently working on a book on how life imitates chess, that will be released this fall in America by Penguin. It examines the unique formulae people use in thinking and problem-solving. For example, the way hope and doubt affect how we process information, or the way we perform in a crisis. I hope it will also serve as a guide to improving these processes.

Over the past several years I have made a number of speeches on the topic of chess themes in life, particularly in business thinking and strategy. The response has been overwhelming and enlightening and I am extracting a number of valuable parallels. For example: the difference between tactics and strategy; how to train your intuition; and maintaining creativity in an era of analysis. In particular, the topic of intuition is intriguing. When I analyzed a 1894 world championship game between Lasker and Wilhelm Steinitz, I also looked at their post-game analysis and the comments of other top players of the day. They all made more mistakes in analysis than the players had made during the game! The intuitive decisions of the players during the game were correct in most cases, and more often so than when they had all the time in the world to analyze later.

Hanson contra the Crazies

2005-03-18T09:15:00.000-05:00

This week the most important writer in America looks into "a deep sort of self-loathing among Western elites," and contemplates the most troubling conceits of the usual suspects:

So what gives with this crazy popular analogy — one that on a typical Internet Google search of “Bush” + “Hitler” yields about 1,350,000 matches?

One explanation is simply the ignorance of the icons of our popular culture. A Linda Ronstadt, Garrison Keillor, or Harold Pinter knows nothing much of the encompassing evil of Hitler’s regime, its execution of the mentally ill and disabled, the systematic cleansing of the non-Aryans from Europe, or mass executions and starvation of Soviet prisoners. Like Prince Harry parading around in his ridiculous Nazi costume, quarter-educated celebrities who have some talent for song or verse know only that name-dropping “Hitler” or his associates gets them some shock value that their pedestrian rants otherwise would not warrant.

Ignorance and arrogance are a lethal combination. Nowhere do we see that more clearly among writers and performers who pontificate as historians when they know nothing about history.

On occasion, those who are tainted, sometimes unfairly, with past charges of rightist extremism, find some psychic release in calling an American democratic president or his conduct Nazi-like. Thus, a German politician, who de facto unfortunately operates under the suspicions of the post-Nazi world, gains the moral high ground and moral fides by gratuitously deflecting attention to an American — not as the descendant of the liberators of the Europe, but as the true inheritor of the German Hitlerian mantel.

George Soros can nearly destroy the Bank of England in his hyper-capitalist financial speculations but somehow find spiritual cover among the leftists of Moveon.org, which he subsidized and which ran ads comparing the president to Hitler. Sen. Byrd, who suffers from the odium of an early membership with the racist Ku Klux Klan, perhaps finds it ameliorative to associate others with the tactics of the 20th century’s premier racist.

"Don't be in such a hurry"

2005-03-18T08:14:00.000-05:00

Lawrence Henry is a very fine writer, and he's at his best when he handles matters that are deeply personal for him. Today he discusses the theme of "death with dignity," and he wants to know why there sometimes seems to be such a rush. (Wesley Smith would tell him that it's because HMO's likes to shave expenses, and Smith has a point.) Henry concludes:

Three things I remember from when my friends came to visit me in the hospital. One thing they all said later: "I thought you were going to die." To which I used to say, "If I ever get out of here, I'm going to get a motorcycle."

And the other was waking up at various times in my hospital bed, seeing my mother, always faithfully there, no matter what.

It is too damned easy to be cavalier and heroic about "dying with dignity" when somebody else is doing the dying.

You remember, of course, that among Hitler's...

2005-03-17T10:21:00.000-05:00

...first murder initiatives was the execution of the handicapped? Well, here's a clever solution to dampen the appearance of such brutality, compliments of the British brave new world. Kill them before they're born:

Doctors and health officials will consider whether more guidance on abortions is needed following the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service not to prosecute two doctors who authorised a late abortion on a foetus with a cleft lip and palate.

Jim England, the chief crown prosecutor for West Mercia, said the doctors believed, in good faith, that there was a substantial risk the child would be seriously handicapped. "In these circumstances, I decided that there was insufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction and that there should be no charges against either of the doctors," he said.

The inquiry began after a legal challenge over a previous decision by police not to charge the doctors involved in the abortion carried out, in 2001, on an unnamed woman from Herefordshire who was more than 24 weeks pregnant.

Aren't the British polite? Twenty-four weeks is just days shy of six months, in case the math didn't jump right out at you. And isn't a cleft palate something that can be corrected by surgery? Well, I guess if abortion is considered surgery, then this case of cleft palate was "corrected."

St. Patrick's Day

2005-03-17T09:30:00.000-05:00

I'm right now in the upstate place where I learned the definitive lesson about St. Patrick's Day: Stay the hell home.

[And a late note on that: I'll always be indebted to my long dead pal Richie Milman, who with great moral authority, ordered those four bouncers to get off of me and let me up. Truly, I've never since seen such a literally commanding performance as Richie's that particular St. Patrick's night.]

But God bless the Irish.

My Dad always said, and I still don't know what the hell he had in mind, "the Irish always predominate."

Mother never made that much of the Irish stuff, and we were as an Irish family fairly much unconnected to any Irish circles outside the extended family of somewhat Irish relatives.

I was their last child, a little to the late side of things for them and for those times, but my birth did occur suspiciously close to exactly nine months after St. Patrick's Day.

So, Mother and Dad might very well have been out that night, but it appears that they made it home all right.

The torture of Terri Schiavo

2005-03-17T09:13:00.000-05:00

More from Andrew McCarthy. He compares the treatment of terrorists to the court-ordered starvation and dehydration of Terri Schiavo, set to begin tomorrow:

On Friday afternoon, unless humanity intervenes, the state of Florida is scheduled to begin its court-ordered torture-murder of Terri Schiavo, whose only crime is that she is an inconvenience. A nuisance to a faithless husband grown tired of the toll on his new love interest and depleting bank account — an account that was inflated only because a jury, in 1992, awarded him over a million dollars, mostly as a trust to pay for Terri’s continued care, in a medical malpractice verdict.

In this instance, though, deafening is the only word for the silence of my former interlocutors — -civil-liberties activists characteristically set on hysteria auto-pilot the moment an al Qaeda terrorist is rumored to have been sent to bed without supper by Don Rumsfeld or Al Gonzales (something that would, of course, be rank rumor since, if you kill or try to kill enough Americans, you can be certain our government will get you three halal squares a day).

Not so Terri Schiavo. She will be starved and dehydrated. Until she is dead. By court order.

My deepest sense of this situation is that Terri will be saved. I hope that is true. If that woman is not actually there, as the medical types assert, then she's done a marvelous job of fooling her parents, and me. She gives the appearance of someone struggling silently to live within her damaged body, and for the medical types and the courts to wave their hands and assert otherwise is just very strange stuff indeed.

May God bless Terri Schiavo.

I haven't seen or heard it...

2005-03-17T08:44:00.000-05:00

...but I assume from Andrew McCarthy's comments at the NRO Corner this morning that John Kerry has been running his cakehole against Paul Wolfowitz's nomination to head the World Bank. Here's the money quote from McCarthy:

Senator Kerry’s diatribe boggles the mind. The nonsense about “Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz's repeated and serious miscalculations about the costs and risks America would face in Iraq[,]” is ironic, to say the least, on two obvious levels.

First, Senator Kerry himself has made “repeated and serious miscalculations about” every important strategic issue in the last 30 years – wrong about the Vietcong, wrong about Latin America, wrong about the Soviet Union, wrong about defense spending, wrong about terrorism, etc. If he is bent on attacking someone, I’m not sure track record is the way for him in particular to go.

Second, one thing I left off the above list is Iraq – Sen. Kerry was spectacularly wrong about that, too. And Paul Wolfowitz was right.

Like McCarthy, I greatly admire Wolfowitz, who is a stalwart advocate of freedom and a calmly ferocious opponent of tyranny. One would hope that Bush could find a few men or women of his quality to fight judicial tyranny from the Supreme Court, but that's another topic.

Shall we take a moment to knock the fake Irishman John Kerry on St. Patrick's Day? I guess so. He tried to present himself as Irish to Massachusetts voters (a lot of Irish in Boston, of course), when there's nothing Irish about him. The guy is about as big a goofball drip as you get to find in American politics. He also pretends to be a Roman Catholic, when that's almost as dubious a claim as the Irish thing was. Does he accept the Church's teaching on the sanctity of human life? Ah, no. So it's just a political pretense that he maintains. I'll thank God this morning that Kerry is not President of the United States.

Vaginal politics at UNC Wilmington

2005-03-17T08:10:00.000-05:00

The intrepid Mike Adams, a conservative outcast on the faculty at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, writes about an on-campus presentation of The Vagina Monologues:

Last week, the [Women’s Resource Center] decided to advertise [The Vagina Monologues] on the lighted marquee in front of the university. Wilmington residents were greeted by the word “vagina” flashing in bright lights as they passed the university on the way to work, to school, or to church. In fact, the flashing “vagina” sign was positioned right across the street from the Greek Orthodox Church and the administrative headquarters of the local Baptist Church.

Because it was located in one of the most heavily traveled thoroughfares in the city, the flashing “vagina” marquee was considered distasteful by more than just a few church-goers. Those who actually attended were even more shocked when they saw lollipops shaped like vaginas on sale in the entrance to Kenan Auditorium. The lollipops were called “p---y pops.” Several “distinguished” members of our university community walked around licking the sex-organ-shaped treats in an apparent display of feminist empowerment.

Before entering the play, attendees were handed a program, which listed various skits to be performed. The skits included “My angry vagina,” “My vagina was my village,” “The little coochie snorcher that could,” and “Reclaiming c--t.” For many, the highlight (or lowlight) of the show was a skit called “A six-year-old girl was asked.” This skit asked a child questions like “If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?”; “If it could speak what would it say?” and; “What does your vagina smell like?”

"Freeze! I Just Had My Nails Done!"

2005-03-17T07:52:00.000-05:00

Ann Coulter takes, shall I say, a somewhat less ethereal pathway than Peggy Noonan (see previous post) in her assessment of the Brian Nichols case:

Atlanta court officials dispensed with any spending issues the next time Nichols entered the courtroom when he was escorted by 17 guards and two police helicopters. He looked like P. Diddy showing up for a casual dinner party.

I think I have an idea that would save money and lives: Have large men escort violent criminals. Admittedly, this approach would risk another wave of nausea and vomiting by female professors at Harvard. But there are also advantages to not pretending women are as strong as men, such as fewer dead people. Even a female math professor at Harvard should be able to run the numbers on this one.

"Flannery O'Connor Country"

2005-03-17T07:40:00.000-05:00

Peggy Noonan pays tribute to Ashley Smith, who negotiated her way out of being killer Brian Nichols' hostage and convinced him to surrender to the police. After quoting at great length from the transcript of Smith's interview with reporters, Noonan has this to say:

It is an idiot's errand to follow such testimony with commentary. It's too big. There is nothing newspaper-eloquent to say. We have entered Flannery O'Connor country, and only geniuses need apply.

Here are mere facts. They were together seven hours and each emerged transformed. He gave himself up without a fight and is now in prison. She reported to police all that had transpired, the police told the press, and now she is famous.

Tuesday evening on the news a "hostage rescue expert" explained that she "negotiated like a pro." Actually what she did is give Christian witness. It wasn't negotiation. It had to do with being human.

It is an amazing and beautiful story. And for all its unlikeliness you know it happened as Smith said. You know she told the truth. It's funny how we all know this.

Protesting liberation, supporting terror

2005-03-16T11:06:00.000-05:00

Michelle Malkin, whose hard edge often leaves her without the credit she deserves as a very hot (but married) woman, takes up the dreary subject of this weekend's worldwide protests against the liberation of Iraq:

In New York, the "Troops Out Now Coalition" plans to march on Saturday from Harlem to Central Park to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's home to demonstrate against the "occupation." Their solution for helping the Iraqi people and demonstrating American leadership: Cut and run. Now!

You can guarantee there will not be a single sign of purple ink solidarity in sight, but the dictator-luvin' ladies of Code Pink who prance around in pastel underwear will be out in full force.

Along the way, the marchers will stop to harass workers at a local military recruiting station. Yes, these are the supposed peaceniks who derive pleasure from ripping yellow ribbon magnets off of minivans and throwing rocks through ROTC campus offices. These are the acolytes of Michael Moore, who compares Iraqi head-choppers to American Revolutionary war heroes.

"Oppose the war, support the troops"? Bull.
....
Organizers will also broadcast a taped message from convicted cop-killer and America-basher, Mumia Abu-Jamal. Death row diatribes are de rigueur.

In New Paltz, N.Y., the weekend anti-war festivities will be capped by a speech from Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y. -- the unhinged tin-foil hat wearer who continues to assert that White House adviser Karl Rove planted the bogus National Guard memos that Dan Rather wrapped himself in at CBS News.

Well, at least I'll have something to amuse myself with this weekend. Too bad that "W" baseball cap I bought from NRO's online store doesn't fit.

Walking the dog at Stonehenge

2005-03-16T10:13:00.000-05:00

Salisbury Plain, England, March, 1967: Years before the combined wear-and-tear of tourism and nature prompted restrictions on access, visitors of the human and canine varieties were free to stroll through Stonehenge's center circle. The mysterious structure — now a U.N. World Heritage Site — was built in three stages beginning about 5,000 years ago; its purpose has been a matter of scholarly debate for centuries.

Bob Milnes ©Stars and Stripes

"Lawless Judges"

2005-03-16T09:01:00.000-05:00

George Neumayr, perhaps the second-most important writer in America, explains how the wheel of judicial tyranny turns eventually to the rejection of law by the people:

Lawless judges operate according to a very cynical assumption: that the people they abuse will never behave as recklessly and ruthlessly as they do. But this is not a durable assumption. Treating the people as docile chumps will work in the short term, but one of the more reliable patterns of history is that anarchy follows tyranny. Tyrants live by lawlessness and die by it. There is no reason to suppose that the convulsions that every other corrupted Republic has choked on through history won't eventually seize the throat of our tyrants.
....
Americans are supposed to be horrified that mullahs in the Middle East are micromanaging the lives of people and standing in the way of their self-government. Yet that's exactly what's happening to Americans under the modernist mullahs of its judicial class. Both the Supreme Court and state courts routinely lecture the people like overweening mullahs, saying in effect: we will not let you govern yourselves; you must submit your way of life to our approval; we don't trust your "values."

American judges have a contempt for God-given freedoms that would make an Arab autocrat proud. Because these judicial tyrants know that letting the people exercise God-given freedoms will not produce the liberal society they have long wanted to engineer, they will squash that freedom by judicial decree. The Monday ruling of San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer throwing out Californians' opposition to same-sex marriage illustrates this once again.
....
Having no respect for the laws of God, modern liberalism is by nature lawless, and the judicial tyranny under which we now live is its natural outgrowth. Since liberalism rests on nothing that precedes human will, what else can the rule of law for it be but the rule of corrupt men? The idea that man would form laws on the basis of an order from which he came -- namely, the order that God established and promulgates to man through his reason -- is an outrage to liberalism. This idea of law is "authoritarian." However, experience should have taught us by now that modern liberalism produces not an absence of authority but an explosion of new and abusive authority, a pitiless authority that tends toward totalitarianism.

Want to watch a silly mind gasping for air?

2005-03-15T11:02:00.000-05:00

Read Scott Erb's March 14, 2005 entry at his blog. Now he's complaining that the U.S. "stacked the deck" against an Iraqi government "easily being named" because forming a government in Iraq requires a 2/3rds vote in the new parliament. "The system was set up in a rather obscene way," says Scott. "All I can figure is that the US wanted to make it difficult for a government to form in order to increase the chances we can manipulate and shape negotiations on its final outcome."

Scott was against the regime change in Iraq, of course. He has been calling Iraq a quagmire and a disaster ever since. This naturally makes it harder and harder for Scott to simply accept success in the Iraq mission, so he has to search for anything resembling failure and then blame it on the United States, as best he can. It wouldn't suit him to pause for a moment and consider that Iraq's greatest challenge is to hold three distinct Muslim cultural identities -- the Shi'ite majority, the Kurds, and the Sunnis -- together within a single national government, and that a 2/3rds supermajority to name a government in the pre-constitutional parliament might be a very good idea. Nah, Scott can't think past the end of his nose, although that has gotten mighty long through the years.

Scott, whose hatred for the United States is never more than a millimeter below the surface, goes on to favorably compare Syria's occupation of Lebanon (for the last thirty years) to the American occupation of Iraq. He made sure to get his post out so that he could tout the big pro-Syrian demonstration from last week before the even larger anti-Syria rallies yesterday -- at least he never updated it to take account of yesterday's demonstration.

Is Scott Erb the next Ward Churchill?

"H.P. Lovecraft's Afterlife"

2005-03-15T08:40:00.000-05:00

Interesting piece by John J. Miller on one of the great masters of horror fiction. I haven't read anything by him for several years, but if there was anyone who reached down into the abyss it was Lovecraft. Miller explains how Lovecraft conjured that abyss.

I have a story, Bailey's Woods, that was inspired by an incident that occurred while I was reading a Lovecraft story. Bailey's Woods is set in upstate New York in and around Ithaca, near where Beck lives (the story is set there because that's where the incident that inspired the story took place, some thirty-two years ago).

The ugliness that is Justin Raimondo

2005-03-15T08:05:00.000-05:00

I recently took Stephen Schwartz lightly to task for his antagonistic mischaracterization of Hunter S. Thompson as a writer. But now Schwartz, who is a very important writer on radical Islam, more than redeems himself with a dead-on profile of Justin Raimondo. Schwartz captures Raimondo as both person and type, and neither is pretty. That Pat Buchanan has anything to do at all with Raimondo suggests things about Pat that I don't even want to think about. A sample from Schwartz's take-down of Raimondo:

Posing as a war-hater, Raimondo defends murderous dictators like Milosevic, who unleashed the only wars in Europe over the past half century. He presents the Ba’athist party-states in Iraq and Syria as victims of the malicious West and openly wished that Japan had won the Second World War, while fiercely alleging his patriotic motivations. When it comes to America’s present wars, he revels in a repellent defeatism. The heinous attacks on America on 9/11 become for him an explanation of American “fascism.”

Taking a leaf from his comic-book canon of political wisdom, Raimondo describes fascism as a product of “the traumatic humbling of a power once considered mighty.” He cites Germany defeated in the First World War, while ignoring that Italy, where fascism originated, was a victor in that war, as was the third Axis power, Japan. Perhaps this omission can be ascribed to the fact that Raimondo idolizes Japan, which was at the height of its power when it attacked Pearl Harbor. As he wrote so eloquently, in an article titled. “Hiroshima Mon Amour: Why Americans Are Barbarians,” posted to his site on August 8, 2001, “the idea that America is, in any sense, a civilized country is easily dispelled.” By contrast, imperialist Japan, which slaughtered millions in East Asia, is his idea of paradise. He believes “the wrong side won the war in the Pacific.” It is, by the way, extremely doubtful that Raimondo has ever set foot on Japanese soil.

Mark Levin on the right to privacy

2005-03-14T12:35:00.000-05:00

Levin's a good guy and the excerpt from his new book that's featured at NRO today tackles a lot of the judicial craziness unto tyranny that has plagued the U.S. Supreme Court for decades.

But he's wrong about there being no general right to privacy. I explained why he's wrong in a note that I sent off to the NRO Corner:

There's a lot to agree with in Mark Levin's article, but the idea that privacy is not a constitutional right because it cannot be found in the Constitution is wrong. This was exactly the problem that Alexander Hamilton warned of when he opposed adding a Bill of Rights in the first place: that enumerating some rights would suggest that rights left unenumerated were not protected. And it's the problem that the Ninth Amendment attempted to solve.

The test for a right is whether it is a "just claim" of the individual. A region of personal privacy is clearly a just claim, a right, and it is suggested by the First Amendment's protection of freedom of conscience, which is predicated on the private nature of one's mind. The Third Amendment speaks to the privacy of one's home; the Fourth Amendment to the inviolability of one's own person, home, and property; the Fifth Amendment to the privacy of conscience and property.

So of course there is a general right to privacy. But like any right, the right to privacy has limits, and does not permit within the privacy zone the violation of the rights of others or other acts deemed illegal by the legislature. You can't kill your child in private or deal drugs in private and use privacy as your defense.

In other words, the privacy zone does not exclude the legislature's determinations. But there is always the question of whether laws are just or not, whether they tip the balance against an individual's just claim on his own life, which he brings with him to society with all of its immediate implications. All laws should and must face that test from their very inception.

What the Ninth Amendment only serves to emphasize is that neither the Bill of Rights nor the Constitution grant rights to people. Rather, the Constitution prohibits the government from infringing the rights that people hold by nature (or from withholding the civil rights that extend from natural rights by civic tradition), those "certain inalienable [natural] rights" with which people are endowed (as well as those civil rights that reflect them in the functions of civil society -- trial by jury, for instance). You won't find a right to life or a right to self-defense explicitly stated in the Constitution either. Is there any doubt that they are both more basic than any of the rights spelled out in the Bill of Rights?

I realize that I'm swimming here against the tide of Robert Bork's (and Mark Levin's) judicial philosophy, but I'm not swimming against the intent of the Framers, which both Bork and Levin would claim to be arguing for.

Here's a key difference: I plainly agree with Bork and Levin that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, but with one fundamental difference. I don't think that Roe v. Wade should be overturned for the purpose of sending the abortion question back to state legislatures. I think that Roe v. Wade should be, literally, reversed, so that the right to life of the unborn is protected. I do not think that determining the right to life of the innocent belongs to the legislatures. I think that Bork has been dead wrong about this all along, and it's time for it to be addressed.

If the unborn child is recognized as a person, he has all the rights of any person under the Constitution. And given the there is no longer any question of duality in any individual human life from the moment of conception, a human being is either a person from the moment of conception onward, or "personhood" is merely a subjective occurrence determined by law. Presented sufficient evidence, which exists in abundance, that human life and thus personhood begins at the bright line of conception, it is the obligation of the judge to apply the full protection of the law to that life, not any legislature's job to decide that it can be killed in New Jersey but not in Indiana.

Culture War

2005-03-14T09:00:00.000-05:00

I've pointed out before that if you are unwilling to stand and fight the culture war, then what you will get is a one-way cultural revolution. Jeff Jacoby fires off a salvo against the de-sexing of marriage on the heels of the declaration by Massachusetts courts that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right:

The changes soon began. Massachusetts rolled out a new marriage license shorn of any reference to bride and groom. Couples getting married were now to be officially identified as ''Party A" and ''Party B." The department of public health proposed a similar rewrite of the state's birth certificate, replacing ''mother" and ''father" with ''Parent A" and ''Parent B." To that, Governor Mitt Romney objected, though it is probably only a matter of time until a court orders him to make the change.

Meanwhile, others have gone far beyond Massachusetts in embracing the brave new world of unisex marriage. Last month, lawmakers in Ontario enacted Bill 171, stripping the statute books of all references to gender in connection with marriage. No longer do Ontario's laws use words and phrases like ''husband," ''wife," ''widow," ''widower," or ''persons of the opposite sex." And it is not just family and marriage laws that have been de-sexed. Bill 171 eliminates the traditional language of matrimony from more than 70 provincial statutes, including the Gasoline Tax Act and the Public Libraries Act.

Oh, those Canadians, they are giving Europe a good race on the road to a brave new world. But don't forget about Harvard:

''Women," [Jada] Pinkett Smith told the audience, ''you can have it all -- a loving man, devoted husband, loving children, a fabulous career. They say you gotta choose. Nay, nay, nay. We are a new generation of women. We got to set a new standard of rules around here. You can do whatever it is you want."

That harmless bit of you-go-girl boosters was all it took to arouse the wrath of Harvard's Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, transcended, and Supporters Alliance. It denounced Will Smith's wife for her 'extremely heteronormative" comments, which ''made BGLTSA members feel uncomfortable." The group demanded -- and received -- an apology. And those who brought Pinkett Smith to campus will now undergo reeducation: The Harvard Crimson reports that the Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations is working with the BGLTSA ''to increase sensitivity toward issues of sexuality." Translation: There will be no more talk of loving men or devoted husbands at Harvard. At least not from married women.

And, of course, there's always the things that you will be called when you speak out against any of this. Why, look at what they said about Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney when he spoke out against same-sex marriage:

Romney's offense against the new marital correctness was considerably more serious. In a couple of speeches to Republican groups out of state, he condemned same-sex marriage on the grounds that ''every child has the right to have a mother and a father."

The words were hardly out of his mouth before protesters were at his State House office, blasting him as ''mean-spirited." Editorial writers launched an attack on his ''ignorance" and charged him with ''stooping to pander to the rigid right." In the Berkshire Eagle, one columnist slammed his statement of the obvious -- that every child deserves a mom and a dad -- as ''really disturbing" and the brainless ''fuzzy stuff of 1940s movies." He was accused elsewhere of succumbing to the kind of thinking that once barred blacks from white lunch counters.

So, you are either ready to fight the culture war, which means you are ready to weather the counter-attacks, or you had best get yourself ready for that one-way cultural revolution. Which is it going to be?

The Horror

2005-03-13T11:45:00.000-05:00

Well, not the horror, but horribly embarrassing. I was just reminded, by the appearance of a couple walking by on the street outside my window, of an afternoon Mrs. McP and I can't forget.

We went out shopping for a mattress, of all things, and as we perused the wares in a store off lower Broadway in Manhattan we suddenly recognized that something terrible had happened. Without realizing it, we had left our apartment dressed exactly alike. We were both wearing black sweaters and khaki pants. We laughed like hell, and have had a good laugh about it whenever it has come up since. Eventually, the saleswoman we were questioning about mattresses looked us up and down and asked if we "worked together." She noticed that we were wearing the same uniform. We explained our tragedy to her and she smiled. (People in Manhattan are wary of indulging in outright laughter.)

For me this rings back to my college days, when my best friend and ex-roommate showed up at a get together with his girlfriend and they were dressed in identical flannel shirts under identical overalls. I'd never liked it when mothers dressed their young kids like that. To see two of my favorite people doing it to themselves just threw me right off, far more than it should have, but then I was but a college student.

So, that's what the couple who just walked by my window had done, dressed themselves in the same essential outfit. (It wasn't a mistake; I've seen them before.)

"To each his own" is clearly hard to apply here.

Religion and Science

2005-03-13T10:48:00.000-05:00

The Nobel Prize-winning (in 1964) physicist and inventor of the laser, Charles H. Townes, just won the Templeton award for his work on the relationship between science and religion. Writing today at opinionjournal.com about that relationship, he calmly jots down what is in effect a series of "notes of reminder." Among the most starkly astounding is this one, which refers to the mysterious and unlocatable "dark matter" that makes up the bulk of the mass of the universe:

We are now convinced that the matter we can identify in our universe is only about 5% of all that is there. What is the rest of it? Scientists are trying hard to detect this strange unknown matter. Will they, and when?

I thought that the estimate was that "dark matter" made up about 70% of the mass of the universe, not 95% as implied by Townes. Perhaps he is calculating the mass equivalent of "dark energy" into the equation as well. Anyway, whether it's 70% or 95% of the matter of the universe that scientists can't find, it's a number that you've got to be impressed by. One suggestion I've seen is that "dark matter" doesn't resemble the matter that we know, with its familiar atomic structure, and could be something entirely different.

I found Townes implied conclusion that religion is as unsettled as science a bit odd for someone who also implies that he is a believer. The mystery of faith seem to me to be far more clarified than the mystery of science, the former being the gift of God while the latter is merely the striving of men.

Francis Fukuyama sometimes writes...

2005-03-13T09:10:00.000-05:00

...and speaks like a man desperate not to take a position. But his methods of avoidance are enlivened by their deft application. In today's New York Times Book Review he offers an essay for the 100th anniversary of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Maybe Weber was right, maybe he was wrong, he sure looks right, he sure looks wrong, maybe culture counts in economics, maybe culture doesn't count, etc. Near the end of the essay, though, Fukuyama did produce a paragraph, lightweight for sure, that hits lightly on the mark:

SURPRISINGLY, the Weberian vision of a modernity characterized by ''specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart'' applies much more to modern Europe than to present-day America. Europe today is a continent that is peaceful, prosperous, rationally administered by the European Union and thoroughly secular. Europeans may continue to use terms like ''human rights'' and ''human dignity,'' which are rooted in the Christian values of their civilization, but few of them could give a coherent account of why they continue to believe in such things. The ghost of dead religious beliefs haunts Europe much more than it does America.

Fukuyama is being careful to keep one leg on either side of the fence here but, translated for meaning, what he is saying is that Europe has lost touch with its identity and the source of its own values. Europe is now a "floating city," without anchor. And that's the single most dangerous situation that a civilization can find itself in: not being able to find itself.

Umbrella in hand, Brooks faces gale force zeitgeist

2005-03-12T10:55:00.000-05:00

David Brooks tries a self-deprecating waltz down the dark alley of the new non-conformity, which is a rebellion against decaf, StairMasters, and the general neo-stoicism of American life. Among many good paragraphs, I liked this one the best:

I blame parents. Kids are raised amid foam corner protectors and schooled amid flame-retardant construction paper. They're drugged with a vast array of pharmaceuticals to keep them from becoming interesting. They go from adult-structured tutorials to highly padded sports practices to career-counselor-approved summer internships.

Indeed, interesting children can be very threatening. The column is hilarious, by the way. Something you can read aloud to husbands, wives, or children in their teenage years, if you dare.

Sorry, Condi

2005-03-12T09:41:00.000-05:00

I've always admired Condi Rice, going back to her days as a National Security Council staffer in the Bush 41 administration. When Bush 43 chose her as his National Security Adviser, I applauded. When he made her Secretary of State, I thought that it was the best choice he had made for his cabinet since becoming President.

Now Rice is being mentioned as a possible Republican presidential nominee, for 2008. But that would not be possible without destroying the Republican electoral coalition (the same holds true for Rudy Giuliani). Rice is pro-choice on abortion, and for her to characterize that position as "mildly" pro-choice is ridiculous on its face. There is nothing mild about abortion. Here she is talking about abortion to the Washington Times:

Miss Rice said abortion should be "as rare a circumstance as possible," although without excessive government intervention. "We should not have the federal government in a position where it is forcing its views on one side or the other.

"So, for instance, I've tended to agree with those who do not favor federal funding for abortion, because I believe that those who hold a strong moral view on the other side should not be forced to fund it."

Describing pro-lifers as "the other side" is one of the ways Miss Rice articulates her position as a "mildly pro-choice" Republican. She explained that she is "in effect kind of libertarian on this issue," adding: "I have been concerned about a government role.

"I am a strong proponent of parental notification. I am a strong proponent of a ban on late-term abortion. These are all things that I think unite people and I think that that's where we should be.

"We ought to have a culture that says, 'Who wants to have an abortion? Who wants to see a daughter or a friend or a sibling go through something like that?' "

I'm never sympathetic when someone declares herself a "libertarian" on the abortion issue. The taking of innocent life is not a "liberty option." It is in fact a moral issue before anything else, and the only moral conclusion to be drawn about it is that it is wrong. No matter how convenient abortion might be, and no matter how out of sight the victim is, abortion is wrong. It is the taking of a new human life.

Rice talks about how she thinks abortion should be "rare." Well, Condi, it isn't rare. It's common, and it's being commonly used as a form of "negative option" birth control. I'm all for "choice," but I'm for a choice that's made before a child is conceived, not after the fact. To be "mildly pro-choice" on abortion is akin to being "a little bit pregnant."

Views on abortion like Rice's are essentially indistinguishable from those of Hillary Clinton, and if Rice or any other pro-choice candidate is nominated by the Republican Party it will destroy the Republican coalition and smother its moral conscience.

I'm with Beck...

2005-03-11T14:13:00.000-05:00

...on this one:

Michelle Malkin points to a letter to which one can put one's name and send it off to bureaubots in supplication over the matter of FEC regulation of weblogs.

Now hear this: it is not my business to go asking them anything about the matter, any more than they made it their business to ask me about it.

I will simply break their law.

That is all.

Corrupted thinking

2005-03-11T13:44:00.000-05:00

That's how I'd characterize the thinking of Charles Krauthammer as he tries to make a distinction without a difference between "research cloning" of human life, which he "deplores," and the use in research of "discarded" embryos created for in vitro fertilization (IVF), which he supports. Here's how he puts it:

The principle I suggested was this: No creating human embryos for experimentation. That means ``no" to all cloning. And that means ``yes'' to using existing, already created embryos such as the thousands of frozen and/or discarded embryos left over from IVF clinics -- embryos created for the purpose of becoming children but which, for one reason or other, were not used.

That's a mighty slippery dance around the same issue. How would "no experimenting on children unless they are orphans" sound? If you create a new life, which is what all human embryos are, for IVF, but eventually experiment on it, then you have in fact allowed a newly created life to be used for experimentation. There is no moral difference between that and making clones for experimentation, and calling the unused IVF embryos "discards" hardly suits the cause of moral reasoning that Krauthammer pretends to be encouraging.

The true thrust of clear moral reasoning must strike at the immorality of creating all those new embryos (new human lives) for IVF that are "not used" and are thereafter "frozen and/or discarded." Trying to accept that situation as a moral fait accompli while "deploring" experimental cloning is some very rich hypocrisy, and it needs to be deplored, and here I am deploring it.

The whole article is so full of this made-up distinction in its attempt to fend off Krauthammer's massive self-contradiction that it is rather shocking to see this line: "The Democrats were oblivious to this self-contradiction. " Or maybe it's not so shocking. In either case, the column is one big lie, told mostly by Krauthammer to himself.

Again, the most important writer in America

2005-03-11T12:35:00.000-05:00

Victor Davis Hanson:

Going to the U.N. in late 2002 was no mistake either — both for the principled reason that resolutions to be legitimate, need to be enforced, and for the more practical purpose of putting everyone's cards on the table. That debate led to reexamination of the U.N., revealing in turn both the corruption of the once august body — everything from Oil-for-Food to the inaction on Darfur — and just how far Europe had really diverged from the United States. These were disappointments to be sure, but necessary to clear the air so there were no illusions about Iraq. Does anyone believe that our present appraisals of both Europe and the U.N. are now more naïve or wrong than they were before September 11?

The title of the article is "A Look Back: Turning Points since September 11." I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Clown returns to center ring

2005-03-11T11:42:00.000-05:00

The New York Times has called in reinforcements for "a redesigned Op-Ed package that will be expanded to two pages in the Week in Review section, following the editorials."

Increasing the number of admitted opinion pages that I won't be reading in the Sunday Times by 50 percent is a bold stroke of...further self-aggrandizement? (I just this moment recalled, from at least 30 years ago, the father of an old girlfriend hoisting the entire Sunday Times onto his lap and referring to it, affectionately, as "this big pig".) But promoting that expansion by announcing the return of Frank Rich to that venue is to announce that the clown act that the Times opinion pages have become will be richer by one clown.

I'm sure that Rich has no need of my appreciation, or anyone else's, given the sublime appreciation he has for himself. But Executive Editor Bill Keller and Editorial Page Editor Gail Collins, no doubt on the instructions of Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., said this in a "note to the staff":

"At Arts & Leisure he developed his own brand of social criticism, in a column that combined intensive reporting, immersion in the popular culture and a unique gift for seeing connections between culture and public life."

Gee, is that what Frank has been doing? I thought that he had been muttering about conservatives while doing his best to reassure Times readers that their liberal conceits will always be carefully nurtured by the Times because, after all, who depends upon the nurturing of those conceits more than the Times itself. Good luck, Frank, but watch out for Maureen. She's a real criminal (first song). "It's a sad, sad world where a girl will break a boy just because she can."

(Thanks to the NRO Corner for the tip)

A national idiocy

2005-03-11T09:56:00.000-05:00

One of the things about the Social Security system that I find most disturbing is how like gravity it curves the American space and warps our idea of who we are. Just one case in point: "people are living longer now, so we should raise the retirement age." You've been hearing that from different quarters, right?

What this means, of course, is that Americans expecting to retire at 65 and thereafter receive their Social Security "benefit," would need to wait additional years because, after all, they are living longer than when Social Security was invented. So goes the rationale.

But my idea of America informs me that Americans should be retiring earlier, not later, and that when they retire earlier they should be doing it behind an investment portfolio as big as they can make it. It should be an investment portfolio started by their parents as early as their presence in the womb. And thereafter built with gusto from the time of a teenager's very first job, all with the intention of being free to retire as early as possible and pursue as many interests as one has the energy to pursue. How about retiring at 40? That is theoretically doable if, in a portfolio that has been under long construction, you own a broad selection of equities, debentures, and other securities that will pay you enough annually even while you still grow it as a capital base.

That's all so confusing, you say? Don't like capitalism? Well, then, wait until you're 70, and get your "benefit."

I hear the objections: "we can't invest for ourselves, let alone our children, when we can barely get by on our income."

But you are already "investing" for your retirement. Every week, you and your employer are putting 12.4 percent of your pay into the Social Security system. Fifty or so years after your first "contribution" you'll get your first "benefit" as determined by Congress. You might be 70 by that time, and you might be getting "70 cents on the dollar" of what you might have expected, and there will be two workers out there paying that money to you out of their paychecks. The 12.4 percent of your pay that went in every week went to the same place, paying people already retired. You never owned or invested any of it.

So you do have something to invest: that big hit on your weekly paycheck that the government throws right into the largest Ponzi scheme ever conceived by mankind. It is the great herd of independent minds that insists that it's all in your best interests. Well, do you think that it's all in your best interests?

For the children, again

2005-03-11T08:52:00.000-05:00

Hillary Clinton is out knocking on doors, eager to show customers some of her new moving-to-the-center products. Because her "for the children" powders and lotions have been her trademark items, Hillary has been holding them up and smiling, her eyes bulging, her head shaking "no" as she says "yes". Unfortunately for her, George Neumayr caught her in mid-pitch and turned consumer advocate:

She returned to this Dick Morris-tutored mode of motherliness this week. Appearing with a few Republicans happy to stand within the compass of her star power, she spoke of the "epidemic" of violent media in the lives of children. "It is a little frustrating when we have this data that demonstrates there is a clear public health connection between exposure to violence and increased aggression that we have been as a society unable to come up with any adequate public health response," she said, calling for legislation to study the impact of media on children.

In other words, Hillary is back to the V-chip. Notice that Hillary Clinton is always careful to emphasize the harm violent television poses to children, while appearing more agnostic and less vocal about the harm sexual content does to them. She has never called for an S-chip. This allows her to reach out to Middle America while making sure not to alienate too many constituencies within the Democratic Party. After all, her friends in Hollywood like to pride themselves on being troubled by the prospect that children might imitate the glamorized violence they see (or a scene involving smoking, nicotine, not marijuana). But that children might imitate the glamorized promiscuity they see -- a far more likely prospect than a teen going out to buy an Uzi after seeing Rambo -- is a proposition her friends in Hollywood won't consider and she knows it. If she were really worried about public health problems arising from media rot -- say, rising levels of illegitimacy and venereal disease -- she would broaden the scope of her concern, and stop supporting the First-Amendment extremism of her party that threw the country into a ubiquitously rancid culture.

Her children's activism has always been highly selective. She will protect children against violence on television but not against the violence of abortion. In one hand she offers parents a V-chip, in the other she offers their children condoms. This is the arbitrary nanny state that takes its cues not from any natural moral law but from the will of an elite that seeks to impose its ideology on families. Proponents of the nanny state will invoke parents but really have no use for them. "We'll take it from here," is the attitude. The chilly social-science-style pronouncements of Hillary Clinton in It Takes A Village revealed her contempt for parenting untutored by the State.

Why?

2005-03-10T18:45:00.000-05:00

Indeed, why in the previous two posts have I been examining the concepts of natural rights, Reason, and truth? (Reason is capitalized to emphasize its meaning as the self-aware individual human mind engaging in abstract rational thinking.)

I'm doing that because of the extent to which Reason has been mischaracterized as mere transitory islands of accumulated logical statements bound only to the rules of logic, and having little to do with truth in general and nothing to do with moral good. And I'm doing it because of another mischaracterization, from the postmodernist direction, that the only truth is that there is no truth. Both of these mischaracterizations reject the concept of natural rights (including the right to one's own life as a direct matter of human nature). The first mischaracterization confines truth to the smallest circumstances, and the second mischaracterization rejects truth entirely.

My purpose is to show that Reason is grounded in truth, that its purpose from that beginning in all of us is to gain adequate knowledge of the truth, that this purpose is moral, and through this purpose moral truth can be adequately known.

That would mean, for instance, that "thou shalt not kill" is an immediate fact discoverable by Reason from its ground in each person's claim on his own life. It is the immediate truthful abstraction of the claims of individuals to a general claim understood among all individuals.

In other words, morality is not made up. It is found in the immediate ground of Reason in each person.

In fact, a failure to make this moral ground explicit within one's own mind will negate the force of Reason, which is the search for truth.

The negation of truth, of Reason based in truth, and of the natural rights at the foundation of Reason, is a negation of human ontology, leading to human beings being characterized as nothing but bags of protoplasm making things up as they go along.

Reason as clear moral insight, truth as the essential object of reasoning, and the natural right to one's own life as the requisite foundation of Reason in each person, are all immediately knowable essential aspects of the reasoning person.

I explicitly reject the dictum of hard skepticism that Reason is a logical isolate with no moral ground and where truth is carefully confined or rejected completely.

Reason and Truth

2005-03-10T17:21:00.000-05:00

Reason is grounded in truth as it is initiated by a person recognizing and laying claim to his life and his thoughts as his own. This is not an accidental occurrence; it is natural to the ontological (the nature of being) manifestation of human beings.

Reason is likewise grounded in rights because in order to Reason a person must know that the life he is living is his own and that the thoughts he is thinking are his thoughts. Only by this explicit claim made on one's own life and thoughts can Reason be initiated. That one is one's self is the foundation of Reason in the reasoner.

Founded in truth, Reason seeks truth. The everyday skepticism that polices Reason's search for truth in the nature of things is often confused with the hard skepticism that rejects any basis for truth in the nature of things.

Founded in itself, Reason denies truth. It can only make logical statements, and is thereafter confused with its own rules of logic. Logic is the infrastructure of Reason. Logical rules protect the careful application of Reason, but Reason is not its logical rules. Reason is grounded in truth and is the search for truth: from that ground it is the judge of experience.

Truth is a search for meaning, and so if Reason is the search for truth, Reason is also the search for meaning. The search for meaning is a search for a knowable and adequate purpose in the nature of things. Everyday skepticism is the withholding of judgment about experience where there is inadequate knowledge of the experience to make judgments about its meaning and purpose. Hard skepticism denies the possibility that meaning and purpose can be judged to be true or not. To the hard skeptic truth is such a limited concept that it can only be narrowly applied to narrow logical statements.

Natural law is the moral law derived through Reason from the nature of things based in the truth of individual human identity, the just claim by each individual on his identity, and the immediate truth, derived by the immediate intuitive insight into others known as empathy, that all human beings possess the same just claim to their own lives.

Hence the immediate corollary rights to the right to one's own life are the immediate moral implications of the moral and just claim to one's own life. Among these are the just claim to self-defense, the just claim to one's liberty, and the just claim to one's property. Likewise, just claims to a zone of privacy and to self-expression are immediate implications of the just claim to one's own thoughts.

Hence, Reason grounded in the truth of the "reasoner reasoning as himself" is formed by truth and by the immediate moral corollaries of that truth. Reason is therefore moral through and through, and its demand for truth is of its very nature. Therefore, even the conceptual clarity wrought by Reason is moral, because conceptual clarity approaches meaning and purpose and meaning and purpose express truth. Likewise, conceptual clarity is the moral imperative of Reason. To think clearly is to think morally because to think clearly is to think truthfully.

Right and wrong are therefore inherent moral judgments that attend Reason that is grounded in truth. Reason is not an assembly of logical statements. Logical statements are Reason's infrastructure, but the logic of Reason itself is that it is grounded in truth and is a search for truth and that truth is moral.

Do natural rights exist?

2005-03-10T14:31:00.000-05:00

Yes, and the immediate proof is found in an examination of the most basic right, the right to one's own life.

A right is a just claim. A just claim is a claim that is true, right, correct, and complete. The most immediate just claim is the one that any person has to his own life, hence his right to his life.
He is the person living his life. It is his life. Likewise, he has a perfect and immediate claim to his own thoughts. He is the one thinking them; they are his.

The right to one's life is realized empirically (i.e., by direct experience) when a child becomes aware of himself as himself. But that right to life is also transcendently realized by others as a claim that will and must be made by the child. And since it will and must be made, they are morally obligated to hold the claim by proxy for a child before he becomes aware of himself as himself, before he takes hold of his identity by the action of reflexive self-possession.

In other words, the right to his life belongs transcendently to a child before he claims it empirically by the simple understanding that he will make that claim on his life and that any claim to the contrary by others, before or after the child makes it, is inferior to it.

His life is his own, not that of his stewards or proxies, either before or after he has come to understand and know his claim. Yet his stewards and proxies are required by the immediately implied ethics of natural law to hold and protect his right to life for him.

Further, the discovery of one's own immediate identity as one's self, the actual claiming of one's self as one's self, and more particularly the immediate and identical claiming of one's thoughts as one's own, is the predicate and foundation of Reason, coordinated abstract rational thought. In other words, Reason begins with the reasoner, and the self-identification of the reasoner as himself places Reason in a foundation of truth.

All of this is painfully obvious, but I think it was A.N. Whitehead who said that the obvious is often the most difficult thing to discover.

If Reason is the conformity of the mind to reality, the initiation point for that is in the individual person claiming his thoughts as his own. Prior to that consolidation of the "I", the logical insights of a child have no coordinator, no reasoner who is conscious of himself as a conscious self. The brain is hardwired to follow logical coordinates: extension, duration, up, down, depth, motion, distinct objects, others. But Reason begins when the reasoner is identified as himself by himself and takes charge of his thoughts. That realization is an empirical truth, Reason is grounded in it and cannot happen without it.

Hence rights are at the foundation of Reason. Reason is grounded in their essential truth, and Reason is inherently moral by virtue of its grounding in rights and truth. When Reason attempts to have a foundation in itself -- in mere logical operations and logical possibility -- as opposed to its real grounding in just claims and truth, it becomes self-negating and self-destructive. It cannot apprehend truth because it denies that it is founded in truth. It denies natural rights because it denies that it is founded in the first natural right -- the just claim to one's own life.

The skepticism that has allowed truth to be reduced, in one corner, to no more than the product of a logical statement, and in another corner to the only truth is that there is no truth, would be a hilarious cosmic joke were it not so seriously held by so many who run the philosophy business.

If the hard skeptics can't recognize that they are only able to use Reason because they know that they are themselves and are themselves reasoning, and accept that as the foundation truth of Reason, then the baby has disappeared and the bathwater is all that remains. The only hope for the hard skeptics is for them to keep staring at the bathwater until they realize that something was once in it that gave it its very character.

Dancing in the end zone

2005-03-10T09:38:00.000-05:00

Ann Coulter:

I keep expecting the real Democrats to appear and drag these nuts out of the room, saying, Oh sorry, he's escaped again – don't worry, he does this all the time, and then Howard Dean will stand up and have no pants on.

You know who is a good guy?

2005-03-08T11:18:00.000-05:00

Rich Lowry is. "Good guy" is one of my highest compliments. It means that I can see the person's heart at work in his work. Here he takes on the odd, disheartening, and ultimately sad phenomenon of Democrats actually hoping for failure in Iraq because they have such irrational hatred for George Bush that they want nothing that will be credited to him as success.

The legendary liberal editor Charlie Peters confessed to his own attack of gluckschmerz: “New York Post columnist John Podhoretz asked liberals: ‘Did you momentarily feel a rush of disappointment [at the news of the Jan. 30 Iraq election] because you knew, you just knew, that this was going to redound to the credit of George W. Bush?’ I plead guilty …”

On his show the other night, comedian Jon Stewart — half-jokingly — expressed a feeling of dread at the changes in the Middle East and the credit President Bush will get for them. “Oh my God!” he said. “He’s gonna be a great — pretty soon, Republicans are gonna be like, ‘Reagan was nothing compared to this guy.’ Like, my kid’s gonna go to a high school named after him, I just know it.” Stewart is badly in need of the consolation of a yet-to-be-written pop theological tract, “When Good Things Happen to Bad Presidents.”

The Democratic foreign-policy expert who was Stewart’s guest that night, Nancy Soderberg, tried to comfort him, pointing out that the budding democratic revolution in the Middle East still might fail: “There’s always hope that this might not work.” There is historical precedent for that, of course. Liberal revolutions failed in Europe in 1848 and Eastern Europe in 1968. What is an entirely new phenomenon is liberals calling such reverses for human freedom — half-jokingly or not — occasions for “hope.”

Making Wolfowitz whole

2005-03-08T09:11:00.001-05:00

David Brooks, I predict, is not long for the op-ed page of The New York Times. His column today, by first appearance, is an appreciation of Paul Wolfowitz, who needs no rehabilitation but certainly needs to be made whole for all the grief flung at him over Iraq. But the other side of Brooks' column, its not so sub-text, is a violent horsewhip laid across the back of other Times' writers, as well as Times' editors and, finally, Times' readers. I do not believe that you can horsewhip the intellectual vanity of the entire Times' universe and remain within its gates. Brooks' appreciation of Wolfowitz will wound that vanity, but listen to these lines:

Let us look again at the man who's been vilified by Michael Moore and the rest of the infantile left, who's been condescended to by the people who consider themselves foreign policy grown-ups, and who has become the focus of much anti-Semitism in the world today - the center of a zillion Zionist conspiracy theories, and a hundred zillion clever-Jew-behind-the-scenes calumnies.
....
Wolfowitz doesn't talk like those foreign policy blowhards who think the world is run by chessmasters sitting around at summits. He talks about national poets, national cultures and the power of people to bring sweeping change. His faith in people probably led to some of the mistakes in Iraq. But with change burbling in Beirut, with many young people proudly hoisting the Lebanese flag (in a country that was once a symbol of tribal factionalism), it's time to take a look at this guy again.

The clauses "the rest of the infantile left," and "condescended to by the people who consider themselves foreign policy grown-ups," and "those foreign policy blowhards who think the world is run by chessmasters sitting around at summits," well, they pretty much describe the Times' universe from A to Z, with no one left out. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and Editorial Page Editor Gail Collins are not left out, star columnists Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman are not left out, and if they are not left out, then no denizen of the Times' fortress commune is left out.

It is an overwhelming probability that the greatest howlings will come directly from the Times' readers, who are so strung out on the Times' product, that this horsewhipping by Brooks will wake them into hysteria. I do not believe that he can survive there and that he will be politely encouraged to find his way elsewhere. Brooks might as well have dredged the corpse of Joe McCarthy from the bottom of the Times' river and told Times' readers that he was not the horrible demon whose mere invocation arouses the moral indignation of Timsesaholics with religious certainty.

Brooks' column is largely about Wolfowitz's faith in people to seek freedom. Well, Brooks is very likely to learn about the faith of the people who read the newspaper he writes for.

Oh, Lord have mercy!

2005-03-07T16:10:00.000-05:00

The New York Times just never lets up. I mean, may God have mercy on this poor woman's soul, but please, stop already. She was a bleedin' communist -- who cares if she opposed Pinochet, who seized power precisely to stop people like her from laying ruin to another society.

The Times, hiding behind an obit picked up from Reuters, allows that obituary to say she was "a well-known human rights advocate." What in God's precious name does a communist know about human rights? Did she oppose Castro? No, apparently she didn't, because when her illness struck she "went to Havana twice for surgery under the auspices of Fidel Castro, her friend and longtime political ally."

Would anyone go around accepting the pretense of Nazis as "human rights advocates?" The Times also accepts the Reuters obit's reference to her, as if this could mitigate her ideological predilection, as the leader of Chile's "small Communist Party." Get that? It was only a small Communist Party. But it wasn't that small was it:

Ms. Marín came from a humble family and joined the Communist Youth Party in the 1950's when studying to be a teacher. She became a congresswoman and supported the Marxist president, Salvador Allende, at the time of the 1973 military coup.

She was the leader of but a small Communist Party, but somehow she wound up being a key supporter of Chile's Marxist president. Are the readers of the Times supposed to be fooled by that? Is calling Allende a Marxist still supposed to mean something other than that he was a Communist? It certainly is reassuring, however, that she "came from a humble family." That makes her close alliance with Castro so much more understandable, just as her alliance with Castro makes her small Communist Party so much more chic.

"Religion and the Founders"

2005-03-07T09:49:00.000-05:00

I've written about this subject so much on Usenet that I can barely lift my hand to make another comment, except to say to Christopher Levenick and Michael Novak that these people will not give up even when you chase their arguments down to the last atom and put even that out of its misery.

I've had them swarm upon me with absurd claims that the Declaration of Independence is not the founding document of the United States behind the sole motivation that they do not want the Declaration's mentions of God to be admitted for significant purpose into the political history of our country. In this endeavor they try every conceivable angle, while accepting no historical testimony or fact to the contrary. For instance, that Lincoln's "four score and seven years ago" had the "new nation" founded in 1776 is met with, "so, Lincoln was never wrong?"

From Levenick and Novak's article a precise illustration of what I've faced four score and seven times:

To take an example: In her litany of statements that intend to prove that "the Founding Fathers were not religious men," she cites one line from a letter written by John Adams. According to Allen, "As an old man, [Adams] observed, 'Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been upon the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!"'" Pretty damning evidence, right? Well, no: Allen neglects to include the next two sentences from Adams: "But in this exclamati[on] I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without Religion, this World would be Something not fit to be mentioned in polite Company, I mean Hell."

The fast

2005-03-07T07:59:00.000-05:00

I made it two days with the "black fast." My friend Mr. Patience (who is anything but) began to rear his ugly head so I fed him and he calmed down. Other than that it was a good experience and I'm going to cut back into it as Terri Schiavo's court-ordered starvation approaches on the 18th.

Double-Bind Europe

2005-03-04T09:47:00.000-05:00

The most important writer in America, VDH, today takes up the subject of Eurobabble by presenting a series of double-bind statements that essentialize European "teenage sass." A double-bind is something on the order of a sign that reads: "Don't read this sign." Let's take a look at a few:

Pay attention to the Muslim world! Hear us who have more experience with the Middle East. Try to incorporate, rather than isolate, the "other" — BUT stop telling us that we have to let Turkey into the EU.

Cease militarizing the globe! See instead the world as an interconnected family of liberal societies that is trying to settle differences by reason — BUT stop trying to prevent us from selling hi-tech arms to big Communist China to threaten tiny democratic Taiwan.

Learn from our more humane culture! See how our short work week, cradle-to-grave entitlements, and pacifism promote well-being — BUT how exactly do you rich and powerful Americans do all that you do?

Remember that we are your critical partners in the war against terrorism! Appreciate our unheralded work that goes unnoticed amid the loud bombs and tanks of you rowdy Americans — BUT Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization and cannot be labeled as such (and Hamas isn't either and needs our financial support).

Sign Kyoto! Start acting like good global citizens! BUT quit suggesting we had a hand in the Rwanda mess, the Balkans mess, the Oil-for-Food Mess, the Saddam-reactor mess, the Hezbollah/Hamas mess, the Arafat mess...

Quit proceeding unilaterally! Refer events that affect the world to the U.N. Don't just act on your own as if your deeds don't affect others — BUT don't remember the Falklands, the Ivory Coast, the unification of Germany, or the oil deals with Saddam.

Don't tamper in the Middle East! Do you cowboys realize what madness you are unleashing? BUT if you succeed we might just stop our caricatures — IF democracy follows and we can take credit for and profit from it.

You get the point: "Don't read this sign, but follow its instructions or else nothing will happen." Stick a fork in that place.

Margaret is just so offended

2005-03-04T09:20:00.000-05:00

Margaret Carlson is an annoying busybody of a reporter, a sort of Eleanor Clift lite. She has none of Maureen Dowd's aloof catty sluttiness to redeem her before eye or ear, either. In the matter immediately before us, David Holman reports on how terribly put off Margaret was by Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and his wife renewing their marriage vows and upgrading them to covenant marriage status. Carlson just couldn't handle that. Any counter-offensive in the culture war is just so offensive. Why do I think, no, why do I know without even checking that Margaret has absolutely no problem with "gay marriage"?

I love this guy

2005-03-04T08:37:00.000-05:00

David Yeagley writes today about the long-standing patriotism of American Indians, of which he is one, a Comanche in fact. I routinely ran links to his articles at my Union Square Journal. He has a compelling personal story that includes academic and scholarly achievement, artistic accomplishment, and stirring battles against his own health problems. You can go to the archive of his articles at FrontPage magazine if you would like to see more of his writing. For a brief biography of Yeagley you can click here. Yeagley is conservative, engagingly candid, and by all appearances a hell of a good guy. The first paragraph:

Ward Churchill wants everyone to think that Indians hate America. The truth is Indians love America, more than most people here. Today there are nearly 200,000 living American Indian veterans. That’s nearly one out of eight Indians. Churchill’s fake Indian voice, though loud, is way off-key. Real Indians honor America, and are quick to honor their warriors.

Had a good dose of Harvard lately?

2005-03-03T17:43:00.000-05:00

No? Here's one that ought to make your realize that if you're not willing to fight the culture war, what you'll get is a one-way cultural revolution. James Taranto has a laugh (first item) at Harvard's expense, but maybe after we stop laughing we will remember how much influence that hell hole has:

"Some of the content was extremely heteronormative, and made BGLTSA members feel uncomfortable," he said.

That's all you get. Go check it out.

The Truth about Hunter S. Thompson, Writer

2005-03-03T12:18:00.000-05:00

My thanks to Beck here for pointing the way to Colby Cosh's insight into Hunter Thompson, the writer. I'm not generally a reader of Cosh, so I would have missed this:

Utterly unsuited to any work but the creation of English sentences, HST was a true graduate of the school of crap-or-bust; if he hadn't gotten a passing grade, he'd have turned up stone dead on a beach, of literal starvation, forty years ago. Anyone who falls for the mythology--the image of the slouching, bleary-eyed addict desperately force-feeding hand-scrawled notes into the maw of a primitive fax machine--deserves the swift, sharp crack on the skull that's coming to him.

That's precisely why I got on Peggy Noonan's case for her precious hit job on Thompson at the Wall Street Journal just a few days after Tom Wolfe had handed Thompson a high spot in American letters. I sent this comment off to the WSJ, which did not post it:

Peggy Noonan makes a mistake by attempting on these same pages to upstage Tom Wolfe on the matter of Hunter S. Thompson. Wolfe, as a preeminent man of American letters, has the standing to judge Thompson's work and should not be so blithely accused by Noonan of being merely a "chauvinist" for his era. There are plenty of writers from Wolfe's era whom he has taken down, and hard. Thompson was not the sort of journalist who moved about his subject as if by ricksha. His vehicle was a style that roared along his beat at top speed like a Corvette. It's not surprising that he offended more genteel sensibilities. His death by self-inflicted gunshot is not an occasion for "compassion," as Noonan suggests. When writers die it is their work that steps forward. Tom Wolfe gave Hunter his due, and Peggy Noonan has no business trying to snatch it back.

A fast for Terri Schiavo

2005-03-03T10:25:00.000-05:00

That's what Gregory Popcak is proposing to his blog readers. Terri Schiavo is a badly brain-damaged Florida woman who appears awake, but who cannot directly communicate with others. Her husband wants to cut off her food and water and let her starve and die of thirst. The courts have ultimately sided with him, despite the passage of a law by the Florida legislature, signed by Governor Jeb Bush, that sought to keep her alive. The courts wouldn't allow it.

It is Terri's parents who believe that she is still aware and wants to live out her life and die in her own time. Doctors have said she is in a persistent vegetative state from which she will never recover, and has no cognition despite the appearance that she is awake. I give the benefit of my doubt to Terri's parents, who know her best in life, love her, and intuit her presence and her desire to live. The latest court ruling is that the tube that supplies her food and water will be removed on March 18th.

March 18th is the birthday of my Aunt Sue McPhillips, who lived in saintly fashion, humbly, quietly, prayerfully, and died peacefully at the age of 89 in October 1963. Many people regarded her as a saint, and I've always felt that way (oddly enough, even when I otherwise violently rejected all such notions), as have numerous members of my family.

I'll give the fast a go. Submit it to others as my testimony on behalf of Terri's life and the dignity of all life. And direct it toward Aunt Sue, who I'll put on the spot, and ask for her intercession with the Lord.

I'm not very good at fasts, but I will announce when I breakdown and break it. Just to keep this honest.

There will be a little bread that I need to take with a pill each morning and water, and some damnable coffee. It ought to be good for me, but it's for Terri's life.

Straightforward, with a slashing style

2005-03-03T09:08:00.000-05:00

That's the method of the estimable George Neumayr, who might be the second most important writer in America, as he deals with the judicial tyrants of the Supreme Court. Do you think that "judicial tyrants" is too strong? You won't if you hear what Neumayr is saying:

The Supreme Court's judicial activists are cutting off the branch on which they sit. By rejecting the law and putting their personal opinions in its place, the justices invite the people to imitate them and disregard their decrees with the same willfulness they disregard the Constitution. If Anthony Kennedy isn't bound by the framers' words, why are the people bound by his?

The authority of Supreme Court justices derives from the authority of the Constitution: once they deny its authority, they deny their own. The Roper v. Simmons decision is a stunningly stark illustration of this despotism that masquerades as jurisprudence. Despotism is not an overwrought description here: we are dealing with a lawless court, judges who obey no law save their own will. Yes, they invoke a living Constitution, but that just means the real Constitution lies dead at their feet, having been trampled beneath a juggernaut of false progress.

The Supreme Court has been holding a de facto constitutional convention for decades, ripping up the old one and writing a new one without the consent of the people. A fitting punishment for this act of hubris will come when the chaos that their own example of lawlessness has set in motion consumes them in impeachment trials or worse.

The justices conceal their despotism in rhetoric and flat-out lying. As Antonin Scalia demonstrated in his dissenting opinion, the "national consensus" that the justices cite to justify the decision doesn't exist. Kennedy and company did a shoddy job of lining up this lie, first inventing a national consensus against executing 17-year olds, then conceding that it doesn't exist by whining about America's refusal to ratify international treaties that forbid the practice.

As the Supreme Court writes a new constitution, the justices are using as their co-authors foreigners not Americans. This now routine reliance on foreign fashions illustrates their alienation from and distrust of the American people. In citing the "overwhelming weight of international opinion" in the Roper decision, the justices are in effect saying to the American people: we are right, you are wrong; since you won't support our boutique views, we will look abroad for support.

Neumayr's column is the most direct look in the eye of this problem that I've seen so far. He's not in a word mincing mood here, and that is very good.

Beck's guitar life

2005-03-02T18:26:00.000-05:00

I agree with John Sabotta on this one (noted in the last paragraph), that Beck's My Guitar Life is his best piece of writing. I was moved by it when I first read it, and believe that it is strong enough to be the basis for a screenplay. It's a classic.

In fact, right around the same time that Beck wrote My Guitar Life, Sabotta was writing some high quality stuff himself. It's rumored that Beck and Sabotta and Lynette Warren, who also penned some fine work around that time, all had one thing in common -- an annoying, demanding, encouraging editor who believed in them as writers.

"The theater widens"

2005-03-02T10:16:00.000-05:00

Good post today at Belmont Club on broadening developments in the Middle East and their reflection in the Global War on Terror (GWOT). A bit:

'Militant' groups have often attempted to stabilize the front whenever events threatened to take a direction which they could not control. This usually took the form of a spoiling terrorist attack to re-mire things in blood, chaos and hatred as often happened during negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. It would not be surprising if the terror masters fell back on this old repertoire by staging attacks directed not only at Middle Eastern targets but at the United States to throw back the threatening psychological wave. The problem is that there is no longer any widespread confidence, even in the places like Lebanon, that terror tactics will prevail. To that extent even the most heinous attacks, like the carbomb which recently killed more than 100 in Iraq, have lost their bite. Psychologically speaking, the greatest contribution of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns is that they have shattered terrorism's myth of invincibility. The terrorists embarked on a maximum effort to dislodge the US from Iraq, employing every weapon of violence, political maneuver and propaganda they could muster and came up much the worse for wear. This lesson has not been lost to public perception and has emboldened dissidents all across the region.

A hard ass approach trumps compassion

2005-03-02T09:03:00.000-05:00

So says Michelle Malkin on the treatment of criminal gangs. She's actually engaging in a little bit of bait and switch over First Lady Laura Bush's initiative to keep American kids away from gangs. Michelle changes the subject to gangs composed of illegal immigrants, and goes off worthily on that subject. Illegal immigration is Michelle's number one issue, something she has written a book about (Invasion). This excerpt from her column describes one of the nastier alien gangs:

The most notorious criminal alien gang enterprise on the American landscape is Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, the El Salvadoran-based syndicate engaged in murder, drug trafficking, and human smuggling across Central America and the United States. MS-13 members, many of them juveniles, have been implicated in gang rapes, machete mutilations and cop killings on both coasts. According to Siskiyou County Sheriff Rick Riggins, MS-13 paraphernalia and weaponry have been discovered deep on federal forest land in northern California, where Latino gangs have established massive marijuana-growing operations.

Most recently, Ebner Anibal Rivera Paz, the reputed leader of MS-13's Honduran branch, was nabbed in Texas last month after escaping from his native country, where he's wanted in connection with the Christmas holiday massacre of 28 people, including six children.

Rivera Paz's appalling immigration history is a textbook example of how criminal alien gangs exploit our open borders. Prior to being caught on Feb. 10 -- by Texas highway patrol officers 100 miles inside the U.S. -- Rivera Paz had waltzed in and out of the country illegally numerous times despite a long rap sheet and repeated deportations.

"The Blue State Court"

2005-03-02T08:26:00.000-05:00

To read this editorial today requires that you register at the Wall Street Journal's opinionjournal.com site, which is free. The editorial is exactly on point about yesterday's Supreme Court decision, which ruled the death penalty unconstitutional for convicted criminals under the age of 18.

Whether you think that juvenile defendants below that age should or should not be subject to the death penalty, you should read the editorial so that you can get a clear sense of precisely how out of line the Supreme Court is in subverting the laws of various states. Sample:

No doubt most Americans will concede that the death penalty for 16- and 17-year-olds is a difficult moral question. That is why different U.S. states have different laws on the matter, and we'd probably oppose such executions if we sat in a legislature. But rather than defer to the will of voters as expressed through state legislatures and at least two ballot initiatives (in Arizona and Florida), Roper imposes the view of five justices that the execution of 16- and 17-year-olds is both wrong and unconstitutional. As Justice Antonin Scalia writes in a dissent that is even more pungent than his usual offerings, "The court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our nation's moral standards."

Justice Kennedy rests his decision on his assertion that American society has reached a "national consensus" against capital punishment for juveniles, and that laws allowing it contravene modern "standards of decency." His evidence for this "consensus" is that of the 38 states that permit capital punishment, 18 have laws prohibiting the execution of murderers under the age of 18. As we do the math, that's a minority of 47% of those states. The dozen states that have no death penalty offer no views about special immunity for juveniles--and all 12 permit 16- and 17-year-olds to be treated as adults when charged with non-capital offenses.

This idea of invoking state laws to define a "consensus" also runs up against any number of notable Supreme Court precedents, including Roe v. Wade. When Roe was decided in 1973, all 50 states had some prohibition against abortion on the books. But never mind.

Take the body?

2005-03-01T14:44:00.000-05:00

That's an old NHL term of art for putting an opponent into the boards: take the body. In discourse it (ad hominem) refers to attacking the person as opposed to the argument. That is a logical fallacy (unless one is arguing on Usenet where it's a logical necessity).

Beck makes the case for attacking the person once the argument has been disposed of. I tend to agree, but Mrs. McP is always insisting that I rein it in. I'm afraid that her best efforts have turned up precious little in results, although I am notorious for sometimes restraining myself preternaturally when I actually find the argument interesting and important. But with some people* I argued for far too long not to have developed the rather brusque air of a consumer advocate toward both their output and their person.

* If there is a more desperately concocted academic mind, held together with popsicle sticks and bubble gum, than that one, it must belong to Ward Churchill.