Freedomnomics is John Lott’s free market retort to the wildly popular book, Freakonomics—that pastiche of thin analysis that skims over topics as diverse as sumo wrestling, real estate rip-offs, used car prices, and children’s names.
In particular, Lott disputes the most explosive claim in Levitt and Dubner’s work—that Roe v. Wade was a major factor in the stunning drop in crime in the 1990s. That huge assertion, based on four pages of analysis that included the negative impact of Communist Romania’s no-abortion policy, could easily have been labeled “fewer blacks, less crime.”
Lott argues, by contrast, that the Supreme Court’s legislative fiat in 1973 actually increased crime by boosting out-of-wedlock births and single-parent households. These crime-correlated statistics exploded in the 1970s and 80s as social sanctions against extra-marital sex disappeared and as the legal but odious option of abortion was rejected by millions of now-pregnant unmarried women.
If abortion isn’t the life-saving procedure that Levitt and Dubner suggest it is, other factors must have caused crime rates to plummet during the last decade of the 20th century. Accordingly, Lott provides evidence that the reinstitution of capital punishment in the early 90s explains some of the drop—a conclusion that coincides with the findings of other analysts and confirms what most folks, including criminals and police officers, sense intuitively—that people go out of their way to avoid being killed. Stated otherwise: harsher penalties, less crime.
The incarceration of more criminals is Lott’s next explanation for lower crime rates. Only among academics, the author notes, would it seem strange that “more inmates” results in “less criminality.” Individuals who rob banks, Willie Sutton might have noted, can’t engage in that illicit activity when they don’t have access to the place where the money is kept.
Lott’s third explanation for the 90s crime recession is, not unexpectedly, more guns among law-abiding citizens—a proposition to which Lott devoted his well-known 1998 book. In this regard Lott notes that “for the first eight to nine years that concealed-carry laws are in effect, murder rates fall by an average of 1 to 1.5 percent per year, while robbery and rape rates decline by about 2 percentage points.”
The beefing up of municipal police forces also helped to reduce crime in the 90s—especially in places like New York City, where a precipitous decline in murders coincided with a 50% increase in police officers and improvements in the quality of recruits. These elevated recruitment standards, Lott notes, reversed the general degradation in force quality that was often associated with “affirmative action” hiring policies.
Concerning traditional economic topics, Lott is much more business friendly than his Freakonomics counterparts. While Levitt and Dubner compare real estate agents to Klan members (with inside information) and warn consumers that “many experts use their information to your detriment,” Lott emphasizes the economic value of reputation and provides data that contradicts or mitigates Levitt and Dubner’s unflattering assertions about used car prices and real estate agents. Lott even provides a plausible market-based explanation for high wine and liquor costs at restaurants.
Among other topics that Lott analyzes in 194 pages of text are the following: the 2000 Presidential vote in Florida (Bush wins!), the vote-depressing effect of measures that make voting (and voter fraud) easier, the left-bias of mainstream media, and the idea that a correlation exists between the cost of political campaigns and the size of government. With respect to the last point, the author notes that all the House, Senate, and Presidential candidates in 2004 spent a mere $2.17 billion for the privilege of dispensing a trough of 2.23 trillion federal dollars. Meanwhile, that same year, Proctor & Gamble spent 3.9 billion on advertising. The logic of this unwelcome campaign finance tale is simple: more government, more campaign dollars.
Another hornet-stirring correlation that Lott considers is one between female voting and big government—a linkage greatly attenuated by marriage and the responsibilities of parenthood. Lott also notes that felons, even more than unmarried and divorced women, vote overwhelmingly for Democrats—a fact that explains the ardor Democrat leaders are exhibiting to restore the “voting rights” of victimizers.
Perhaps the most revealing anecdote in Lott’s book occurs in the introduction. Here the author discusses the severe professional pressures that were brought to bear against him because of his work on behalf of a property tax elimination measure in Montana. The relevant correlations in this case involved more taxes, more money for government-funded educators, and more intimidation of professors who don’t go along with the program. Put succinctly: more state subsidies, less speech.
In sum, Freedomnomics is just the sort of product one would expect from an author whose book begins with the assertion, “The free market works,” and whose economic analysis starts with these words, “If something becomes more costly, people will do less of it.” Such frankness would have resonated with the late Merryle Rukeyser, a blunt talker who once repeated these no-nonsense definitions on his son’s popular financial program: “A liberal is someone who’s liberal with other people’s money, and a reactionary—that’s someone who can count.”
Friday, August 10, 2007
Friday, August 03, 2007
DARWINISM AND THE ORIGIN OF LIFE
Here is an excerpt of a speech by Jerusalem Post columnist Jonathan Rosenblum on Darwinism's most obvious flaws. Where did DNA come from? Outer space? A parallel universe?
One wonders where Christopher Hitchens' "Ockham's razor" is when it comes to bio-speculative "explanations."
One wonders where Christopher Hitchens' "Ockham's razor" is when it comes to bio-speculative "explanations."
Monday, July 30, 2007
MEDIA SPIN ON GAY MARRIAGE
Everyone knows the tale about the emperor who was sold a bill of goods by a clever huckster because the king and his subjects wouldn’t admit that they didn’t see things the way “enlightened” folks do. At last a lad who trusted his lying eyes blurted out the truth about the king’s attire—an epiphany that gave other subjects permission to believe the obvious.
Today, political correctness forces politicians and businesses to pretend that kids raised by same-sex couples are just as well off as kids raised by married male-female couples. This proposition requires honest observers to admit that either mothers or fathers are optional and that step-parents generally do as well at child-rearing as bio-moms and dads.
In keeping with this point of secular faith, San Diego’s TV-journalists happily presented, without contradiction, a pair of females at the recent Gay Pride Parade who declared that their “marriage” would be no different from any other. This same message is encountered dozens of times every week in the mainstream media—so frequently, in fact, that it qualifies as the prime modern example of a proposition’s “truth” being established by sheer repetition.
Anyone who asks if the evidence for dismissing five thousand years of recorded history is compelling, will instantly be vilified by “human rights” advocates. No wonder the Padres go along meekly with the political left and blend Gay Pride promotions with family-centered events. After all, isn’t it clear that moms and dads don’t matter—that all kids need are two adults?
For anyone who can handle the truth, kids with step-moms and step-dads don’t do as well as kids with bio-moms and dads—a fact shown even by those manipulable “studies” that often turn common sense on its head.
Another clear fact is that kids don’t do nearly as well in single-parent homes—homes that usually have only a mom. The idea that two moms or two dads will overcome these deficiencies isn’t an argument supported by the data at hand. At least that’s the conclusion of the American College of Pediatricians.
Such studies as have been done on the topic of same-sex parents are few—and their reportage pitifully politicized, a point gingerly implied by USC sociologists Stacey and Biblarz in 2001. First the public is told that the sexuality of parents doesn’t affect kids. And when that deception is digested, we are told that it doesn’t matter if parental sexuality does affect kids.
Recently a local columnist put forward the popular dogma that sexuality is purely genetic—adjacent an observation about homosexuality’s prominence in ancient Greece. The fact that most folks don’t even notice this obvious contradiction shows how brainwashed they are—willing also to swallow the ruse that AIDS is an equal opportunity disease and not a malady transmitted overwhelmingly in the U.S. by sodomy and drug needles.
Nor will media lemmings see the Vancouver study that showed an 8- to 20-year reduction in lifespan among male homosexuals. Media indoctrination and political intimidation keep mouths closed and eyes shut.
Today, political correctness forces politicians and businesses to pretend that kids raised by same-sex couples are just as well off as kids raised by married male-female couples. This proposition requires honest observers to admit that either mothers or fathers are optional and that step-parents generally do as well at child-rearing as bio-moms and dads.
In keeping with this point of secular faith, San Diego’s TV-journalists happily presented, without contradiction, a pair of females at the recent Gay Pride Parade who declared that their “marriage” would be no different from any other. This same message is encountered dozens of times every week in the mainstream media—so frequently, in fact, that it qualifies as the prime modern example of a proposition’s “truth” being established by sheer repetition.
Anyone who asks if the evidence for dismissing five thousand years of recorded history is compelling, will instantly be vilified by “human rights” advocates. No wonder the Padres go along meekly with the political left and blend Gay Pride promotions with family-centered events. After all, isn’t it clear that moms and dads don’t matter—that all kids need are two adults?
For anyone who can handle the truth, kids with step-moms and step-dads don’t do as well as kids with bio-moms and dads—a fact shown even by those manipulable “studies” that often turn common sense on its head.
Another clear fact is that kids don’t do nearly as well in single-parent homes—homes that usually have only a mom. The idea that two moms or two dads will overcome these deficiencies isn’t an argument supported by the data at hand. At least that’s the conclusion of the American College of Pediatricians.
Such studies as have been done on the topic of same-sex parents are few—and their reportage pitifully politicized, a point gingerly implied by USC sociologists Stacey and Biblarz in 2001. First the public is told that the sexuality of parents doesn’t affect kids. And when that deception is digested, we are told that it doesn’t matter if parental sexuality does affect kids.
Recently a local columnist put forward the popular dogma that sexuality is purely genetic—adjacent an observation about homosexuality’s prominence in ancient Greece. The fact that most folks don’t even notice this obvious contradiction shows how brainwashed they are—willing also to swallow the ruse that AIDS is an equal opportunity disease and not a malady transmitted overwhelmingly in the U.S. by sodomy and drug needles.
Nor will media lemmings see the Vancouver study that showed an 8- to 20-year reduction in lifespan among male homosexuals. Media indoctrination and political intimidation keep mouths closed and eyes shut.
Friday, July 20, 2007
THREE IMMIGRATION QUESTIONS
The idiot promos for a new network game show, this one hosted by Drew Carey, at least contain one thought-provoking question: “What percentage of Americans said they would notify the police if they saw a Mexican citizen sneaking into the U.S.?”
As it happens, I suspect that a family near my residence, one sporting a Mexican flag in their window and exhibiting no proficiency in English, may be “undocumented.” But the truth of the matter is, I don’t know.
Moreover, I’d be reluctant to ring up the ICE hotline—even if such a number existed and I were confident that the adults lacked papers. After all, several young kids run around in the yard behind the wire fence that’s often employed as a clothesline.
Furthermore, it’s not like anyone is hiding in the bushes, fouling the water, or accosting unsuspecting travelers. Indeed, the vehicle that graces the driveway is a late-model SUV.
In short, even if these folks are “unauthorized,” they aren’t exactly skulking “in the shadows.” So one would think the authorities, if they were interested, could enforce the law. And if police are forbidden from enforcing immigration laws, why notify them?
A more revealing question for Carey’s show might be this one: “How many Americans said they would hire an illegal immigrant to do work for them?” The problem with this question, however, is that one usually doesn’t know who is and who isn’t illegal. The default policy for many householders (not business owners) thus becomes “Don’t ask, don’t tell”—or tacit amnesty.
One effect of this attitude is apparent when I’m walking around Oceanside’s Buddy Todd Park. On weekends the place is packed, and the sights are overwhelmingly those of young families or of groups of kids at birthday parties—pure Americana, but with piñatas and lots of Spanish voices and Mexican music.
This vision of happy domesticity prompted my recollection of a dour statement that William Bennett once made in defense of immigrants generally—namely, that he was more afraid of what America (via its pop-culture) might do to immigrants than what immigrants would do to America.
As is true of most true statements, Bennett’s comment addresses only half the story. The other half is that America has never had millions and millions of immigrants come to this country, illegally, from a neighboring country—a country with a different language that also harbors profound historical grievances against the U.S.
Moreover, this migration comes when many Americans (and most “rights” groups) are apt to view this country, with historian Howard Zinn, as a perpetrator of injustice and not as a beacon of liberty.
In such a setting, these assimilation questions posed by Pat Buchanan seem more urgent than Drew Carey’s law enforcement query: “How many Americans, forced to work in Mexico, would become loyal Mexicans in a decade rather than remain Americans in exile? Why do we think Mexicans are any less attached to the land of their birth?”
The key phrase here is “forced to work.”
As it happens, I suspect that a family near my residence, one sporting a Mexican flag in their window and exhibiting no proficiency in English, may be “undocumented.” But the truth of the matter is, I don’t know.
Moreover, I’d be reluctant to ring up the ICE hotline—even if such a number existed and I were confident that the adults lacked papers. After all, several young kids run around in the yard behind the wire fence that’s often employed as a clothesline.
Furthermore, it’s not like anyone is hiding in the bushes, fouling the water, or accosting unsuspecting travelers. Indeed, the vehicle that graces the driveway is a late-model SUV.
In short, even if these folks are “unauthorized,” they aren’t exactly skulking “in the shadows.” So one would think the authorities, if they were interested, could enforce the law. And if police are forbidden from enforcing immigration laws, why notify them?
A more revealing question for Carey’s show might be this one: “How many Americans said they would hire an illegal immigrant to do work for them?” The problem with this question, however, is that one usually doesn’t know who is and who isn’t illegal. The default policy for many householders (not business owners) thus becomes “Don’t ask, don’t tell”—or tacit amnesty.
One effect of this attitude is apparent when I’m walking around Oceanside’s Buddy Todd Park. On weekends the place is packed, and the sights are overwhelmingly those of young families or of groups of kids at birthday parties—pure Americana, but with piñatas and lots of Spanish voices and Mexican music.
This vision of happy domesticity prompted my recollection of a dour statement that William Bennett once made in defense of immigrants generally—namely, that he was more afraid of what America (via its pop-culture) might do to immigrants than what immigrants would do to America.
As is true of most true statements, Bennett’s comment addresses only half the story. The other half is that America has never had millions and millions of immigrants come to this country, illegally, from a neighboring country—a country with a different language that also harbors profound historical grievances against the U.S.
Moreover, this migration comes when many Americans (and most “rights” groups) are apt to view this country, with historian Howard Zinn, as a perpetrator of injustice and not as a beacon of liberty.
In such a setting, these assimilation questions posed by Pat Buchanan seem more urgent than Drew Carey’s law enforcement query: “How many Americans, forced to work in Mexico, would become loyal Mexicans in a decade rather than remain Americans in exile? Why do we think Mexicans are any less attached to the land of their birth?”
The key phrase here is “forced to work.”
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
WHO DESIGNED THE DESIGNER
Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens think this question, typical of college or high school freshmen, is an unanswerable retort to all arguments from design. Michael Behe disposes of this purile, philosophically naive objection in short order.
BANNING DI-HYDROGEN MONOXIDE
Penn and Teller ruse. Ban water now! An example of environmental conscientiousness--not!
THE GORE-BUDDHA
You've heard of the laughing-Buddha and the contemplative Buddha. Behold! The global warming Buddha!
Thursday, July 05, 2007
SWINGING FISTS AT NOSES: THE SHIFTING LINES BETWEEN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE BEHAVIOR
“My right to swing my fist ends at your nose.” That’s the level of ethical reflection typical of folks who’ve replaced inherited moral wisdom with vacuous clichés promulgated by TV airheads and political gurus.
Such an argument is regularly used to justify, quite selectively, smoking bans in public parks and, in a few cases, even on city sidewalks. I point to the recent anti-smoking ordinance passed in Belmont, California, and to the debates on less severe bans in Escondido and Oceanside.
The truth of the matter is that swinging my fist within two inches of your nose would constitute, under any reasonable-person criterion, sufficient grounds for holding me liable for schnoz-endangerment. I raise this pedantic point because it emphasizes the oft-ignored fact that no clear dividing line separates the private from the public sphere.
Indeed, it only takes a little mental effort to show how most practices have public ramifications. Three activities that currently appear on the do-gooder hit list include smoking (due to health care costs and the presumed effects of second hand smoke), driving SUVs (due to their mpg ratios and environmental impact), and selling trans fat foods (due to the medical impact of obesity).
Thanks to the global warming frenzy promulgated by Al Gore’s media lackeys, almost any product with a “carbon footprint” or possible climate link (from light bulbs to cow toots) has become subject to public regulation.
Significantly, other activities with clearer public implications are treated as if they take place in an imaginary Las Vegas—and stay there. These “private” acts are behaviors whose effects media elites and other political do-gooders have little desire to scrutinize. They include alcohol consumption (whose costs in terms of traffic accidents and abuse dwarf the impact of second hand smoke), recreational drug use, recreational sex, and a specific sex act that is overwhelmingly the means for spreading HIV.
If anyone seriously wants to consider how out-of-wedlock sex, for example, has damaged the lives of children, I’d be glad to do a calculation. We can start with parental neglect, move on to education deficits, and close the books (somewhat arbitrarily) with prison costs. But, of course, we all know that people’s sex lives are “private.” Just as we’ve been told that bong use among Hollywood dimwits hurts no one.
In short, what is considered “private behavior” is largely a social construct that depends on the winds of political fashion. The size of one’s family was once considered a personal matter. Then, under the influence of ZPG fanatics, large families became a subject of public concern—if not government regulation.
On the other hand, concern about public morals has almost disappeared over the last forty years—under the absurd media-spawned assumption that “private” immoral behavior and commercial images of the same affect no one beyond the “consenting adults” involved.
Today folks panic over a whiff of second hand smoke but yawn when corporate goons prostitute the souls of ten-year-olds. The latter, we’re told, is a family affair.
Such an argument is regularly used to justify, quite selectively, smoking bans in public parks and, in a few cases, even on city sidewalks. I point to the recent anti-smoking ordinance passed in Belmont, California, and to the debates on less severe bans in Escondido and Oceanside.
The truth of the matter is that swinging my fist within two inches of your nose would constitute, under any reasonable-person criterion, sufficient grounds for holding me liable for schnoz-endangerment. I raise this pedantic point because it emphasizes the oft-ignored fact that no clear dividing line separates the private from the public sphere.
Indeed, it only takes a little mental effort to show how most practices have public ramifications. Three activities that currently appear on the do-gooder hit list include smoking (due to health care costs and the presumed effects of second hand smoke), driving SUVs (due to their mpg ratios and environmental impact), and selling trans fat foods (due to the medical impact of obesity).
Thanks to the global warming frenzy promulgated by Al Gore’s media lackeys, almost any product with a “carbon footprint” or possible climate link (from light bulbs to cow toots) has become subject to public regulation.
Significantly, other activities with clearer public implications are treated as if they take place in an imaginary Las Vegas—and stay there. These “private” acts are behaviors whose effects media elites and other political do-gooders have little desire to scrutinize. They include alcohol consumption (whose costs in terms of traffic accidents and abuse dwarf the impact of second hand smoke), recreational drug use, recreational sex, and a specific sex act that is overwhelmingly the means for spreading HIV.
If anyone seriously wants to consider how out-of-wedlock sex, for example, has damaged the lives of children, I’d be glad to do a calculation. We can start with parental neglect, move on to education deficits, and close the books (somewhat arbitrarily) with prison costs. But, of course, we all know that people’s sex lives are “private.” Just as we’ve been told that bong use among Hollywood dimwits hurts no one.
In short, what is considered “private behavior” is largely a social construct that depends on the winds of political fashion. The size of one’s family was once considered a personal matter. Then, under the influence of ZPG fanatics, large families became a subject of public concern—if not government regulation.
On the other hand, concern about public morals has almost disappeared over the last forty years—under the absurd media-spawned assumption that “private” immoral behavior and commercial images of the same affect no one beyond the “consenting adults” involved.
Today folks panic over a whiff of second hand smoke but yawn when corporate goons prostitute the souls of ten-year-olds. The latter, we’re told, is a family affair.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
INCONVENIENT TRUTHS FOR AL GORE
Here is a piece that exposes some holes in Gore's ozone.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/450392,CST-EDT-REF30b.article
http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/450392,CST-EDT-REF30b.article
Thursday, June 21, 2007
BLOWING MORAL SMOKE
“I don’t smoke and I don’t chew and I don’t go with them that do.” With that folksy caveat from a lifelong non-smoker, let me offer a few words that might warm the nicotine-restricted arteries of cancer-stick addicts.
California cities from Belmont in the Bay Area to Escondido and Oceanside in North County have been pondering bans on smoking in public spaces. The recently approved Belmont ban will apparently extend to all areas beyond single-family detached residences—including automobiles. Locally, Solana Beach, San Diego, and Del Mar have already passed no-smoking-on-the-beach ordinances.
The primary reason given for such bans has been the deadly effects of secondhand smoke—a toxin that allegedly causes 3,000 lung cancer deaths in the U.S. each year. Occasionally the litter impact of cigarettes is thrown in to “butt-ress” the case for public prohibition. And in some cases global warming is included in the grab bag of arguments.
What most folks don’t know, however, is that the aforementioned mortality estimate from a 1993 EPA “metastudy” (i.e. a study of other studies) was obtained by violating basic research protocols. Nor do they know that these “findings” were essentially declared bogus both by the Congressional Research Service and by a federal judge who reviewed the data. Indeed, if standard statistical methods had been used in the EPA study, the mortality impact of second hand smoke would have been judged insignificant.
The same disregard for statistical method applies to the World Health Organization study done in 1998—and to almost all secondhand smoke research. Still, those who find smoking obnoxious (which it is) and who have an overwhelming urge to regulate the habits of fellow citizens, don’t really care about scientific integrity. What they care about is their cause and that cough-inducing smoke.
Personally, since I have no stub in this ashtray, I could care less if smoking were banned. I am upset, however, at the way anti-smoking zealots often ignore more profound moral problems. It’s as though their health and environment passion compensates for looking the other way when it comes to the social depravity spread by pimps like Jerry Springer. Likewise, the trans fat crew get exercised over KFC’s food preparation methods but yawn when the musical mafia promote unspeakably vile lyrics via gangsta’ rap.
In 1993, the late Sen. Daniel Moynihan lamented how Americans were “Defining Deviancy Down”—accepting high illegitimacy and crime rates as par for the course. Shortly thereafter, columnist Charles Krauthammer noted a corresponding trend—“Defining Deviancy Up.” Under this scenario activities formerly considered gauche or stupid (e.g. making crude jokes) were being upgraded to criminal offenses (hate-crime harassment).
Combining these scholarly insights, I see today’s hysteria over secondhand smoke as a moral head-fake—an exaggerated cause that allows people to ignore more destructive behavior that hits closer to home. Better to feel morally exalted about pushing a smoking ban than to be labeled “judgmental” (a la Dr. Laura) for denouncing the narcissism that’s transformed the homes of countless children into tawdry love-shacks.
California cities from Belmont in the Bay Area to Escondido and Oceanside in North County have been pondering bans on smoking in public spaces. The recently approved Belmont ban will apparently extend to all areas beyond single-family detached residences—including automobiles. Locally, Solana Beach, San Diego, and Del Mar have already passed no-smoking-on-the-beach ordinances.
The primary reason given for such bans has been the deadly effects of secondhand smoke—a toxin that allegedly causes 3,000 lung cancer deaths in the U.S. each year. Occasionally the litter impact of cigarettes is thrown in to “butt-ress” the case for public prohibition. And in some cases global warming is included in the grab bag of arguments.
What most folks don’t know, however, is that the aforementioned mortality estimate from a 1993 EPA “metastudy” (i.e. a study of other studies) was obtained by violating basic research protocols. Nor do they know that these “findings” were essentially declared bogus both by the Congressional Research Service and by a federal judge who reviewed the data. Indeed, if standard statistical methods had been used in the EPA study, the mortality impact of second hand smoke would have been judged insignificant.
The same disregard for statistical method applies to the World Health Organization study done in 1998—and to almost all secondhand smoke research. Still, those who find smoking obnoxious (which it is) and who have an overwhelming urge to regulate the habits of fellow citizens, don’t really care about scientific integrity. What they care about is their cause and that cough-inducing smoke.
Personally, since I have no stub in this ashtray, I could care less if smoking were banned. I am upset, however, at the way anti-smoking zealots often ignore more profound moral problems. It’s as though their health and environment passion compensates for looking the other way when it comes to the social depravity spread by pimps like Jerry Springer. Likewise, the trans fat crew get exercised over KFC’s food preparation methods but yawn when the musical mafia promote unspeakably vile lyrics via gangsta’ rap.
In 1993, the late Sen. Daniel Moynihan lamented how Americans were “Defining Deviancy Down”—accepting high illegitimacy and crime rates as par for the course. Shortly thereafter, columnist Charles Krauthammer noted a corresponding trend—“Defining Deviancy Up.” Under this scenario activities formerly considered gauche or stupid (e.g. making crude jokes) were being upgraded to criminal offenses (hate-crime harassment).
Combining these scholarly insights, I see today’s hysteria over secondhand smoke as a moral head-fake—an exaggerated cause that allows people to ignore more destructive behavior that hits closer to home. Better to feel morally exalted about pushing a smoking ban than to be labeled “judgmental” (a la Dr. Laura) for denouncing the narcissism that’s transformed the homes of countless children into tawdry love-shacks.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Here is a video production from the David Horowitz Freedom Center's Terrorism Awareness Project: http://www.terrorismawareness.org/what-really-happened/
It is a brief historical overview of the "Palestinian Conflict."
It is a brief historical overview of the "Palestinian Conflict."
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
MICHAEL NOVAK: "LONELY ATHEISTS OF THE GLOBAL VILLAGE"
"Lonely Atheists of the Global Village," by Michael Novak http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.25770/pub_detail.asp
Friday, June 08, 2007
WHY WE DON'T DEFEND OUR BORDERS
Presidential candidate Duncan Hunter notes on his official campaign website that the Kennedy-McCain immigration bill currently before the Senate calls for the construction of only 370 of the 854 miles of fence mandated by last year’s Secure Fence Act—and that only 11 miles have thus far been built. Meanwhile, former Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan ponders the proposed legalization of 12 to 20 million aliens in this country and terms it “national suicide.”
Many Americans are familiar with arguments put forward on both sides of the immigration debate—the argument that illegals stimulate the economy by filling jobs that would otherwise go wanting, and the counter-argument that they depress wages for employees in labor-intensive industries.
They’ve heard that undocumented immigrants help support the Social Security system, and they’ve seen a recent Heritage Foundation calculation that puts the net entitlement cost per illegal household at $20,000. They know that PBS lauds the virtues of diversity and that Roger Hedgecock deplores a “press one for English” society.
They’ve listened to border control advocates who observe that most illegals don’t have high school diplomas—and to activists who tout the work ethic of folks who only want to support their families. They’ve been told that the pending Kennedy-McCain legislation will bring illegals “out of the shadows”—and that Z visas for folks who broke the rules will spawn a greater wave of illegal immigration in the future—as happened after the 1986 amnesty.
What is seldom pondered in this contentious debate, however, is why a nation would largely ignore its immigration laws in the first place—and thus invite the dissolution of its culture. That’s a question to which I’ve given a lot of thought.
Nations, I think, have few problems regulating immigration as long as they retain confidence in their heritage and feel deserving, to some degree, of the blessings they enjoy. On both those counts many Americans are now uncertain.
For almost five decades Michael Moore media types and humanities professors have tried to convince Americans that the U.S. is a nation not of brave patriots, but of racist robber barons. Indeed, the author of our most popular American history textbook, Howard Zinn, recently said in an interview with talk-show host Dennis Prager, that, on balance, his nation had done more bad than good.
One must add to this drumbeat of self-hatred the shame that rightly attends a society that’s sanctioned 45 million abortions and tolerates, or revels in, a vast cultural cesspool. Individuals bearing this moral burden find it hard to tell foreign laborers who earn a tenth of what low-wage Americans earn that they must follow the rules. In the moral scale of things, not getting in line to cross a border seems a lot less reprehensible than indulging and exporting a pop-culture that sexualizes kids, glorifies rule-breaking, and regularly ridicules flag-waving churchgoers.
In short, unless we reclaim our heritage and get our moral act together, the will to preserve our culture won’t be there—nor should it be.
Many Americans are familiar with arguments put forward on both sides of the immigration debate—the argument that illegals stimulate the economy by filling jobs that would otherwise go wanting, and the counter-argument that they depress wages for employees in labor-intensive industries.
They’ve heard that undocumented immigrants help support the Social Security system, and they’ve seen a recent Heritage Foundation calculation that puts the net entitlement cost per illegal household at $20,000. They know that PBS lauds the virtues of diversity and that Roger Hedgecock deplores a “press one for English” society.
They’ve listened to border control advocates who observe that most illegals don’t have high school diplomas—and to activists who tout the work ethic of folks who only want to support their families. They’ve been told that the pending Kennedy-McCain legislation will bring illegals “out of the shadows”—and that Z visas for folks who broke the rules will spawn a greater wave of illegal immigration in the future—as happened after the 1986 amnesty.
What is seldom pondered in this contentious debate, however, is why a nation would largely ignore its immigration laws in the first place—and thus invite the dissolution of its culture. That’s a question to which I’ve given a lot of thought.
Nations, I think, have few problems regulating immigration as long as they retain confidence in their heritage and feel deserving, to some degree, of the blessings they enjoy. On both those counts many Americans are now uncertain.
For almost five decades Michael Moore media types and humanities professors have tried to convince Americans that the U.S. is a nation not of brave patriots, but of racist robber barons. Indeed, the author of our most popular American history textbook, Howard Zinn, recently said in an interview with talk-show host Dennis Prager, that, on balance, his nation had done more bad than good.
One must add to this drumbeat of self-hatred the shame that rightly attends a society that’s sanctioned 45 million abortions and tolerates, or revels in, a vast cultural cesspool. Individuals bearing this moral burden find it hard to tell foreign laborers who earn a tenth of what low-wage Americans earn that they must follow the rules. In the moral scale of things, not getting in line to cross a border seems a lot less reprehensible than indulging and exporting a pop-culture that sexualizes kids, glorifies rule-breaking, and regularly ridicules flag-waving churchgoers.
In short, unless we reclaim our heritage and get our moral act together, the will to preserve our culture won’t be there—nor should it be.
Friday, June 01, 2007
ATHEISTS AT WORK: "GOD IS NOT GREAT" ISN'T SO HOT
God is not Great is yet another contribution to a popular series of anti-religion rants. This genre was initiated in 2004 by an undistinguished author named Sam Harris. His work, The End of Faith, apparently set other atheist minds to thinking, “If a Stanford graduate student can write a popular religion-bashing book, surely I can do better.”
One might have thought that the renowned biologist Richard Dawkins would improve on Harris’s anemic contribution to a debate whose philosophical luminaries include Antoine de Condorcet, Auguste Comte, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Such, however, wasn’t the case—as I noted last December in my review of The God Delusion. Unfortunately, most of the faults that attend Harris’s and Dawkins’s works also apply to Christopher Hitchens’s 286-page oeuvre.
Among other irritants, Hitchens’s chatty apologia for European secularism is peppered with insults directed toward intellectual adversaries. (C.S. Lewis’s writings are “dreary and absurd,” Malcolm Muggeridge is a “silly British evangelist,” and Intelligent Design arguments amount to “well-financed propaganda” on behalf of a “puerile tautology.” On the positive side, one can say that Hitchens is a better stylist than his skeptical competitors and that he utilizes a broader literary and cultural palate than Harris or Dawkins. Philosophically, however, God is not Great is as shallow as its predecessors.
This philosophical lassitude is exhibited, first of all, by Hitchens’s tendency to shift focus from his advertised thesis—that “religion poisons everything”—to the idea that there is no god, then to the idea that many religious claims are historically dubious. Moreover, the author seems to believe that a sound conclusion about the consistent effect of religion can be established via a list of particulars. Employing this standard, an advocate could “prove” (a word Hitchens uses more often than a Karl Popper disciple should) any proposition for which numerous examples can be adduced. Given the fact that Hitchens has 5000 years of history from which to cherry-pick, it would be astounding if he couldn’t assemble a long train of examples in favor of whatever thesis he cared to promote. Such logical gaffs indicate that Hitchens’s subtitle represents no more than a rhetorical flourish to generate market buzz.
Strictly speaking, what Hitchens wants to argue is that religion regularly makes things worse than they would be if most folks adopted his own perspective—that there is no god, that natural science provides the only philosophical answers rational folks require, that evolution (understood as a process of random change “directed” by nature’s survive or perish judgments) is the sole cause of human development, and that a morality consistent with the ideals of Jefferson and Franklin can rest on these materialist premises. Given this monumental task, it’s surprising that Hitchens devotes ten pages of his first substantive chapter to “proving” that bad religious dudes inhabit six cities that begin with the letter B. In this way the author “refutes” the idea put forward by talk-show host Dennis Prager that most folks would be glad to know that the strangers approaching them in a dark alley had just attended a bible class.
Other “proofs” Hitchens offers for the proposition that “religion poisons everything” are these: the case of child-evangelist, Marjoe (two pages); the dubious revelations of Latter-day Saints founder, Joseph Smith (eight pages); the Messianic pretensions and recantation of Sabbatai Sevi (four pages); a pastiche of alleged Old Testament barbarisms (eleven pages); and an anti-kosher chapter titled “Why Heaven Hates Ham” (five pages). This list of topics provides a sample of the gadfly journalist’s modus operandi. While genuine philosophical questions are occasionally posed, they are never analyzed rigorously and systematically. Witty remarks and tendentious put-downs constitute all the discussion Hitchens typically deems necessary to establish the truth of propositions he never seriously questions.
By contrast, a scholarly analysis of religion’s historical impact would acknowledge that societies prior to the twentieth century were suffused with religious belief—thus making it impossible to isolate religious from nonreligious effects. Consequently, the tacit assumption that Thomas Jefferson would embrace similar ideals, absent the Christian society in which he was raised, becomes sheer speculation. Indeed, the only way to test Hitchens’s religion thesis is to compare modern atheistic or secular regimes with their historical predecessors. Yet this is just the comparison Hitchens carefully avoids.
Far from conceding that fascism was a political byproduct of the loss of faith, Hitchens emphasizes that many religious individuals and institutions supported fascist regimes. He also notes, with satisfaction, that secular leftists opposed fascism more strenuously than religious leaders—neglecting to mention, of course, that this opposition was largely rooted in another monstrous ideology or that Stalin did far more than any religious leader to embolden Nazi Germany, thanks to Soviet leader’s pact with Hitler in 1939.
If these omissions aren’t enough to demonstrate Hitchens’s bad faith, the fact that he classifies communism as a religion of sorts should convince most objective readers of the author’s thumb-on-the-scales bias. (Sam Harris employs the same question-begging tactic vis-à-vis communism in The End of Faith.) With fascism and communism excluded from the secular camp, Hitchens hitches his atheist wagon to individuals like Einstein, A. J. Ayer, and Bertrand Russell. About the demographic death spiral currently confronting Europe or the abysmal decadence of post-modern culture, Hitchens has nothing to say—just as he uncritically assumes that a society educated to believe in a blind evolutionary process will produce at least as many altruists and democrats as a society that speaks of humans as “endowed by their Creator with…unalienable rights.”
Also unscrutinized by Hitchens is the ironic fact that his careless but still revered evolutionary process has produced an overwhelmingly religious species—suggesting that religion, even if untrue, passes the critical “survivor” test. Another unbroached irony involves Nietzsche’s assertion, partially seconded by Alfred North Whitehead, that science’s “will to truth” derives, ultimately, “from the flame which a faith thousands of years old has kindled: that Christian faith, which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine.”
In sum, Hitchens’s disjointed and disingenuous arguments put one in mind of the fellow who, criticized by a neighbor for returning a defective bucket, countered by claiming that the container had a hole in it when it was picked up, that the device was in perfect shape when returned, and that, finally, he’d never borrowed the stupid bucket.
One section of God is not Great did strike me as being different from all the rest. That segment (pages 151-153) concerned the dissolution of Hitchens’s own Trotskyite faith. The pathos of the disenchanted true believer is poignantly displayed in this confession: “There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb.” Such wistful yearning for a place to stand is touching—provided one is able to separate Marxism (as Hitchens apparently can) from the scores of millions who died (and continue to die) because of the brutality of secular Marxist regimes.
In subsequent remarks Hitchens explicitly invites readers to jettison their dogmas, just as he did. The pain, he assures them, will subside in time. This lingering wound over lost faith probably accounts for the mean-spirited tenor of Hitchens’s work—and for the scarcely concealed contempt he displays toward those insignificant “mammals” who continue to indulge in the consolations of religious faith. Like an angry jilted lover, he wants everyone else to feel his pain.
In his book, Radical Son, David Horowitz describes, in greater detail than Hitchens, the dissolution of his Marxist faith—an enervating process that left a gaping hole where once stood an all-consuming purpose. Today, I suspect, that sense of loss still fuels Horowitz’s passionate desire to destroy his former ideology. By contrast, Hitchens’s spiritual vacuum has spawned a war on faith itself. And by putting himself in this faith-negating position, he achieves what Hegel termed “skeptical mastery”—a critical perspective that (in its Freudian version) reduces all other faiths to childish wishes and mass delusions. Only the skeptic’s convictions and habits are exempted from ridicule. (Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.)
There is certainly a place for skepticism in philosophy. Alfred North Whitehead offered his tribute to the activity via a memorable paean in Science and the Modern World:
“The common sense of the eighteenth century, its grasp of the obvious facts of human suffering and of the obvious demands of human nature, acted on the world like a bath of moral cleansing. Voltaire must have the credit, that he hated injustice, he hated cruelty, he hated senseless repression, and he hated hocus-pocus. Furthermore, when he saw them, he knew them. In these supreme virtues, he was typical of his century, on its better side.”
Whitehead concludes his comments, however, on a different note—one utterly foreign to Christopher Hitchens: “But if men cannot live on bread alone, still less can they do so on disinfectants.” One might charitably regard God is not Great as a mildly effective but largely obnoxious disinfectant.
One might have thought that the renowned biologist Richard Dawkins would improve on Harris’s anemic contribution to a debate whose philosophical luminaries include Antoine de Condorcet, Auguste Comte, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Such, however, wasn’t the case—as I noted last December in my review of The God Delusion. Unfortunately, most of the faults that attend Harris’s and Dawkins’s works also apply to Christopher Hitchens’s 286-page oeuvre.
Among other irritants, Hitchens’s chatty apologia for European secularism is peppered with insults directed toward intellectual adversaries. (C.S. Lewis’s writings are “dreary and absurd,” Malcolm Muggeridge is a “silly British evangelist,” and Intelligent Design arguments amount to “well-financed propaganda” on behalf of a “puerile tautology.” On the positive side, one can say that Hitchens is a better stylist than his skeptical competitors and that he utilizes a broader literary and cultural palate than Harris or Dawkins. Philosophically, however, God is not Great is as shallow as its predecessors.
This philosophical lassitude is exhibited, first of all, by Hitchens’s tendency to shift focus from his advertised thesis—that “religion poisons everything”—to the idea that there is no god, then to the idea that many religious claims are historically dubious. Moreover, the author seems to believe that a sound conclusion about the consistent effect of religion can be established via a list of particulars. Employing this standard, an advocate could “prove” (a word Hitchens uses more often than a Karl Popper disciple should) any proposition for which numerous examples can be adduced. Given the fact that Hitchens has 5000 years of history from which to cherry-pick, it would be astounding if he couldn’t assemble a long train of examples in favor of whatever thesis he cared to promote. Such logical gaffs indicate that Hitchens’s subtitle represents no more than a rhetorical flourish to generate market buzz.
Strictly speaking, what Hitchens wants to argue is that religion regularly makes things worse than they would be if most folks adopted his own perspective—that there is no god, that natural science provides the only philosophical answers rational folks require, that evolution (understood as a process of random change “directed” by nature’s survive or perish judgments) is the sole cause of human development, and that a morality consistent with the ideals of Jefferson and Franklin can rest on these materialist premises. Given this monumental task, it’s surprising that Hitchens devotes ten pages of his first substantive chapter to “proving” that bad religious dudes inhabit six cities that begin with the letter B. In this way the author “refutes” the idea put forward by talk-show host Dennis Prager that most folks would be glad to know that the strangers approaching them in a dark alley had just attended a bible class.
Other “proofs” Hitchens offers for the proposition that “religion poisons everything” are these: the case of child-evangelist, Marjoe (two pages); the dubious revelations of Latter-day Saints founder, Joseph Smith (eight pages); the Messianic pretensions and recantation of Sabbatai Sevi (four pages); a pastiche of alleged Old Testament barbarisms (eleven pages); and an anti-kosher chapter titled “Why Heaven Hates Ham” (five pages). This list of topics provides a sample of the gadfly journalist’s modus operandi. While genuine philosophical questions are occasionally posed, they are never analyzed rigorously and systematically. Witty remarks and tendentious put-downs constitute all the discussion Hitchens typically deems necessary to establish the truth of propositions he never seriously questions.
By contrast, a scholarly analysis of religion’s historical impact would acknowledge that societies prior to the twentieth century were suffused with religious belief—thus making it impossible to isolate religious from nonreligious effects. Consequently, the tacit assumption that Thomas Jefferson would embrace similar ideals, absent the Christian society in which he was raised, becomes sheer speculation. Indeed, the only way to test Hitchens’s religion thesis is to compare modern atheistic or secular regimes with their historical predecessors. Yet this is just the comparison Hitchens carefully avoids.
Far from conceding that fascism was a political byproduct of the loss of faith, Hitchens emphasizes that many religious individuals and institutions supported fascist regimes. He also notes, with satisfaction, that secular leftists opposed fascism more strenuously than religious leaders—neglecting to mention, of course, that this opposition was largely rooted in another monstrous ideology or that Stalin did far more than any religious leader to embolden Nazi Germany, thanks to Soviet leader’s pact with Hitler in 1939.
If these omissions aren’t enough to demonstrate Hitchens’s bad faith, the fact that he classifies communism as a religion of sorts should convince most objective readers of the author’s thumb-on-the-scales bias. (Sam Harris employs the same question-begging tactic vis-à-vis communism in The End of Faith.) With fascism and communism excluded from the secular camp, Hitchens hitches his atheist wagon to individuals like Einstein, A. J. Ayer, and Bertrand Russell. About the demographic death spiral currently confronting Europe or the abysmal decadence of post-modern culture, Hitchens has nothing to say—just as he uncritically assumes that a society educated to believe in a blind evolutionary process will produce at least as many altruists and democrats as a society that speaks of humans as “endowed by their Creator with…unalienable rights.”
Also unscrutinized by Hitchens is the ironic fact that his careless but still revered evolutionary process has produced an overwhelmingly religious species—suggesting that religion, even if untrue, passes the critical “survivor” test. Another unbroached irony involves Nietzsche’s assertion, partially seconded by Alfred North Whitehead, that science’s “will to truth” derives, ultimately, “from the flame which a faith thousands of years old has kindled: that Christian faith, which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine.”
In sum, Hitchens’s disjointed and disingenuous arguments put one in mind of the fellow who, criticized by a neighbor for returning a defective bucket, countered by claiming that the container had a hole in it when it was picked up, that the device was in perfect shape when returned, and that, finally, he’d never borrowed the stupid bucket.
One section of God is not Great did strike me as being different from all the rest. That segment (pages 151-153) concerned the dissolution of Hitchens’s own Trotskyite faith. The pathos of the disenchanted true believer is poignantly displayed in this confession: “There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb.” Such wistful yearning for a place to stand is touching—provided one is able to separate Marxism (as Hitchens apparently can) from the scores of millions who died (and continue to die) because of the brutality of secular Marxist regimes.
In subsequent remarks Hitchens explicitly invites readers to jettison their dogmas, just as he did. The pain, he assures them, will subside in time. This lingering wound over lost faith probably accounts for the mean-spirited tenor of Hitchens’s work—and for the scarcely concealed contempt he displays toward those insignificant “mammals” who continue to indulge in the consolations of religious faith. Like an angry jilted lover, he wants everyone else to feel his pain.
In his book, Radical Son, David Horowitz describes, in greater detail than Hitchens, the dissolution of his Marxist faith—an enervating process that left a gaping hole where once stood an all-consuming purpose. Today, I suspect, that sense of loss still fuels Horowitz’s passionate desire to destroy his former ideology. By contrast, Hitchens’s spiritual vacuum has spawned a war on faith itself. And by putting himself in this faith-negating position, he achieves what Hegel termed “skeptical mastery”—a critical perspective that (in its Freudian version) reduces all other faiths to childish wishes and mass delusions. Only the skeptic’s convictions and habits are exempted from ridicule. (Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.)
There is certainly a place for skepticism in philosophy. Alfred North Whitehead offered his tribute to the activity via a memorable paean in Science and the Modern World:
“The common sense of the eighteenth century, its grasp of the obvious facts of human suffering and of the obvious demands of human nature, acted on the world like a bath of moral cleansing. Voltaire must have the credit, that he hated injustice, he hated cruelty, he hated senseless repression, and he hated hocus-pocus. Furthermore, when he saw them, he knew them. In these supreme virtues, he was typical of his century, on its better side.”
Whitehead concludes his comments, however, on a different note—one utterly foreign to Christopher Hitchens: “But if men cannot live on bread alone, still less can they do so on disinfectants.” One might charitably regard God is not Great as a mildly effective but largely obnoxious disinfectant.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
IMMIGRATION LAW AND LA RECONQUISTA
One-sixth of Mexico is already in this country, and half a million more persons of Mexican ancestry enter the U.S. every year. That startling observation in Pat Buchanan’s book, State of Emergency, is followed by this immigration tidbit:
“In the 1990s, people of Mexican ancestry here grew by 7 million, or 50 percent, to 21 million. That 7 million exceeded the number that any nation on earth previously sent to America over four generations. It does not include the 6 million Hispanics who refused to give census takers their nation of origin.”
Elsewhere Buchanan notes that the number of immigrants who came to this country from 1607 to 1960, around 36 million, is smaller than the number who have come, legally and illegally, since that time. Given this demographic tidal wave, local attempts to get a handle on its social consequences are understandable.
What most observers don’t understand, however, is the legislative history that sanctioned this unprecedented influx of immigrants from Mexico and Latin America. That history revolves around the Immigration Act of 1965, a Great Society innovation that changed quotas from ratios reflecting the nation’s existing ethnic makeup to rules favoring immigrants from other nations.
Senator Ted Kennedy, a great proponent of this legislation, argued that immigration levels would remain “substantially the same” and insisted that “the ethnic mix of the country will not be upset.” Predictably, Kennedy tagged opponents of the legislation—probably two-thirds of the country according to a 1965 Harris Poll—as haters.
The actual result of the legislation was not what Kennedy claimed. As Dean Steven Gillon of Oklahoma University noted in 2006, “The U.S. added at least 40 million immigrants after 1965. Before 1965, 95 percent of the new immigrants had come from Europe. After 1965, 95 percent came from the Third World. The 1965 act has transformed American society and had consequences exactly the opposite of what we were promised.”
The immigration debacle of 1965 was followed by another step toward cultural suicide in 1986 when the amnesty extended to three million illegal aliens became a magnet for millions of other laborers who found U.S. wages of five to eight dollars an hour more attractive than the ten dollars a day they earned in Mexico.
During a recent visit to Dallas, Texas, I encountered another local attempt to deal with the nation’s immigration problem. The suburb of Farmers Branch (pop. 28,500) had passed an ordinance by a 2 to 1 popular vote that prohibited landlords from renting to illegal aliens. As Escondido knows, such laws with challengeable enforcement procedures are instantly embroiled in ACLU-sponsored litigation.
I also noticed on my Dallas trip that numerous AM radio stations and several of the area’s TV stations are now Spanish-language—a fact whose full significance can only be grasped by those who take seriously a 2002 Zogby Poll in which 58% of the Mexican citizens interviewed said “the territory of the United States Southwest belongs to Mexico.”
In recent decades U.S. immigration policy has encouraged that assumption.
“In the 1990s, people of Mexican ancestry here grew by 7 million, or 50 percent, to 21 million. That 7 million exceeded the number that any nation on earth previously sent to America over four generations. It does not include the 6 million Hispanics who refused to give census takers their nation of origin.”
Elsewhere Buchanan notes that the number of immigrants who came to this country from 1607 to 1960, around 36 million, is smaller than the number who have come, legally and illegally, since that time. Given this demographic tidal wave, local attempts to get a handle on its social consequences are understandable.
What most observers don’t understand, however, is the legislative history that sanctioned this unprecedented influx of immigrants from Mexico and Latin America. That history revolves around the Immigration Act of 1965, a Great Society innovation that changed quotas from ratios reflecting the nation’s existing ethnic makeup to rules favoring immigrants from other nations.
Senator Ted Kennedy, a great proponent of this legislation, argued that immigration levels would remain “substantially the same” and insisted that “the ethnic mix of the country will not be upset.” Predictably, Kennedy tagged opponents of the legislation—probably two-thirds of the country according to a 1965 Harris Poll—as haters.
The actual result of the legislation was not what Kennedy claimed. As Dean Steven Gillon of Oklahoma University noted in 2006, “The U.S. added at least 40 million immigrants after 1965. Before 1965, 95 percent of the new immigrants had come from Europe. After 1965, 95 percent came from the Third World. The 1965 act has transformed American society and had consequences exactly the opposite of what we were promised.”
The immigration debacle of 1965 was followed by another step toward cultural suicide in 1986 when the amnesty extended to three million illegal aliens became a magnet for millions of other laborers who found U.S. wages of five to eight dollars an hour more attractive than the ten dollars a day they earned in Mexico.
During a recent visit to Dallas, Texas, I encountered another local attempt to deal with the nation’s immigration problem. The suburb of Farmers Branch (pop. 28,500) had passed an ordinance by a 2 to 1 popular vote that prohibited landlords from renting to illegal aliens. As Escondido knows, such laws with challengeable enforcement procedures are instantly embroiled in ACLU-sponsored litigation.
I also noticed on my Dallas trip that numerous AM radio stations and several of the area’s TV stations are now Spanish-language—a fact whose full significance can only be grasped by those who take seriously a 2002 Zogby Poll in which 58% of the Mexican citizens interviewed said “the territory of the United States Southwest belongs to Mexico.”
In recent decades U.S. immigration policy has encouraged that assumption.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
A MORMON IN THE WHITE HOUSE? by Hugh Hewitt
Mitt Romney has a friend in Hugh--Hugh Hewitt that is. The radio talk-show host, Harvard grad, and Ohio sports aficionado has nothing but praise for the former Bay State governor and GOP presidential candidate. And the case for Romney is one that the L.A.-based lawyer-educator can make without pounding the table. Certainly, convincing Republicans to support a Massachusetts Mormon as their 2008 standard-bearer will be an easier task than begging party activists to back Harriet Miers—a lost cause that the former Reagan Justice Department staffer undertook in 2005 via a series of walk-the-plank radio briefs.
An alternate title for this Romney hagiography might be McCain in the Outhouse! —as readers are never far from a page on which the Arizona senator is taken to the political woodshed. Indeed, there are no less than seven index references to McCain’s collusion with the “Gang of 14”—the bi-partisan group that preempted senate filibusters against a handful of Bush judicial nominees but kept others from receiving up or down votes. Among other grievances, Hewitt lambastes the “maverick” Republican for collaborating with Democrat Russ Feingold on a speech-restricting campaign finance bill and for teaming up with Ted Kennedy on legislation that would repeat the 1986 immigration-amnesty fiasco. But so much for the candidate Hewitt calls a “Great American, lousy senator, and terrible Republican.”
A Mormon in the White House? (Note the question mark.) focuses primary attention on the unfinished biography of Mitt Romney—the fourth child of three-term Michigan Governor George Romney and of his talented wife, Lenore. The book was written, Hewitt says, because “Mitt Romney ought not not be President because of his religious beliefs.” To make that case Hewitt showcases the governor’s impressive credentials and explains why those qualifications shouldn’t be shunted aside by a recrudescent “religion test” that would overturn the social consensus reached in 1960 with John Kennedy’s election and would violate the spirit of the Constitution’s Article VI prohibition against religious tests for office.
Hewitt notes that Mitt Romney, unlike his father, is a five-star product of America’s higher education system—topping stellar years at Brigham Young with a joint degree from Harvard Law and Harvard Business School. These academic achievements were followed by a series of career triumphs, first at Bain and Company, then at Bain Capital—a firm founded by Romney in 1984 and grown into a multi-billion dollar investing powerhouse. Flush with this success, Romney was tapped to rescue his old firm, Bain and Company, from the verge of insolvency. That task prepared him for an even more impressive salvage operation—the scandal-plagued 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympic Games. This triumph is chronicled in Romney’s own book, Turnaround.
Hewitt touts with radio repetitiveness the business technique Romney successfully employed throughout his career—the “Bain way”—a method of information gathering, debate, and analysis that took the case-study curriculum at Harvard Business School an implementation step further. In 2003, Romney brought these talents to his new job as governor of Massachusetts—turning a huge projected deficit into a surplus, without raising taxes. Romney’s aggressive response to the massive, and eventually tragic, mismanagement of the “Big Dig” project provides an example of acting under pressure. In this instance the governor was able to oust the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority’s Chairman and CEO and to commence a top-to-bottom construction review—with authority now vested in the governor. Whether Romney’s universal health insurance plan will be scored as another political victory is yet to be seen. Even more impressive, from the perspective of social conservatives, was the tenacity Romney displayed in supporting an initiative that called for a constitutional referendum on the state Supreme Court’s 4-3 mandate for same-sex marriage. Other actions that win points with most conservatives are Romney’s beyond-the-Bain-way veto of embryonic cloning legislation and his refusing to extend diplomatic courtesies to Iran’s former President, Mohammed Khatami.
In addition to career accomplishments, Hewitt focuses attention on Romney’s family life—as a son, a husband, and father to five sons. Summer trips, practical jokes, mission work, courting secrets, and other not-too-private moments constitute a portrait of wholesome affection and commitment on which the media are tempted to place a “too good to be real” label. A Boston Globe hit-piece written in 1994 during Romney’s senate race against Ted Kennedy, typifies this kind of jaded journalism. That article directed its embarrassed misgivings toward Romney’s “too perfect” wife, Ann—a remarkable woman who subsequently won dressage medals amid a successful therapeutic regimen to counter her multiple sclerosis.
Having established his candidate’s credentials, Hewitt addresses the book’s central concern—whether Mitt Romney’s religion should matter to voters and reporters. In his introduction Hewitt notes with dismay a November 2006, Rasmussen poll that found 43% of voters unwilling to vote for a Mormon candidate. Hewitt later observes that the “Mormon question” was largely a non-issue during George Romney’s run for the Republican nomination in 1968. That ill-fated campaign was done in, for the most part, by media spin directed against a man (born in a Mormon community in Mexico) who wasn’t a member of the cosmopolitan elite.
A major argument that Hewitt employs to distinguish Mormons from fringe sectarians is that church members are now firmly ensconced in American life—a point made by David Broder and Stephen Hess when they wrote The Republican Establishment in 1967. That “Establishment,” of course, included Michigan Governor George Romney. Hewitt points out that two other Mormons, besides Romney’s father, have conducted recent presidential campaigns—Orrin Hatch and Mo Udall. To this list of prominent Latter-day Saint pols, one could add the name of Nevada’s Democrat Senator, Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Beyond the fact that Mormons populate both sides of the political aisle, Mitt Romney’s record in very blue Massachusetts should suffice to rebut any conspiratorial ideas about a Utah-centered theocracy. Moreover, the candidate’s perfect-pitch responses to questions about the political influence of the Mormon Church are reinforced by statements from LDS leaders who forswear any role in partisan politics.
To acquaint readers with the general contours of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Hewitt dedicates several pages to the group’s history and theology. (In 1996, Hewitt was involved in a PBS production, Searching for God in America, that also explored the Mormon faith.) Finally, as a supplement, the author provides a transcript of his conversation with two conservative Christian religion professors—a brief discussion about Mormonism and whether the two gentlemen could conscientiously vote to put a Mormon in the White House. (Both said they could cast such a vote.)
Beyond the damage done by needlessly ditching a talented Presidential candidate, Hewitt rues the harm that will befall the country if secular journalists and political operatives begin to scrutinize office-seekers’ religious beliefs. The “Mormonism is too weird” objection can easily become an argument against those who believe in transubstantiation, the Assumption of Mary, or the biblical account of creation. (Chris Matthews’ question about evolution, recently directed to GOP presidential candidates at the Reagan Library, is an example of what Hewitt hopes to avoid—queries that open the door to reportorial inquisitions about biblical inspiration, Papal authority, or whether candidates really believe this “crazy Jesus stuff.”)
Hewitt observes that an Atlantic Monthly journalist has already asked Romney about his liturgical undergarments—and that additional cases of anti-Mormon and anti-religious bigotry (e.g. Slate’s Jacob Weisberg) have popped up in the press. Media response to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on partial-birth abortion also seems to validate Hewitt’s fears—as journalists who take their cue from New York Senator Chuck Schumer haven’t been shy about playing the “Catholic card” against judges presumably guided by Church dogma on the topic and not by established principles of jurisprudence.
In sum, Hewitt’s message is that Mitt Romney has become a political canary in the coalmine. If a man of Romney’s intellectual and professional stature is taken down simply because of his religious beliefs, others will follow. Permission will have been granted to destroy political opponents across the religious spectrum for believing “weird” things—or perhaps for being excessively moral in the eyes of a skeptical, secular press.
An alternate title for this Romney hagiography might be McCain in the Outhouse! —as readers are never far from a page on which the Arizona senator is taken to the political woodshed. Indeed, there are no less than seven index references to McCain’s collusion with the “Gang of 14”—the bi-partisan group that preempted senate filibusters against a handful of Bush judicial nominees but kept others from receiving up or down votes. Among other grievances, Hewitt lambastes the “maverick” Republican for collaborating with Democrat Russ Feingold on a speech-restricting campaign finance bill and for teaming up with Ted Kennedy on legislation that would repeat the 1986 immigration-amnesty fiasco. But so much for the candidate Hewitt calls a “Great American, lousy senator, and terrible Republican.”
A Mormon in the White House? (Note the question mark.) focuses primary attention on the unfinished biography of Mitt Romney—the fourth child of three-term Michigan Governor George Romney and of his talented wife, Lenore. The book was written, Hewitt says, because “Mitt Romney ought not not be President because of his religious beliefs.” To make that case Hewitt showcases the governor’s impressive credentials and explains why those qualifications shouldn’t be shunted aside by a recrudescent “religion test” that would overturn the social consensus reached in 1960 with John Kennedy’s election and would violate the spirit of the Constitution’s Article VI prohibition against religious tests for office.
Hewitt notes that Mitt Romney, unlike his father, is a five-star product of America’s higher education system—topping stellar years at Brigham Young with a joint degree from Harvard Law and Harvard Business School. These academic achievements were followed by a series of career triumphs, first at Bain and Company, then at Bain Capital—a firm founded by Romney in 1984 and grown into a multi-billion dollar investing powerhouse. Flush with this success, Romney was tapped to rescue his old firm, Bain and Company, from the verge of insolvency. That task prepared him for an even more impressive salvage operation—the scandal-plagued 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympic Games. This triumph is chronicled in Romney’s own book, Turnaround.
Hewitt touts with radio repetitiveness the business technique Romney successfully employed throughout his career—the “Bain way”—a method of information gathering, debate, and analysis that took the case-study curriculum at Harvard Business School an implementation step further. In 2003, Romney brought these talents to his new job as governor of Massachusetts—turning a huge projected deficit into a surplus, without raising taxes. Romney’s aggressive response to the massive, and eventually tragic, mismanagement of the “Big Dig” project provides an example of acting under pressure. In this instance the governor was able to oust the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority’s Chairman and CEO and to commence a top-to-bottom construction review—with authority now vested in the governor. Whether Romney’s universal health insurance plan will be scored as another political victory is yet to be seen. Even more impressive, from the perspective of social conservatives, was the tenacity Romney displayed in supporting an initiative that called for a constitutional referendum on the state Supreme Court’s 4-3 mandate for same-sex marriage. Other actions that win points with most conservatives are Romney’s beyond-the-Bain-way veto of embryonic cloning legislation and his refusing to extend diplomatic courtesies to Iran’s former President, Mohammed Khatami.
In addition to career accomplishments, Hewitt focuses attention on Romney’s family life—as a son, a husband, and father to five sons. Summer trips, practical jokes, mission work, courting secrets, and other not-too-private moments constitute a portrait of wholesome affection and commitment on which the media are tempted to place a “too good to be real” label. A Boston Globe hit-piece written in 1994 during Romney’s senate race against Ted Kennedy, typifies this kind of jaded journalism. That article directed its embarrassed misgivings toward Romney’s “too perfect” wife, Ann—a remarkable woman who subsequently won dressage medals amid a successful therapeutic regimen to counter her multiple sclerosis.
Having established his candidate’s credentials, Hewitt addresses the book’s central concern—whether Mitt Romney’s religion should matter to voters and reporters. In his introduction Hewitt notes with dismay a November 2006, Rasmussen poll that found 43% of voters unwilling to vote for a Mormon candidate. Hewitt later observes that the “Mormon question” was largely a non-issue during George Romney’s run for the Republican nomination in 1968. That ill-fated campaign was done in, for the most part, by media spin directed against a man (born in a Mormon community in Mexico) who wasn’t a member of the cosmopolitan elite.
A major argument that Hewitt employs to distinguish Mormons from fringe sectarians is that church members are now firmly ensconced in American life—a point made by David Broder and Stephen Hess when they wrote The Republican Establishment in 1967. That “Establishment,” of course, included Michigan Governor George Romney. Hewitt points out that two other Mormons, besides Romney’s father, have conducted recent presidential campaigns—Orrin Hatch and Mo Udall. To this list of prominent Latter-day Saint pols, one could add the name of Nevada’s Democrat Senator, Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Beyond the fact that Mormons populate both sides of the political aisle, Mitt Romney’s record in very blue Massachusetts should suffice to rebut any conspiratorial ideas about a Utah-centered theocracy. Moreover, the candidate’s perfect-pitch responses to questions about the political influence of the Mormon Church are reinforced by statements from LDS leaders who forswear any role in partisan politics.
To acquaint readers with the general contours of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Hewitt dedicates several pages to the group’s history and theology. (In 1996, Hewitt was involved in a PBS production, Searching for God in America, that also explored the Mormon faith.) Finally, as a supplement, the author provides a transcript of his conversation with two conservative Christian religion professors—a brief discussion about Mormonism and whether the two gentlemen could conscientiously vote to put a Mormon in the White House. (Both said they could cast such a vote.)
Beyond the damage done by needlessly ditching a talented Presidential candidate, Hewitt rues the harm that will befall the country if secular journalists and political operatives begin to scrutinize office-seekers’ religious beliefs. The “Mormonism is too weird” objection can easily become an argument against those who believe in transubstantiation, the Assumption of Mary, or the biblical account of creation. (Chris Matthews’ question about evolution, recently directed to GOP presidential candidates at the Reagan Library, is an example of what Hewitt hopes to avoid—queries that open the door to reportorial inquisitions about biblical inspiration, Papal authority, or whether candidates really believe this “crazy Jesus stuff.”)
Hewitt observes that an Atlantic Monthly journalist has already asked Romney about his liturgical undergarments—and that additional cases of anti-Mormon and anti-religious bigotry (e.g. Slate’s Jacob Weisberg) have popped up in the press. Media response to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on partial-birth abortion also seems to validate Hewitt’s fears—as journalists who take their cue from New York Senator Chuck Schumer haven’t been shy about playing the “Catholic card” against judges presumably guided by Church dogma on the topic and not by established principles of jurisprudence.
In sum, Hewitt’s message is that Mitt Romney has become a political canary in the coalmine. If a man of Romney’s intellectual and professional stature is taken down simply because of his religious beliefs, others will follow. Permission will have been granted to destroy political opponents across the religious spectrum for believing “weird” things—or perhaps for being excessively moral in the eyes of a skeptical, secular press.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
DEBATING "ILLEGAL" IMMIGRATION
“Whoever first defines the situation is the victor.” So said the iconoclastic psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. Consider, for example, the difference between dealing with the “Soviet government” or an “evil empire”—between paying “confiscatory taxes” and making “infrastructure investments.”
The accuracy of Szasz’s statement is further illustrated in the debate over…illegal immigration. The prior sentence would have had a different impact if the word “illegal” were omitted—as it typically is when “mainstream” media cover the issue.
The day after this year’s May Day marches, a North County Times headline announced, “Local immigration protests draw few.” Hometown television hairdos employed similar lingo the evening before, speaking of “immigration activists” and “immigration rights.”
Other terms included “humane progressive change,” “meaningful immigration reform,” and “undocumented immigrants.” The final construct is a tad more honest than the insipid phrase “undocumented residents” that a local TV reporter invented a few weeks ago.
As I switched from one station to another, the uniform story line was that though the rallies were shadows of last year’s events (The Vista march, one journalist said, numbered around 50.) the protestors’ points were made just as forcefully. In other words, it was implied that numbers don’t matter—a perspective never voiced when marches are “massive.”
The most honest reportorial moment occurred when a trifecta of protestor demands was announced: no guest workers, stop the raids, legalization for all. There was, naturally, no commentary about the realistic consequences of this no-border policy.
After fluff coverage of the marches, a brief statement by Congressman Brian Bilbray was imposed on the screen and read: “While we may be a nation of immigrants, we are also a nation of laws, and it is absolutely absurd for anyone who has broken our laws to demand rights such as citizenship.”
KUSI then proceeded to a segment about the rise of hate crimes and of “anti-immigrant” hate groups—drawing special attention to a Klan member who hoped for a bomb to “blow up a busload of Latinos.”
So there you have it. On the one hand we have persons who only want “a decent living wage and a decent life,” and on the other hand you have those who want to murder Latinos—a group juxtaposed with the North County Congressman who dares ignore the protest sign: “Ninguna persona es illegal.”
Missing was any honest analysis of how twelve million “illegal aliens” affect local schools and hospitals. Missing was any discussion about welfare benefits, gangs, and the impact of “open-borders” on persons at the lower end of the economic ladder. Missing was commentary, like Diana West’s, that highlights the four-decade transformation of Anglo Los Angeles into the second largest Mexican city in the world—behind Mexico City.
I’m perfectly willing to agree that most “illegals” come to this country to work and to work hard. What I won’t do is ignore the difference between regulated legal immigration and unregulated illegal immigration. Just as I won’t pretend, for PC’s sake, that a locked back door equals the Berlin Wall.
The accuracy of Szasz’s statement is further illustrated in the debate over…illegal immigration. The prior sentence would have had a different impact if the word “illegal” were omitted—as it typically is when “mainstream” media cover the issue.
The day after this year’s May Day marches, a North County Times headline announced, “Local immigration protests draw few.” Hometown television hairdos employed similar lingo the evening before, speaking of “immigration activists” and “immigration rights.”
Other terms included “humane progressive change,” “meaningful immigration reform,” and “undocumented immigrants.” The final construct is a tad more honest than the insipid phrase “undocumented residents” that a local TV reporter invented a few weeks ago.
As I switched from one station to another, the uniform story line was that though the rallies were shadows of last year’s events (The Vista march, one journalist said, numbered around 50.) the protestors’ points were made just as forcefully. In other words, it was implied that numbers don’t matter—a perspective never voiced when marches are “massive.”
The most honest reportorial moment occurred when a trifecta of protestor demands was announced: no guest workers, stop the raids, legalization for all. There was, naturally, no commentary about the realistic consequences of this no-border policy.
After fluff coverage of the marches, a brief statement by Congressman Brian Bilbray was imposed on the screen and read: “While we may be a nation of immigrants, we are also a nation of laws, and it is absolutely absurd for anyone who has broken our laws to demand rights such as citizenship.”
KUSI then proceeded to a segment about the rise of hate crimes and of “anti-immigrant” hate groups—drawing special attention to a Klan member who hoped for a bomb to “blow up a busload of Latinos.”
So there you have it. On the one hand we have persons who only want “a decent living wage and a decent life,” and on the other hand you have those who want to murder Latinos—a group juxtaposed with the North County Congressman who dares ignore the protest sign: “Ninguna persona es illegal.”
Missing was any honest analysis of how twelve million “illegal aliens” affect local schools and hospitals. Missing was any discussion about welfare benefits, gangs, and the impact of “open-borders” on persons at the lower end of the economic ladder. Missing was commentary, like Diana West’s, that highlights the four-decade transformation of Anglo Los Angeles into the second largest Mexican city in the world—behind Mexico City.
I’m perfectly willing to agree that most “illegals” come to this country to work and to work hard. What I won’t do is ignore the difference between regulated legal immigration and unregulated illegal immigration. Just as I won’t pretend, for PC’s sake, that a locked back door equals the Berlin Wall.
Friday, April 27, 2007
LAMENTING AN ANGRY CULTURE
Shortly after my house-hunting trip to San Diego in 1984, James Huberty slaughtered 21 men, women, and children at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro. Though I had often read about such incidents, this one brought with it a new stomach-churning sensation—as pit stops at the golden arches had been frequent for a penny-pinching family with two young daughters. “It could have happened where we were” was the thought that accompanied the nauseating gastric whirl.
Today the McDonald’s in San Ysidro has been razed and a memorial with 21 pillars commemorates the victims, but the mass violence that started in 1966 with James Whitman’s deadly sniping from the University of Texas tower, continues.
Last Friday was the eighth anniversary of the Columbine murders—an event cited with admiration by Cho Seung-Hui, the killer who now holds not only America’s single-day mass-murder record but also (thanks to NBC and follow-the-leader news outlets) the record for post-mortem media exposure.
In the wake of Monday’s massacre, many copycat threats were issued—and numerous hyper-precautionary measures taken. Locally, an Internet message promising a disaster greater than Virginia Tech frayed nerves at SDSU until authorities tracked down the demented sender.
SDSU, of course, is no stranger to violence. Witness the 1996 murder of three professors by a graduate student. And at area high schools, the much-publicized Santee killings in March of 2001 were followed less than three weeks later by the non-lethal Granite Hills shooting spree. Obviously, what happened in Blacksburg, Virginia, has also happened here—most destructively in San Ysidro.
Significantly, both Huberty and the Virginia Tech killer expressed anger toward society in general at the time of their acts. Cho’s rambling diatribes were mostly directed at amorphous targets—rich hedonists who drink vodka and cognac—not at anyone in particular. “They” were the ones who, in Cho’s paranoid mind, made him do it. Similarly, before his deadly rampage in San Ysidro, Huberty announced that, “society had its chance.” Unfortunately, Huberty and Cho had only glancing or irregular (and obviously inadequate) contact with mental health professionals.
One could speculate that the free-floating rage expressed by deranged minds will exist regardless of societal models. But I think it’s safe to assume that the venom and violence regularly marketed in our culture at least reinforce the imaginary grievances of mentally disturbed individuals.
By contrast, imagine a culture in which civility is prized—where slasher films and the f-word are denounced like the n-word, where victimhood is eyed with suspicion, where political opponents are discussed with linguistic restraint, not vilified as sub-human monsters.
Most importantly, imagine a culture where gratitude is expressed as frequently as, in today’s society, rights are invoked. Such an environment would provide those on the edge a portrait of benevolence that doesn’t foster delusions.
Unfortunately it’s hard in our media-shaped world (where gratitude is as unpopular as temperance) to distinguish homicidal maniacs from your typical bloviating narcissist.
Today the McDonald’s in San Ysidro has been razed and a memorial with 21 pillars commemorates the victims, but the mass violence that started in 1966 with James Whitman’s deadly sniping from the University of Texas tower, continues.
Last Friday was the eighth anniversary of the Columbine murders—an event cited with admiration by Cho Seung-Hui, the killer who now holds not only America’s single-day mass-murder record but also (thanks to NBC and follow-the-leader news outlets) the record for post-mortem media exposure.
In the wake of Monday’s massacre, many copycat threats were issued—and numerous hyper-precautionary measures taken. Locally, an Internet message promising a disaster greater than Virginia Tech frayed nerves at SDSU until authorities tracked down the demented sender.
SDSU, of course, is no stranger to violence. Witness the 1996 murder of three professors by a graduate student. And at area high schools, the much-publicized Santee killings in March of 2001 were followed less than three weeks later by the non-lethal Granite Hills shooting spree. Obviously, what happened in Blacksburg, Virginia, has also happened here—most destructively in San Ysidro.
Significantly, both Huberty and the Virginia Tech killer expressed anger toward society in general at the time of their acts. Cho’s rambling diatribes were mostly directed at amorphous targets—rich hedonists who drink vodka and cognac—not at anyone in particular. “They” were the ones who, in Cho’s paranoid mind, made him do it. Similarly, before his deadly rampage in San Ysidro, Huberty announced that, “society had its chance.” Unfortunately, Huberty and Cho had only glancing or irregular (and obviously inadequate) contact with mental health professionals.
One could speculate that the free-floating rage expressed by deranged minds will exist regardless of societal models. But I think it’s safe to assume that the venom and violence regularly marketed in our culture at least reinforce the imaginary grievances of mentally disturbed individuals.
By contrast, imagine a culture in which civility is prized—where slasher films and the f-word are denounced like the n-word, where victimhood is eyed with suspicion, where political opponents are discussed with linguistic restraint, not vilified as sub-human monsters.
Most importantly, imagine a culture where gratitude is expressed as frequently as, in today’s society, rights are invoked. Such an environment would provide those on the edge a portrait of benevolence that doesn’t foster delusions.
Unfortunately it’s hard in our media-shaped world (where gratitude is as unpopular as temperance) to distinguish homicidal maniacs from your typical bloviating narcissist.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Darwin, David Brooks, and Mass Murder
David Brooks’ column on the status of Darwinism in Western culture appeared in my local paper the day after Cho Seung-Hui murdered thirty-two human beings in Blacksburg, Virginia—a record for campus slaughter that surpassed the mark set by Charles Whitman at the University of Texas in 1966. In his piece Brooks touts the prevailing biological orthodoxy that “human beings, like all other creatures, are machines for passing along genetic code” and that we “are driven primarily by a desire to perpetuate ourselves and our species.”
Brooks then says that the “logic of evolution explains why people vie for status, form groups, fall in love and cherish their young. It holds that most everything that exists does so for a purpose. If some trait, like emotion, can cause big problems, then it must also provide bigger benefits, because nature will not expend energy on things that don’t enhance the chance of survival.”
Like many columnists (including secular soulmate, George Will) Brooks occasionally dabbles in academic topics. But the above remarks illustrate his philosophical naiveté. A committed evolutionist and Academic Dean at a prominent La Jolla prep school once gratuitously announced at a faculty meeting, “Evolution is ateleological”—a statement that means the process has “no purpose.” (The Dean proceeded to suggest, incomprehensibly, that evolution’s lack of direction should serve as an educational model.)
In addition to lacking “purpose,” nature, for evolution professionals, is constantly expending energy on things that don’t “enhance the chance of survival.” When, however, its random products don’t survive, evolutionary theory declares them “unfit.” Dinosaurs, for example, were “fit” for a while; then nature “selected” against them. Put otherwise, the species died out. Strictly speaking, “fitness” and “currently existing” are virtual synonyms for real, as opposed to romantic, evolutionists.
The “purpose” that Brooks mentions in his column is really a product of theoretical hindsight—not of intention. One must slip a personifying image of Mother Nature through an intellectual back door to make the term mean what Brooks implies in his paean-of-sorts to Richard Dawkins’ “Blind Watchmaker.”
These analytical comments bring me back to Virginia Tech and mass murder. I don’t think Brooks would be willing to employ even his prettified Darwinism to explain the “purpose” of that slaughter. (Keep in mind that all “benefits” of “trait(s), like emotion,” that “can cause big problems” must refer to the propagation of genes.) Certainly, the cosmic purposelessness espoused by Dawkins would be a word untimely spoken at last Tuesday’s memorial convocation.
On the topic of emotion I add my own quizzical lines to those of the Hokies’ poet in residence:
How understand sweet love
beneath this meta-Physical model?
A means of species propagation?
A lucky hit?
Are tears to be reduced to adaptations
in the pointless quest for life?
In short, the language of sociobiology doesn’t comprehend what humans consider most important—like the heroism of Holocaust survivor and Professor Liviu Librescu, who gave his life that others might live. To reduce the poignant irony of Librescu’s sacrificial act to a function of genetic compulsion is to embrace a blindness as great as the blindness that confuses being alive with the purpose of living.
Brooks declares that Darwin has replaced Freud, Marx, and earlier, the Bible, as a unifying Western cosmology. Like Marx and Freud, however, Darwin has no language that takes seriously individual acts of good and evil. Instead, good and evil become epiphenomena generated by impersonal forces that lie beyond good and evil. This fatal flaw trivializes, and continues to spawn, acts of horror in Brooks’ “postmodern” West.
Brooks then says that the “logic of evolution explains why people vie for status, form groups, fall in love and cherish their young. It holds that most everything that exists does so for a purpose. If some trait, like emotion, can cause big problems, then it must also provide bigger benefits, because nature will not expend energy on things that don’t enhance the chance of survival.”
Like many columnists (including secular soulmate, George Will) Brooks occasionally dabbles in academic topics. But the above remarks illustrate his philosophical naiveté. A committed evolutionist and Academic Dean at a prominent La Jolla prep school once gratuitously announced at a faculty meeting, “Evolution is ateleological”—a statement that means the process has “no purpose.” (The Dean proceeded to suggest, incomprehensibly, that evolution’s lack of direction should serve as an educational model.)
In addition to lacking “purpose,” nature, for evolution professionals, is constantly expending energy on things that don’t “enhance the chance of survival.” When, however, its random products don’t survive, evolutionary theory declares them “unfit.” Dinosaurs, for example, were “fit” for a while; then nature “selected” against them. Put otherwise, the species died out. Strictly speaking, “fitness” and “currently existing” are virtual synonyms for real, as opposed to romantic, evolutionists.
The “purpose” that Brooks mentions in his column is really a product of theoretical hindsight—not of intention. One must slip a personifying image of Mother Nature through an intellectual back door to make the term mean what Brooks implies in his paean-of-sorts to Richard Dawkins’ “Blind Watchmaker.”
These analytical comments bring me back to Virginia Tech and mass murder. I don’t think Brooks would be willing to employ even his prettified Darwinism to explain the “purpose” of that slaughter. (Keep in mind that all “benefits” of “trait(s), like emotion,” that “can cause big problems” must refer to the propagation of genes.) Certainly, the cosmic purposelessness espoused by Dawkins would be a word untimely spoken at last Tuesday’s memorial convocation.
On the topic of emotion I add my own quizzical lines to those of the Hokies’ poet in residence:
How understand sweet love
beneath this meta-Physical model?
A means of species propagation?
A lucky hit?
Are tears to be reduced to adaptations
in the pointless quest for life?
In short, the language of sociobiology doesn’t comprehend what humans consider most important—like the heroism of Holocaust survivor and Professor Liviu Librescu, who gave his life that others might live. To reduce the poignant irony of Librescu’s sacrificial act to a function of genetic compulsion is to embrace a blindness as great as the blindness that confuses being alive with the purpose of living.
Brooks declares that Darwin has replaced Freud, Marx, and earlier, the Bible, as a unifying Western cosmology. Like Marx and Freud, however, Darwin has no language that takes seriously individual acts of good and evil. Instead, good and evil become epiphenomena generated by impersonal forces that lie beyond good and evil. This fatal flaw trivializes, and continues to spawn, acts of horror in Brooks’ “postmodern” West.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
"STUPID" SIGNS AND THE USE TAX
Comedian Bill Engvall’s most famous routine focuses on folks who should be wearing “Stupid” signs—like those dim bulbs who take blow dryers into the shower. “Here’s your sign.” Last week while filling out my California Form 540, it occurred to me that ordinary taxpayers who sweat compliance with line 49, the Use Tax, might qualify for a Engvall placard.
The Use Tax, line 37 on Form 540A, applies to out-of-state purchases that were made, for example, “by telephone, over the Internet, by mail, or in person.” Its purpose is to recoup sales tax revenue that individuals avoid when buying out of state.
This statute, as we are solemnly informed on page 6 of the tax booklet, has been around since 1935 and was presumably instituted to level the playing field for California businesses. Since 2003, a specific line has been included on income tax forms to make it “easier for consumers to report and pay use tax on their purchases.” (How thoughtful of our legislators!)
Folks who purchased cars, boats, or airplanes in other states have good reason to comply with this statute since records of these purchases are often available to California’s Board of Equalization. What can’t be verified, absent an enormously extensive and invasive snooping apparatus, are the electronic, mail, or out-of-state purchases offered as illustrations on the BOE’s use tax Internet pages. Here’s a sample:
“Last week while visiting relatives in Maine I purchased $200 in stereo equipment for use with my system at home in Sacramento. When I purchased the equipment I was charged 5% Maine sales tax. Do I owe California use tax on this purchase?”
Answer: “Yes, however, Revenue and Taxation Code section 6406 allows you to take a credit for sales or use tax paid to another state. Therefore, a portion of the California use tax you owe on the purchase is offset by the sales tax you paid to the retailer in Maine. Since the sales and use tax rate in Sacramento is 7.75%, use tax of $15.50 would be due on your purchase. However, after deducting the $10 in Maine sales tax you paid when you purchased the equipment, you would only owe $5.50 in California use tax on the purchase.”
Wow! And people complain about the Patriot Act. (For North County readers, I note that the tax rate for Oceanside, Escondido, and San Marcos is 7.75%, while the amount for Vista is 8.25%. I should also mention that these BOE net-pages have a shadowy notation, attached to nothing in particular, that says: Data Last Updated 12/31/1969.)
A six-letter sign is reserved for anyone sending a check to Sacramento for the difference between the sales tax paid in Maine and the tax that would have been paid in Vista for a $200 purchase. The good news is that the use tax law has a large exception for goods purchased abroad—for example, from Mexico. State taxpayers will also be glad to learn that información para el votante is included in their tax booklets.
The Use Tax, line 37 on Form 540A, applies to out-of-state purchases that were made, for example, “by telephone, over the Internet, by mail, or in person.” Its purpose is to recoup sales tax revenue that individuals avoid when buying out of state.
This statute, as we are solemnly informed on page 6 of the tax booklet, has been around since 1935 and was presumably instituted to level the playing field for California businesses. Since 2003, a specific line has been included on income tax forms to make it “easier for consumers to report and pay use tax on their purchases.” (How thoughtful of our legislators!)
Folks who purchased cars, boats, or airplanes in other states have good reason to comply with this statute since records of these purchases are often available to California’s Board of Equalization. What can’t be verified, absent an enormously extensive and invasive snooping apparatus, are the electronic, mail, or out-of-state purchases offered as illustrations on the BOE’s use tax Internet pages. Here’s a sample:
“Last week while visiting relatives in Maine I purchased $200 in stereo equipment for use with my system at home in Sacramento. When I purchased the equipment I was charged 5% Maine sales tax. Do I owe California use tax on this purchase?”
Answer: “Yes, however, Revenue and Taxation Code section 6406 allows you to take a credit for sales or use tax paid to another state. Therefore, a portion of the California use tax you owe on the purchase is offset by the sales tax you paid to the retailer in Maine. Since the sales and use tax rate in Sacramento is 7.75%, use tax of $15.50 would be due on your purchase. However, after deducting the $10 in Maine sales tax you paid when you purchased the equipment, you would only owe $5.50 in California use tax on the purchase.”
Wow! And people complain about the Patriot Act. (For North County readers, I note that the tax rate for Oceanside, Escondido, and San Marcos is 7.75%, while the amount for Vista is 8.25%. I should also mention that these BOE net-pages have a shadowy notation, attached to nothing in particular, that says: Data Last Updated 12/31/1969.)
A six-letter sign is reserved for anyone sending a check to Sacramento for the difference between the sales tax paid in Maine and the tax that would have been paid in Vista for a $200 purchase. The good news is that the use tax law has a large exception for goods purchased abroad—for example, from Mexico. State taxpayers will also be glad to learn that información para el votante is included in their tax booklets.
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