Home

  • For a New "Sputnik Moment," the '60's Radicals Have Got to Go

    President Obama may want one…

    President Obama called for another “Sputnik moment” on Monday by having the nation invest more in education and science, previewing a theme that is likely to be part of his agenda and his budget for the second half of his term.

    Mr. Obama, who made his remarks during a visit to a community college here, was not yet born when the Soviets’ launch of the Sputnik orbiter in 1957 shocked Americans and prompted a national commitment to education, space and science spending. “Fifty years later, our nation’s Sputnik moment is back,“ Mr. Obama said.

    His goal, he said, is to increase education and science spending to 3 percent of the size of the economy, a significant increase from current levels. Mr. Obama also acknowledged the need to reduce the long-term debt, just days after his fiscal commission proposed a $4 trillion, 10-year package of spending cuts and tax increases, and he said the two parties would debate the nation’s spending priorities next year and years beyond.

    …but he’s going to have to jettison a large part of his party’s “baggage” to get one.

    It’s true that the panicked reaction to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik engendered one of the greatest and most visible advances in science and technology we have ever had.  But it’s also worthwhile to remember that much of the 1960’s was a backlash against same scientific and technological advance, or featured the introduction of a great deal of pseudo-science.  It’s also worth remembering that many presented the space race and fixing our social problems as an “either/or” proposition.  Well, as Jesus promised, the poor we have with us always, but…

    The largest burden anti-technological burden that came out of that era was the environmental movement, which is now about to lower the boom on American industry–and the science and technology that go with it–by using our anti-pollution laws to regulate carbon dioxide.  It’s never occurred to anyone that we can’t stop current activity while waiting for this “green ideal” to show up.  And then there’s that great casualty of 1960’s and 1970’s panic mentality: the nuclear power industry…

    This administration’s aversion to small businesses is only making the unreasonably complex regulatory environment even worse.  It’s worth remembering that many of the technological spin-offs of the space program were commercialised in the private sector.  As the Soviets found out, the government is great at making theoretical advances, but not so hot at putting shoe leather to them.  We can put the question another way: in a society where being credentialled by a few institutions and moving up in large bureaucracies is becoming de rigeur, where will the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates come from?  And where will the jobs they create be located?

    It’s true that our educational system needs to fix the laggard status of science and math education in our state school system.  But we can’t simply upgrade that and leave those who come out of the system “all dressed up and nowhere to go.”  To fix that is going to require a metanoia amongst many of the superannuated hippies and their followers amongst our élites–or perhaps the boot would be quicker.

  • Pat Robertson Supports the Abolition of Civil Marriage

    That’s the way I interpret this (advance to about 6:30 in the video):

    http://downloads.cbn.com/cbnplayer/cbnPlayer.swf?s=/archive/club/700club120610_WS

    Sooner or later there’s going to be a fracas on the right when enough people realise that those of us who support the abolition of civil marriage are at odds with those who are “defending” it, but until then…

    Interesting to note that the question was set up by my fellow South Floridian, Lee Webb.

    ,

  • Is Sarah Palin Wrong About Jack Kennedy?

    Kennedy’s niece certainly thinks so:

    Palin fails to understand the genius of our nation. The United States is one of the most vibrant religious countries on Earth precisely because of its religious freedom. When power and faith are entwined, faith loses. Power tends to obfuscate, corrupt and focus on temporal rather than eternal purposes.

    Somehow Palin misses this. Perhaps she didn’t read the full Houston speech; she certainly doesn’t know it by heart. Or she may be appealing to a religious right that really seeks secular power. I don’t know.

    I am certain, however, that no American political leader should cavalierly – or out of political calculation – dismiss the hard-won ideal of religious freedom that is among our country’s greatest gifts to the world. As John F. Kennedy said in Houston, that is the “kind of America I believe in.”

    I think the core of the problem here is that the United States facing Sarah Palin–and us–is different from Jack Kennedy’s.  He faced a very different challenge from Palin’s, and his response was tailored to the situation.

    Kennedy’s U.S. wasn’t a state with an official religion or an official church, but one where the social value of religious beliefs were valued.  Those two had gone together from the beginning.  Palin has overlooked the fact that, in Kennedy’s day, it was unnecessary for an American politician to make the case for holding religious beliefs, publicly or privately.   Kennedy’s problem was that, in a Protestant country, it was a widely accepted idea that Catholic authoritarianism would obligate Kennedy to take orders from the Vatican, something Protestants found distasteful in the extreme.  (Freemasons, syncretistic though they were, had the same opinion).  Kennedy’s task–aptly done in Houston–was to set people’s minds at ease on that, and he was largely successful.

    One thing that most Protestants don’t understand about Roman Catholics is that, for a church that ostensibly demands perfect conformity with the teaching of the church, they can be willing to ignore the teachings of the church when the occasion calls for it.  Kathleen Kennedy Townsend brings up her family’s differences with the church, but relative to the 1960 election most of those were after the fact–and after, I might add, Vatican II.

    Today both secular left and religious right routinely set forth the proposition that you are what you believe and that you should be judged based on that.  Secular leftists routinely opine that people with any religious beliefs are incapable (or unworthy) of living in a technologically and scientifically advanced society, let alone hold public office, a proposition that came out in my “back and forth” with astrophysicist Saul Adelman.  On the right we have a theonomistic view where law and government–and the people who run them–must be in conformity to a very specific idea, or they too are out of the game.

    It’s hard to see how a “free society” can endure such opinions having wide currency, and in that respect Townsend’s critique has merit.  But Sarah Palin, as was the case with Jack Kennedy, has to play with the cards she’s been dealt.  Until the secular left and religious right come to some modus vivendi in this country, the only way to play this game is for keeps.

    ,

  • How You Look at Christmas Depends Upon Where You Come From

    In the middle of an excellent piece on the city of Philadelphia’s horror at a “Christmas Village,” Christine Flowers takes an informal poll and finds the following:

    As an immigration attorney, I deal with a lot of non-Christians, and I wanted to see if the ones I knew were upset at the Christmas display. They were not. “Mohammed” from Pakistan was particularly happy that, unlike the holiday displays in his hometown, it was not in danger of being bombed by the Taliban. “Ziva” from Israel said she liked the idea that all this fuss was being made about a little Jewish boy. “Chiang” from China was thrilled that he could say the word “Christmas” in public and not be sent to a re-education camp. So when I told him the City of Brotherly Love was stripping the word from a public display, he shook his head in disgust.

    People who come from countries that know what true religious intolerance is can’t understand the pettiness of the bureaucrats. Neither can I. Apparently, we have to accept that the word “Christmas” conjures up the same sort of nefarious images as swastikas, so we need to protect the quaking Quaker-flavored populace from the yearly plunge into the horror of the season.

    The real problem we have in this country and in Europe is that the secularists want to banish Christianity altogether, so they go after things like the Christmas Village in the name of “tolerance”.

    Fortunately the City of Brotherly Love reversed itself after the stink made the Drudge Report.  Daniel Rubin couldn’t resist having a little fun with the original announcement:

    I stood in a media scrum Tuesday – news of the name change had made the Drudge Report – as city Managing Director Richard Negrin explained how he’d received complaints from city workers and residents about the market, how unwelcoming it was to those who don’t do Christmas.

    He told of how a little girl and her father had been walking by the market the other day, and the girl, who was Jewish, had asked, “Don’t we get a village?”

    Yes, dear, I thought. We call it New York…

    My feeling is have your Christmas market, and I’ll have my Hanukkah menorah. I’ll roast chestnuts with you by the fire, and you drop by my house when we wolf down some latkes and applesauce. Or sour cream. Just call ahead.

    There’s an easier way for hospitality, though.  One of the great regrets I have from my years in my family business is that I didn’t head to a 20,000 sq. ft. Jewish delicatessen in Delray Beach with one of our Jewish business partners.  Sad to say, both of us had already spent too much time in the chow line, so we never did it.

  • Apple Gives Manhattan Declaration App the Boot

    The Church Mouse blog (I think this name is hilarious, considering this) reports the following:

    Since then, the folk behind the (Manhattan D)eclaration thought it would be a good idea to create an iPhone app which allows users to read and sign the declaration, and share it with others.  The app was duly created and released in the iTunes App Store, with a rating of 4+, meaning “no offensive content”.

    This drew criticism from many campaigners who believe that the declaration is “anti-gay”, in that it denies gay marriage is legitimate and describes gay sex as “immoral”and “wayward”.  This drew the attention of a number of leading tech and other publications in the US, and a campaign of writing to Apple CEO Steve Jobs and a petition emerged.

    The latest news is that the app has disappeared from iTunes.  The Manhattan Declaration people say on their website that they are “perplexed”.  However, it is known that Apple has previously supported gay equality charities, so it shouldn’t be a surprise.

    No, it shouldn’t, sad to say.  I think that Apple is simply wrong to do this, and hope they reverse their decision.  But as regular readers know my position on the Declaration itself is complicated:

    • I don’t like the Manhattan Declaration and don’t support it.  One reason is that the Declaration, like so many conservative Christian statements on the subject, conflates civil with ecclesiastical marriage, which I think is a mistake.  I think that civil marriage needs to be abolished and the Declaration is yet another missed opportunity to seize the initiative on this.
    • Marriage as a divine union of one man and woman is certainly foundational; the Church Mouse blogger is not correct on this.  It’s not an accident that Jesus, in defining Christian marriage, went back to the Creation for his position.  And that’s foundational.

    But, as long as causes well represented in the upper socio-economic strata have pull, these things will happen.

    ,

  • A Lesson from Lenin: The Last Time Secrecy Was Denounced, We Only Ended Up With More

    With all of the trumpeting of the benefits of the Wikileaks revelations and how wonderful it is to get them out in the open, it’s a good idea to take a trip down memory lane and look a previous time when secrecy was at least denounced, if not exposed.

    That time, of course, was before the Russian Revolution, and the denouncer was V.I. Lenin.  Here’s an example of that, from May 1917:

    We all know that the “revolutionary” Provisional Government’s first word on foreign policy was the declaration that all secret treaties concluded by ex-Tsar Nicholas II with the “Allied” capitalists remained in force, and that the new Russia would regard them as sacred and inviolable.

    We know, furthermore, that our “defencists” vehemently support the Milyukovs’ refusal to publish the secret treaties. These so-called socialist have sunk so low as to defend secret diplomacy, and the secret diplomacy of the ex-tsar at that.

    Why do the supporters of the imperialist war guard the secret of these treaties so zealously?

    Do you want to know why, comrade workers and soldiers?

    Familiarise yourselves with at least one of these noble treaties–“our” treaty with Italy (i.e., with the Italian capitalists) signed at the beginning of 1915.

    On the basis of material published in Novoye Vremya, Mr. V. Vodovozov, a bourgeois democrat, reveals in Dyen (for May 6, 1917) the contents of that treaty:

    “The Allies have guaranteed Italy Southern Tyrol with Trient, the entire coastline, and the northern part of Dalmatia with the towns of Zara and Spalato, the central part of Albania with Valona, the Aegean islands off the coast of Asia Minor, as well as a profitable railway concession in Asiatic Turkey–such is the price for which Italy has traded her blood. These annexations exceed any national claims ever advanced by Italy many times over. In addition to regions with an Italian population (Southern Tyrol and Trieste) of nearly 600,000, Italy, under this treaty, is to receive territories with a population of over a million who are absolutely alien to Italy eghnographically and in point of religion. These include, for instance, Dalmatia, 97 per cent of whose population are Serbs and only slightly over 2 per cent Italians. It is only natural that this treaty with Italy, concluded without the knowledge or consent of Serbia, should have provoked such bitterness and resentment in that country. Pašic, speaking in the Skupshtina, expressed the hope that the rumours concerning the treaty were false, since Italy herself had united in the name of the principle of national unity, and could not therefore do anything that was likely to strike at the very roots of that principle. But Pašic was wrong; the treaty was concluded.

    “This is the only treaty concerning the present war whose contents we know of, and this treaty is grossly predatory. Whether similar predatory instincts are or are not reflected in other treaties, we do not know. At any rate, it is extremely important that democracy, on whose banner is inscribed ‘peace without annexations’, should know this.”

    “We do not know” to what extent the other secret treaties are predatory? No, Mr. Vodovozov, we know it very well: the secret treaties concerning the carve-up of Persia and Turkey, the seizure of Galicia and Armenia are just as dirty and predatory as the rapacious treaty with Italy.

    Comrade soldiers and workers! You are told that you are defending “freedom” and the “revolution”! In reality you are defending the shady treaties of the tsar, which are concealed from you as one conceals a secret disease.

    Lenin was famous for his denunciations of secret diplomacy.  But the end result, in reality, was one of the most secretive nations on the planet, the USSR.  One thing for sure, though: with nationalised health care (another thing the USSR pioneered) there won’t be too many secret diseases any more.

    Unintended consequences are such nuisances!

  • The Love of Our God

  • Liberalism Reaches Its End by Making People Get Off of Theirs

    Well, at least prohibiting people from sitting on the streets, as San Francisco just did:

    A new law targeting those who hang out, and lie down, on the sidewalks and streets of San Francisco has some asking whether this city, known for its “love thy neighbour” attitude, has perhaps decided some neighbours aren’t welcome.

    In November, 53% of voters here passed Prop. L, which forbids people from sitting or lying on public sidewalks from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. The ordinance is very similar to anti-sit/lie laws in Berkeley, Seattle, and other liberal cities, and received strong support from Mayor Gavin Newsom and Police Chief George Gascon.

    After civil rights advocates and the progressive majority on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors opposed the idea, Mayor Newsom pushed to get it on the ballot.

    Critics like Andy Blue call it cruel and heartless, words not normally directed at “The City by the Bay.”

    There’s enough of the ’60’s radical in me that finds this hard to take.  Whatever happened to the city that turned our culture upside down?  (They even gave the “Jesus Music era” classics such as Cookin’ Mama’s New Day and Glide Memorial’s Bobby Kent. If you want to see how a San Francisco hippie is supposed to live, visit Kent’s site and view the photos).  How could they do this?  Worse, how could People’s Republics like Berkeley and Seattle do it?

    Although the Board of Supervisors attempted to “keep the faith”, the duplicitous Gavin Newsom did not.

    I’ve always said that Boomer liberals sold out, which is one reason why I cannot stomach their continued influence in our society.  This is additional proof.  The next thing you know, they’ll want to cut off welfare and really make people get off of their end.  But wait, Bill Clinton did that in the 90’s…

  • Wikileaks Reveals the Obvious: The Saudis Knew of Iran's Objectives, and Wanted the U.S. To Do Something About It

    Back in 2006, I stated the following:

    Last year we stated that Iran’s greater objective than wiping Israel off of the map was to take control of both sides of the Persian Gulf, which would include Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the other Gulf states. Such an assesment was and is a minority view, both by those who support Israel (the evangelicals) and Americans who would as soon see Israel wiped off of the map themselves (James Baker.)

    It looks like this is in point of fact the case, and that Saudi Arabia has no intention of allowing this to happen. This explains their support of the Sunnis in Iraq and the Christians and other non-Shi’a groups in Lebanon. The Sunni-Shi’a divide is not only religious but geopolitical.

    This kind of thing does in fact screw up a lot of people’s plans for the Middle East. It makes the Islamicists job impossible because it calls into question who in fact is the real leader of Islam (and that is the central problem of Islamic politics.) Oil people dislike the endless instability of their product’s supply. And those who are looking for democracy in the Middle East can’t handle the fact that holding power is like winning to Vince Lombardi: it isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. Democracy and representative government are real nuisances to power holding, something the U.S. will find out the hard way if it ever elects Hillary Clinton as President.

    Making her Secretary of State didn’t help either…

    Well, the “minority view” was shared by the Saudis and their neighbours:

    Arab rulers secretly lobbied the US to launch air strikes to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme, leaked US diplomatic messages reveal…

    The most striking of the initial disclosures is that Arab leaders have been privately urging the US to take military action to halt Iran’s nuclear programme before it is too late.

    The King of Bahrain was quoted as telling US diplomats that Tehran’s nuclear drive “must be stopped”.

    He was said to have been backed by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who was said to have repeatedly urged Washington to “cut off the head of the snake” while there was still time.

    The cables are said to include a US assessment that Iran has obtained advanced missiles from North Korea that could enable it to strike Western European capitals and Moscow.

    As David “Spengler” Goldman has dryly observed, “…From the first batch of headlines there is little in WikiLeaks’ 250,000 classified diplomatic cables that a curious surfer would not have known from the Internet.”  But there are few really “curious” surfers on the Internet in this country, only delusional ones who cannot bear to see their idea sidetracked by reality.  And that runs from top to bottom, as I also noted four years ago.

  • Hitchens vs. Blair: The Result Depends Upon the Premises

    It’s not surprising that the Guardian has trumpeted the result of the Munk Debate in Toronto as Hitchens 1 Blair 0.   (For a more reasonable take on the debate, one should turn to His Grace.)  The results of the polls aren’t surprising either; Hitchens went into the debate with a lead amongst those polled, and he and Blair split the undecideds; Blair’s result in that respect is better than the Democrats managed to do in the recent U.S. elections.

    Nevertheless it strikes me that the whole debate is based on a faulty premise, one that can be seen by looking at the debate’s subject: “Be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world”.

    Atheists these days love to portray themselves as guided by reason.  I’ve always said that reason is only as good as the premises upon which it is based.  So let’s ask the simple question re the subject: what is good?  Or, put another way, good for what?

    The fastest way to end such a debate is for one of the debaters to do one or two things: either force his opponent to agree with his idea of the good, in which case the first debater is the automatic winner, or for the two debaters to come to an impasse on the definition of good, in which case the debate is over except for the shouting and the audience finds itself with a decidedly unsettling result.

    To some extent Hitchens has the upper hand because atheists have in recent years adopted a “humanitarian” idea of good where suffering is to be eliminated and “science” rules.  It has not always been so with the godless, especially regarding the former, and there’s nothing in a purely materialistic construct that would lead us to accept this idea and no other.  In any case humanitarianism of this kind–especially in an age where Westerners feel guilty about their self-centredness and have made volunteerism a religion in and of itself–plays well, which may do wonders for atheists’ reputation but does nothing for their reality as scientific.

    The simplest way of illustrating this is to look at some alternate ideas of what is “good”.

    Some have posited that there are about 6 billion too many of us, and that extermination of same would make things better.  That’s one concept of good.

    Others, especially revolutionaries from the Bastille to Beijing, have thought that their nations would be cleansed by the blood of the opponents of the revolution.  (Franophones who doubt this should sing the words of La Marseilleaise to themselves).

    Then there are those who think that the working of the free markets would bring a lot of good to the world, especially regarding the conception and encouragement of small businesses.  But socialists on both sides of the Atlantic reach for their barf bags at the thought.

    There are the pro-life people who think that those conceived should have a chance at a full human life.  But many conceived are inconvenient for those who deal with the results, and in any case it’s an impediment to sexual freedom, so they resist unto death.  (Or, at least, the next Supreme Court nomination).

    On the other end, we have pro-life people and we have those who feel that elderly people are an expensive burden on the state and should be eliminated, either by force or by making them feel they’re doing themselves a favour.

    These are just a few examples.  All of them have both religious and political dimensions.  But all of them illustrate the simple fact that what kind of good religion (and that also assumes that all religions are about the same thing) can or cannot do depends upon how we define good.

    Which is why debates such as the Munk Debate are basically stupid.

    ,
Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started