What's Wrong with the World

GUEST POST: Is Free Enterprise Evil?

2012-02-07T02:37:30Z

Is Free Enterprise Evil?
Kenneth W. Bickford
February 2012

Is free enterprise structurally evil? Does it guarantee goodness from its practitioners — or is it an impediment?

I ask because Occupy Wall Street, that movement of folks angrily bent on refashioning the American economy has suggested as much.

Here in New Orleans, a firestorm has erupted at Loyola University in response to a proposed Austrian economics master’s program. This program envisions an immersion in the political economic theories of the great 20th century libertarian thinkers of Austro-German descent, whose work is often neglected by students of political economy.

Critics see a manifest conflict with Loyola’s commitment to social justice. The objectors assert that some economic theories are structurally incompatible with goodness, and they strongly imply that this program of study is crippled by its engagement with just such theories. Since the Austrian school, almost alone among modern economics, embraces free enterprise as a nearly unalloyed good, the sharp criticism of this masters program implies a sharp criticism of free enterprise as such. And if an economic theory embracing free enterprise is at odds with Catholic teaching, it stands to reason that free enterprise may well be at odds with other Judeo-Christian moral systems.

So we come back to the striking question, Is free enterprise structurally evil?

]]> As is usual in these situations, the question sort of misses the point.

At its heart, economics is a theory of providence — of how we provide for ourselves and those we care about. Economics, properly ordered, can be like a well-made tool: a hammer or a screwdriver, for example. However, even the best tools are indifferent to how you use them. A hammer can be used by a carpenter to build things, supporting his family, or by a thief to burgle the carpenter’s workshop. It all depends upon the intentions of the person wielding it.

Here, then, is an insight: Even the best materials, plans and tools will not produce a good outcome without well-ordered and skillfully executed intentions.

You can decide as a society that all land and capital should be publicly owned — a communist viewpoint — or that only consumption goods should be privately owned — a socialist viewpoint — or that these things should mostly be privately owned. (Incidentally, Communism has never worked in communities much larger than an extended family.)

But none of it will create a good society until that society possesses social and spiritual graces, that is, we might say, “spiritual capital” — our human belief in, and commitment to, something transcendently greater than selfish interests. Spiritual capital is the connective tissue bridging the best outcome with the mere mechanical aspects of economic theory.

All of which suggests that the common good can be compatible with free enterprise — but only when we possess the spiritual capital that commits us to a greater good.

What can we say about the human desire to engineer a system that mechanically “manufactures” goodness in its citizens — it has ever been with us. Plato and Aristotle explored the possibility. So did Lenin.

As Plato and Aristotle concluded, it is the rough equivalent of trying to make a hammer that can never be used to hit someone in the head. How is such a thing even possible?

No, I’m afraid that any system — economic, political or plumbing — must be vitally connected to a set of transcendent beliefs before it can achieve goodness. Very little of what we call a system is so connected. In the communist Soviet Union the disconnection was official and brutally enforced.

At present in these United States, connecting one’s economic theory to a greater good is voluntary — we are encouraged to think of others while retaining the right to act selfishly. It is the same policy we have for hammers, really.

Some now suggest that perhaps our goodness shouldn’t be voluntary. Their motivations are pure, but I am afraid that should these otherwise exemplary souls succeed they will find themselves to have extinguished the only part of the American economy that was truly good: The freedom to distribute our wealth as gifts.

The iron maiden of medieval days was designed to extract several days of suffering from its victims by impaling as many body parts as possible while missing the vital organs. This is structural evil by design — and there aren’t enough good intentions in the world to turn such a tool toward the good.

It follows that some economic and political theories begin with an evil design. You can easily spot them by the millions of corpses they leave behind.

Most economic schools of thought are not so structured. They can mostly be viewed as attempts to unify human nature with economic activity. But whatever success has been achieved remains inert and lifeless without spiritual capital. The scientific-mindset of our society ignores spiritual capital, and we ought to discuss that — vigorously.

The mistake of many — both conservative and liberal — is their pernicious belief that we can engineer human goodness. We can’t — at least not in the way that they imagine.

But we can connect economic acts with goodness; a connection, incidentally, that came as easily as breathing to our ancestors.

______________________
Established in spring of 2010, the Center for Spiritual Capital is a first of its kind at a Catholic university and second in academia only to Yale University’s Spiritual Enterprise Institute. The Center for Spiritual Capital was founded as a full-service resource center, providing everything from curriculum enhancement and faculty development to seminar planning and advice to small corporations and nonprofits. The center is aimed at serving industry leaders and students alike, who choose to exercise more profound roles as entrepreneurs, in both commerce and culture, and to honorably contribute to the betterment of society.

On February 13, 2012, Loyola’s Center for Spiritual Capital will further explore the question Christianity and Free Enterprise Economics: Compatible or in Conflict? 7 p.m. in room 114 of Miller Hall. All are welcome.

Checking in

2012-02-05T18:42:05Z

I apologize to my colleagues and readers (a few of you anyway!) for having been scarce these past weeks. I'll probably be scarce in the weeks to come as well, but will try to improve little by little. It's no secret that our sixth child was born on January 21, a boy, and that he was born with pulmonary hypertension which the doctors deemed life-threatening. He was hospitalized for a while, but his progress has been extraordinarily rapid and we were able to bring him home last week.

]]> The experience of God in the birth of a child has become cliche, but we are simply overwhelmed with His mercy and the love bestowed upon us through family, friends, friends of friends, acquaintances, and even complete strangers. Let me say, too, that I have a new respect for hospital social workers, who were immensely helpful to us, and for charitable groups like "Wings of Eagles" who were Johnny-on-the-spot with their support. Furthermore, the professional competence and dedication of the hospital pediatricians, as well as the NICU nurses, was a magnificent sight to behold. A “culture of life” still triumphs in these people, even in the midst of much tawdry political correctness. What marvelous work for anyone - but for a Christian especially - to embark upon.

As I often say, we Culbreaths are debtors, pure and simple, and at times like this we can do little more than soak in the abundance of God and the generosity of others. That is not to say there isn't a big bill behind it all. The baby's flight to Sacramento alone, which lasted about an hour, was billed at $28,000. Not including ambulance services to and from the airports.

As a person of (partially) sanguine temperament, I have a rather embarrassing tendency to over-commit to things. In the course of the past year I have made several promises with respect to W4: to review ISI's "Wealth, Poverty, and Human Destiny", which was given to me for that purpose; to review Newman's "The Idea of a University"; and to review Fr. Thomas Dubay’s “Happy Are You Poor”. The first review is daunting because there are so many interesting perspectives involved; the second is daunting because Newman doesn’t write in bumper sticker slogans, and I am, after all, a blogger; the third is daunting because I suspect that this book, while promulgating a much-needed and widely-ignored Christian message, is flawed in such a way as to detract from its primary purpose, and I’m not sure how to present or clarify this. My intention to review each of these books remains, but I beg your patience and may even require your forgiveness.

The zero-sum game and a smoking gun

2012-02-03T21:54:50Z

I've written a number of posts (see here, here, here, and here) on the zero-sum game that homosexual activists have set up for moral traditionalists. In brief, my idea of the zero-sum game (admittedly rather unoriginal) is that the actual goals of homosexual activists are incompatible with the freedom of sexually normal, traditional people. The bulk of ordinary Americans might have been willing to come up with some kind of compromise, though what that compromise amounts to would have varied from person to person. Even non-discrimination laws that include "sexual orientation" are already a grave intrusion into the rights of moral traditionalists. I find it difficult to come up with a single aspect of the homosexual political agenda, which has always been about governmental requirements of non-discrimination in some area or other, which is not inherently coercive. Nonetheless, there are probably some who have thought that, if we just give them this (say, non-discrimination laws, civil unions), we will be allowed to get back to our lives and be left alone. The problem with this is two-fold. First, the "this" is always something that doesn't allow at least some people--businessmen, landlords, adoption agencies, wedding planners--simply to get on with their lives as before if they are moral traditionalists. The whole point of the agenda is to change the behavior of those people in their ordinary lives. So the "give them this and they'll leave us alone" presumption really involves saying, "I don't belong to any of those groups. I wouldn't actually have to change my daily life. And I don't care about what happens to people in those groups. I'll sacrifice their freedom in the hopes that the homosexual lobby will be satisfied and leave me alone." But the second problem is that the demands never were going to end there. Once non-discrimination in this or that area has been mandated, the further demand is that all dissent be punished, especially among employees, students, young people with their way to make in a profession, and so forth. The homosexual lobby was never willing to have issues like the morality of homosexuality, the wisdom of homosexual adoption, and the like be treated as things on which people could take varying views and have those varying views and discussion of them tolerated. The idea was always that eventually, as more and more acceptance was mandated, traditional views would be regarded as utterly intolerable and heinous and would be hounded out by officialdom. Such "bigotry" might be allowed to survive in people's most private, secret thoughts, at most. This meta-level position--that traditional morality itself is horrific, shocking, and beyond the pale--of course creates a zero-sum game that should be obvious to everyone, even if the zero-sum nature of the homosexual agenda wasn't obvious to everyone before. The faux "tolerance" of the homosexual lobby is a mandate for complete intolerance of the views of the majority of mankind.

As I put it in this earlier post:

Those golden-hearted souls who wish to take on the exhausting task of helping others--like Mr. and Mrs. Johns and Julea Ward--are the ones hit first by this requirement [to affirm homosexuality]. In those areas, the homosexual agenda now has such power that if you wish to help, they will define you instead as "harmful" if you do not promote their ideology. It is that stark. If you disagree with them, you are out. You may not help. You may not have the job. You may not do the work. It's the serious Christians or the homosexual activists. Both cannot win. Given the demands, no compromise is possible. We should not fool ourselves.

One of the more recent manifestations of the homosexual agenda is so-called "anti-bullying" legislation which seeks to enshrine homosexuality as defining a specially protected class throughout public schools and to make it a violation of all schools' policy, if not a crime, to criticize it. This is, in fact, the latest manifestation of the speech codes that some of us remember fighting on college campuses back in the 90's, but this time at the K-12 level.

The American Family Association of Michigan, in particular, has been pointing this out and has been fighting to make any "anti-bullying" legislation passed in Michigan include no special categories, no specially protected classes, in its language. The idea there is that in that case the legislation would not, at least on its face, give sanction to administrators and teachers to bully traditional students for their views.

]]> In this story we have both a manifestation of the zero-sum game and a smoking gun for the actual agenda of "anti-bullying" policies. A student wrote (apparently at the student paper's invitation) an opinion piece, as part of a point-counterpoint series, arguing against homosexual adoption. He even had the temerity to use some Scripture passages in his article. The administration, when it became aware that the student newspaper was treating this as a subject open for discussion, a subject on which the traditional view would actually be aired and published, went into frantic spin mode. They hysterically apologized that anyone should have allowed such a piece to be published. The apology itself called the article a "form of bullying and disrespect." And, worst of all, the superintendent called in the offending young author, suggested that he had violated the school's "anti-bullying" policy, and proceeded to subject him to some actual bullying. The super attempted some direct Soviet-style arm-twisting, giving the student an opportunity to say he "regretted" his column. When that failed, the super threatened him directly: "We have the power to suspend you."

The student has retained legal counsel and a suit may follow. Good. I hope the school gets its hinder end well kicked. There needs to be at least a little push-back against such blatant, intimidating totalitarianism.

The supposed social contract in which we tolerate and air different points of view on politically controversial issues has turned out to be an utter sham once the liberals were in charge. It might, might have been possible for homosexual behavior to become more accepted in society than it previously was without our having these kinds of stories, had the metalevel view described above--that traditional opinions about sex are evilly bigoted and utterly beyond the pale--not become an item of the state secular religion and the gold standard of acceptable liberal discourse. Was that development itself inevitable? Sociologically, it probably was inevitable, especially given the homosexual activists' insistence that homosexuality be regarded as similar to race for purposes of public policy. (Frankly, the superintendent's bullying tactics were utterly unprofessional and would have been unacceptable even if the student had written a badly misguided column on a subject like race. But I make that comment only in passing.) For several decades social liberals have specialized in getting their preferred opinions declared not simply right but out of bounds for questioning. See my comments above about speech codes. It was only to be expected that this so-called "civil rights issue" would go the same way.

So it is mostly futile to look, like Diogenes with his lamp, for one honest liberal who will say, "I don't think homosexual acts are a sin, but I can respect people who do think that. I understand why they think that, and I have no intention of demonizing them. I think it's fine for their views to be represented, for them to continue to have influence in society. Their jobs or school positions shouldn't be in danger. That's ridiculous and Communistic, and I utterly deplore it."

I've known maybe one or two such. Back in the days when I was a member of the National Association of Scholars, I used to meet a few dinosaurs of that kind--political and social liberals, but sincere, not to say passionate, civil libertarians. People who still naively believed that the ACLU would defend social conservatives like the student in the story, against the homosexual lobby. Their breed is dying out now. Did it have to die out? I don't know for sure, though I suspect so. What I do know is that now, the zero-sum game is afoot, and social conservatives had best not be caught napping.

You must and will fund abortion clinics

2012-02-02T15:01:52Z

I'm trying to wrap my head around this; really, I am:

The Komen Foundation, which is supposed to be a charitable foundation all about curing breast cancer, funded Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion provider, for years. Pro-lifers were really bugged by this and suggested that Komen stop. Moreover, the funding was rather puzzling, because Planned Parenthood doesn't prevent or treat breast cancer. They don't even provide mammograms. Only, maybe, referrals for mammograms. So why would Komen send them money? It didn't have any clear connection at all to Komen's mission. It didn't make sense.

Recently Komen has made the sensible decision to stop funding them. The reason given is that PP is under congressional investigation, but it shouldn't have been necessary to give such a reason. Does Komen randomly fund doctors or clinics that are supposed to have something to do with "women's health"? I would think not; not if they aren't doing something obvious and specific about breast cancer. Komen could have just said they'd reviewed their funding policies and decided the money could be spent better for the breast cancer cause elsewhere. Since the statement would have been obviously true, that should have been the end of the discussion.

But the pro-aborts are absolutely livid. You must fund Planned Parenthood. You are not allowed not to fund Planned Parenthood. One Democrat lawmaker has said she no longer supports the Komen Foundation because they won't fund Planned Parenthood! And the clown Howard Dean says corporations should boycott Komen because they won't fund Planned Parenthood.

I mean, what? I sometimes truly believe that our nation has gotten to the point where it is impossible to have a substantive discussion in public about anything whatsoever. In debate team terms, shouldn't the advocates for PP's funding be bringing forward "need, plan, benefit" kinds of stuff? Shouldn't they be showing, clearly and in detail, how Planned Parenthood actually helps to save the lives of women or treat women in relation to breast cancer if they want to make an argument that they should be receiving funding from a breast cancer foundation? And in fact, since probably there are a lot of worthy organizations out there referring women for mammograms, shouldn't people who want Komen to fund PP have to provide evidence that PP is doing something especially noteworthy in this area? A private, focused charity has only so many dollars to go around, after all.

Surely we're not just expected to believe without any evidence that PP is a good outlet for Komen's dollars. If, in fact, PP's cheerleaders can't bring any evidence that PP actually prevents, detects, or treats breast cancer, then what possible excuse can they have for the outrage at Komen's cutting out the funding to PP?

For that matter, even if PP did do things relevant to breast cancer, it's not like the money is now going into a mattress somewhere. Presumably Komen will fund other groups that have something to do with detecting or curing breast cancer. And if liberals are so concerned about that goal, why would they try to hurt a charitable foundation that is trying to achieve that goal simply because the charitable foundation doesn't, inter alia, fund Planned Parenthood? Just who, again, is placing abortion politics above the good of women?

Right.

Update: See comments beginning here for the discussion of Komen's flip-flip decision, within days (during which their donations actually went up!) to begin funding PP yet again.

What will happen with the Obama Catholics?

2012-02-01T14:22:19Z

As usual, I'm a bit late to the party, and all my readers know by this time that the American Catholic Bishops, bless 'em, are standing firm in opposition to the Obama administration's tyrannical demand that Catholic organizations that serve the public must provide contraception in employee health insurance. Here is the on-line petition against the HHS rule. Here is a letter by Phoenix Bishop Thomas Olmstead vowing not to comply with the mandate. Here is an excellent interview with a representative of Belmont Abbey College, which is in the legal front lines. Here is W4's previous post, by Bill Luse, on the subject. There's plenty more out there.

Wesley J. Smith adds information that I had not seen elsewhere and that should be more widely advertised: The HHS rules will place requirements even on those very few employers that do qualify for the narrowly defined religious exemption (because they employ and serve only members of their own religion). Even those employers will be required to volunteer information to employees about where they can obtain contraception. The very fact that employees could easily find such information for themselves merely underscores the fact that Secretary Sebelius is requiring it as a gesture, an act of power for its own sake.

In these various demands, Obama has shown himself such an extremist, so willing to sacrifice even political expediency and the appearance of moderation to ideology, so implacable in the desire to bring religious, especially Catholic, organizations to their knees, that he has roused opposition even among those who were not his foes previously. The arrogant recent announcement by "Catholic" Secretary Sebelius, endowed by Obamacare legislation with near-godlike powers over health plans throughout the country, that she would give Catholic organizations a year to "adapt" their consciences, has simply deepened the shock. Fr. Jenkins, the not-overwhelmingly-conservative president of Notre Dame, can't understand why the previous concept of religious exemptions can't still obtain. Why can't organizations like his own have a religious exemption, as one would have expected, from the demand that they provide contraception? Why has the Obama administration re-defined a "religious" organization so narrowly as to exclude those organizations that serve non-Catholics? Obama has broken a kind of unwritten rule: You lefty Catholics support me, and I'll leave you a little playground in which you can do your own thing. Nope. Now everyone has to pour a libation.

So here's a question: Will this outrage have any effect on the election in November? Will there actually be peace-n-justice Catholics who finally decide that Obama is not on their side and refuse to vote for him when they otherwise would have done so?

Update on Julea Ward case

2012-01-31T16:03:07Z

There is for the moment good news in the Julea Ward case against Eastern Michigan University. I wrote at length about that case for The Christendom Review, here. Briefly, Ward was expelled from EMU's counseling program for refusing to engage in counseling which affirmed a homosexual lifestyle. In the course of deciding whether to expel her, the faculty gave her the option of undergoing a reeducation program to change her religious views, which they regarded as incompatible with professional counseling practices. Federal District Court Judge George Sheeh rendered summary judgement in favor of EMU, meaning the case would not even go to trial. Now, the Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit Court has overruled Judge Sheeh and returned the case for a jury trial with a stinging opinion.

A university cannot compel a student to alter or violate her belief systems based on a phantom policy as the price for obtaining a degree…. That [Ward's] conflict arose from religious convictions is not a good answer; that her conflict arose from religious convictions for which the department at times showed little tolerance is a worse answer.

Ward was willing to work with all clients and to respect the school’s affirmation directives in doing so. That is why she asked to refer gay and lesbian clients (and some heterosexual clients) if the conversation required her to affirm their sexual practices. What more could the rule require? Surely, for example, the ban on discrimination against clients based on their religion (1) does not require a Muslim counselor to tell a Jewish client that his religious beliefs are correct if the conversation takes a turn in that direction and (2) does not require an atheist counselor to tell a person of faith that there is a God if the client is wrestling with faith-based issues. Tolerance is a two-way street. Otherwise, the rule mandates orthodoxy, not anti-discrimination.

The EMU case will not be the last case in which advocates of the homosexual rights agenda attempt to impose their views as orthodoxy. Eternal vigilance being the price of freedom, as it is, we can be thankful for the ADF, which is representing Ward. Now the case goes to trial, and it bears watching. (Question: Will Judge Sheeh be conducting the trial? How could one find out?)

Kidnapping by Officials is OK if They Don't Know the Law

2012-01-30T03:22:54Z

In the past I have tended to give police and law officials the benefit of the doubt in their using police powers to make arrest and such. I think I am going to have to retract that, or at least put up a huge caveat. And I now think that maybe bad reasoning, and bad perception of reality as expressed in legal decisions, is a fully satisfactory basis for removing judges from the bench. The 9th Circuit needs to have several judges removed from its ranks, and replaced with people who have a connection with reality.

The court ruled last September that telling a homeowner “let me in or I will take your kids away from you” can constitute an action against which there is no legal remedy, even though the person making the threat has no authority to enter the home and the homeowner is perfectly aware of it, and is (in real time) being affirmed in that by his lawyer. So, effectively, threatening kidnapping in order to be given an open door to home invasion, is OK.

Facts of the case :

]]> 1. L-family in Arizona moved into a house before it was fully completed.
2. County officials had signed off on it to be suitable for habitation.
3. Jan 7 the county CPS received anonymous tip that kids were subject to neglect: unsafe living conditions such as exposed wiring.
4. CPS leaves business card at residence Jan 10.
5. Jan 11, CPS and parents make an appointment in March for home viewing.
6. Family joins HSLDA. That org requests full list of allegation in anonymous complaint. CPS refuses.
7. Family retracts the appointment.
8. Mar 9, two CPS officers stop by house, with a county deputy and a volunteer “posse” member in uniform, and demand to see kids and enter house.
9. L parents refuse to grant entry.
10. CPS threatens “we have to take your kids away for up to 72 hours” if we can’t get in.
11. L’s get their lawyer on phone, but CPS won’t talk to him, they refer him to assistant DA.
12. Deputy calls for assistance, 2 more deputies, and for advice from sarge on phone. Eventually, sarge tells deputy that they have no exigent circumstances for basis to search home, and need a search warrant to enter over parents' objections.
13. CPS gets the assistant DA on phone, who talks to L-parents’ lawyer, and tells them they would take temporary custody of kids if not allowed to enter.
14. L-parents, in fear of arrest and having the kids taken away regardless of their resistance, give in and permit CPS to enter.
15. Within 10 minutes, CPS determines that the allegations were groundless and complaint will be closed.
16. L-parents sue CPS and sheriff officials for unreasonable entry.
17. Officials claim qualified immunity: they were just carrying out their official duties.
18. District judge denies deputies’ motion for summary judgment to dismiss: under the facts claimed, there is sufficient basis to try the case.
19. The infamous 9th Circuit overturns district judge, grants motion to dismiss the suit: Deputies were justified in their coercive entry because they had reason to believe probable cause existed. As a result, the entry is not considered “coercion” as far as the law goes.

My thesis comes in 3 parts. First, it is obvious that at least with respect to the manner this whole thing was carried out, the CPS officers should be fired for not putting the welfare of the children above their pissy little egos. You won’t be surprised that both CPS officials are women. Women may make great employees for handling kids, but I am not the first person to notice that they do sometimes seem to act like little napoleons when they have force of arms behind them. In addition to being fired, these CPS officers should be liable for civil claims, because their behavior did not comply with law and _probably_ did not comply with county policy. They had no business threatening to take the kids away without exigent circumstances, which they didn’t have. They were FLAT 100% wrong in claiming that the 4th Amendment doesn’t apply to them.

Secondly, the deputies (who also are being sued) are idjits and jackasses for hiding behind the stupidity of the CPS women. The deputies are claiming that it seemed “viable” that CPS should threaten to take the kids away, and this meant that the deputies’ telling the family to cave in and let them in was not something a reasonable officer should have known was out of bounds. Somehow, even though the CPS people didn’t even give lip service to (a) describing the information they had that presented probable cause, or (b) explaining why they didn’t have to follow the 4th Amendment, to the deputies these lapses meant the deputies could ignore those minor defects as well.

Thirdly, the 9th Circuit has finally gone too far, and positive measures should be taken to get rid of at least half of them, more likely the bulk of them. They are simply out of control. In this case, they DISMISSED the case, claiming a reasonable officer would “not have known that consent was not voluntary” when the deputy withdrew his “initial threat to enter the Ls' home without a warrant.” OK, the deputy initially (feeling his oats pretty well, with his weapon on hip) told the family the officials would enter without a warrant. Later on in the 40 minute debate he said that they could get a warrant, implicitly indicating that the sheriffs would not force entry without a warrant. However, at no time did he volunteer that his sergeant said there was no exigent circumstance providing a basis for entry without warrant, and the CPS officers continued unrelentingly demanding entry “or else we’ll take the kids away.” The continued presence of (by that time 5) deputies who persisted in backing up the CPS officers claims without one word of qualification is clear coercion. But even if for somebody the matter of fact is in doubt, THAT’s what trials are for – deciding the facts. The 9th’s decision to settle the case in absence of a determination of the facts about the threats is just WRONG law. And the 9th's own wording tells against them: the deputies " had reason to believe probable cause existed" is also wrong: either "probable cause" exists, or they don't have "reason to believe" that threatening to take the kids away is OK. They were already told by their sergeant that they didn't have exigent circumstances for entry without a warrant.

It is possible that the L’s didn’t react with the best possible strategy, but damn it they didn’t just barricade the doors, they let CPS see the kids from the balcony, and they got their lawyer on the phone. It was CPS who refused to listen to the lawyer. The 9th Circuit is saying that effectively there is no remedy for this: the deputies didn’t ought to have known better, (that entry was coercive), because there was a prior case that determined the “If that threat had remained unabated, ... consent could properly be set aside as involuntary” and they presume that the officers couldn’t know that the threat had remained unabated. WELL, what do you know, we can’t take the time to try the facts and find out whether the threat really had been abated, now can we? Oh, no, the 9th has to make sure that families have no recourse against the intrusions of the state into every facet of their lives, and threats of kidnappings are OK by state officials.

Why do I get the sense that if the deputies had been pursuing an illegal alien or drug dealer and made the same threats, the evidence observed upon home entry would be thrown out and the charges would be dropped by the same court? Hmmm? Do we use the law to PROTECT criminals and to INVADE law-abiding citizens?

I don’t send out letters to my congressmen and senators nearly often enough, but I will on this one. The judges need to be given a sharp lesson, and being made to answer for this is just the right step. I used to think simply being in error was not grounds for a judge being impeached, but this is too much. It’s not just that they are wrong, it’s the egregious way they concluded the matter, and their manipulation of law to provide no recourse to citizens when those with police powers are clearly outside their authority.

Follow-up: I like this ad

2012-01-28T18:54:34Z

Follow-up to my previous post. I like this Youtube ad.

If you are a social conservative (please note the man and woman getting married and the beautiful child in the womb) and don't have an allergy to American patriotism, I think you will like it too.

Social conservatives, those of us on the unabashed American right, are tired of being told to go to the back of the bus by our supposed "own" party. When was the last time we had a presidential candidate who appealed this directly and unashamedly to our values, including our social values, to what we stand for? I can't remember the last time.

I'm a purist, but I'm not an attack dog

2012-01-27T13:47:03Z

Away back four years ago when John McCain was running for President, I took a certain amount of flak for saying that I wouldn't vote for him based on his position on human ESCR. He'd been a vocal proponent of it, had never changed his mind, and in fact that continued in a rather flagrant fashion right into the presidential race. I'm not going to recap all of that, but suffice it to say that I was not shy about saying, on blogs, why I wasn't going to vote for him, even to keep Barack Obama out of the Oval Office.

I argued then, and would argue now, that we conservatives need a line in the sand on particular issues, particularly issues of social conservatism. My biggest grief at that time was that my fellow conservatives seemed to have no such line. It was, "I'll vote for the lesser evil no matter who he is." I wrote pieces on the nature of a vote arguing that one should at least be willing in some sense to endorse a candidate if one is going to vote for him. None of this, "I'm going to vote for Hitler if the other guy is worse" stuff. Remember: You'd be horrified (I hope you would) to find a campaign sign for Hitler on your front lawn.

Okay. I stand by all of that. But by that same token, I think I need to be willing to take some flak from the exceedingly purist right for the following statement: I'm going to vote for Rick Santorum in the upcoming Republican primary. In fact, I'm not even remotely ashamed to be doing so. That's why I'm blogging it. In fact, I'd put a yard sign for him on my front lawn.

Don't bug me with whether he's electable or not, because frankly, I don't give a darn. Especially not in the primary. Primaries used to be about voting for the candidate who most closely represented your views. If and when he loses the primary, I'll make up my mind about whether I can in good conscience vote for whoever wins. That'll be then. This is now.

The purist case against Santorum is based on on several of his past actions. One is that he allowed his arm to be twisted by the party machinery into campaigning for the odious Arlen Specter against Toomey, a conservative primary challenger. Another is his voting for funding Planned Parenthood in Title X omnibus legislation. A third is his voting for the FACE bill.

Of these, the last is in my opinion the worst, and I would like to see him say that it was unconstitutional and wrong. On the other hand, it's a) water under the bridge, not the kind of thing that has much connection to future action and b) something he was probably bamboozled into thinking blocked only "violent" protestors and the like. So it was billed at the time. Not a good vote, but the fact of it in the past of a Congressman who is enthusiastically, not to say pushily, pro-life right now does not cross my bright line.

The funding for Planned Parenthood is not good, and he has defended voting for the bill in debates. What I would like to see is for him to be on-board with defunding Planned Parenthood in the future. Now that the campaign among pro-lifers has gotten going for that purpose, my guess is he will get on-board with it, despite his defensiveness about past votes. These omnibus bills are the very devil. They're a kind of cancer on our legislative life and no doubt have tripped up many otherwise good Congressmen. The horse trading that goes on is incredible, and they include a grab bag of stuff. He should reconsider his defensiveness, but his having voted in the past for one of these monster bills that, inter alia, includes funding for PP does not cross a line for me. Moreover, the existence of the Hyde amendments which allegedly block funding for abortions per se has probably been used by party whips as a successful argument to many a pro-life congressman to vote for such omnibus bills. It is only recently that pro-lifers have seen it as realistically within their sights to block the allegedly "non-abortion" funding that still goes to PP from government coffers.

The campaigning for Specter was to my mind, even at the time, a tragedy for Santorum. Yes, it meant that he didn't have the courage to say no. Not everybody does have that courage all the time. The pressure he was under was intense, and no doubt the action was portrayed to him as a necessary and virtuous thing, to keep a Republican majority in the Senate. I took a certain grim and probably wrong satisfaction against the Republican leadership from the fact that that didn't work out for them. At all. As strategy, it stunk. Plus it was unprincipled. But I felt sorry for Santorum. And he's paid. The voters punished him.

This is a candidate who speaks up loudly and clearly, right now, about both abortion and opposition to the homosexual rights agenda and who I believe will and would take action in those areas if elected to office. And he takes flak for it (and downright nastiness) from the liberal media all the time. He even gets barbs about it from at least one fellow Republican campaigning against him who has said that he "Can't stop talking about gay people." To my mind, that's a kind of recommendation. That is the kind of thing that pro-lifers and social conservatives have been wanting for a long time.

I'm going to vote for him. It would be just as cowardly of me not to say so because I've made my stand on the Internet with conservative purists and don't like the thought of what they might say or think about me as it would have been in 2008 for me to hide my refusal to vote for McCain.

Fighting Roe: Whence, what, whither?

2012-01-25T14:55:42Z

This slightly hysterical article in Slate alleges that Roe v. Wade is no longer in practice "the law of the land" because of various pro-life pieces of legislation that have been (or even just might be) successful at the state level.

Well, would that it were so. But let's not get too excited too fast. After all, our pro-death opponents are not satisfied unless every woman everywhere has easy access to an abortion for whatever reason, and they'll howl that we're abrogating women's "constitutional rights" if we rein in a quodlibetal abortion license.

Several of the items Slate brings up, though examples of good legislation which will, God willing, save lives, are not direct challenges to Roe and its infamous companion, Doe v. Bolton. These include waiting periods and informed consent laws, some apparently even requiring women to be offered an opportunity to view an ultrasound of the unborn child. (Slate makes it sound like the woman must actually be shown the ultrasound, which appears to be incorrect. This summary by Guttmacher just describes offering the woman the opportunity to view an ultrasound.)

However, the prohibitions on abortion after fetal pain (which the statutes list as twenty weeks) are more plausibly challenges to Doe. This is because, at least if they are all like Idaho's, they apparently contain only a very narrow health exception which could not plausibly be applied to "mental health" or financial situation. Slate frets about the failure to file suit against such bills, but in August, a couple of months after the Slate article came out, such a suit was indeed filed, apparently focusing on the absence of the desired sweeping health exception. I don't have an update on the status of that suit; if a reader does, please post that in comments.

]]> Rolling back the sweeping health exception in Doe and introducing meaningful protection for unborn children after twenty weeks would be a wonderful gain, if such laws are enforced. The laws do contain an "emergency medical condition" exception which I have no doubt will function as a health exception in a number of cases, but if the law is enforced, these cases will be limited in number. Dr. Tiller operated with impunity in Kansas (which, as I recall, allegedly limited late-term abortions to those where there was a genuine danger to a woman's physical health), but my perception is that he did this by getting another doctor to rubber-stamp frivolous health exception claims, for which he could have been prosecuted had there been the prosecutorial will to do so in his local venue. So these bills will help only if a) there is such prosecutorial will and b) they are not struck down for not containing a broader health exception.

It would be interesting to know how such bills actually affect would-be abortionists in the states, especially those would-be abortionists who want to be perceived as respectable. Do they take the bills at face value and not perform abortions after the stated number of weeks unless there is some serious health problem with the mother? Or do they shrug and decide that the Supreme Court will get them out of quod if they skirt the law and abort for psychological reasons, reasons of fetal anomaly, and the like? I'd be especially interested to know whether Down Syndrome children are still being aborted in Nebraska, Idaho, and other states that pass such laws.

I'm not going to do the "bitter purist" routine and dismiss all regulations within or even pushing the envelope of Doe and Roe as mere fiddling while Rome burns. These are real gains. Even waiting periods may well save some babies, and informed consent, if carried out rather than flouted, will save many more. (One does have to wonder: How would an abortionist be likely to "offer a woman the opportunity" to see an ultrasound of her unborn child? Would printing the statement, "You have a right to view the ultrasound that is performed on you" in small print as part of a sheaf of papers do it? How about muttering, "You don't want to see this, do you?" while performing the ultrasound?)

Roe must be meaningfully, fully overturned, or babies, especially early in pregnancy, will still be slaughtered in numbers and for any reason, and the states will not be able to stop this.

Until a state can actually arrest and prosecute an abortionist simply for aborting a child at twelve weeks, then yes, in practice, Roe remains "in force."

What will happen? I don't know, though I'm inclined to be somewhat pessimistic. I do know that the fight to get the chance to protect the unborn, even at the state level, will not be over until it's over.

P.S. Let's not forget defunding Planned Parenthood at the federal level. Defunding legislation is always meaningful legislation. Money talks. The next time someone tells you that, because the courts have spoken, the legislatures can do nothing and (usually this is the conclusion) we needn't bother our heads about whether a politician is pro-life, think about all the money PP gets every year.

Tuesday Verse

2012-01-24T11:45:25Z

Behind every ring of the old cliché
“We’re not getting any younger,”
Heard constantly today —

Is a terrible secret
Which, baffling the modern mind,
Lies concealed inveterate.

The surface truth, plainly enough,
Admits not of gainsay or dissent,
Seems to well conclude the stuff.

Yet gradually does it appear,
To focused reason, to rooted thinking,
That few errors indeed are more dear

Than this: supposing little children,
Like sad small adults, sunken and downtrodden;
Oppressed by the burden —

The burden of approaching expiration:
The old serpent with his death,
And his gospel of acquisition.

For with the laughter in falsetto
That filters down the hall
To our tired ears comes also:

News that falsifies the old cliché
By reminding the dull adults,
That slow-witted cretinous company —

Recalling to their minds
What bad theory took away
And cliché unjustly confined —

That we’re all getting younger
Indeed every last one,
Whose destiny is bound up with the young’uns.

For a newborn babe,
In becoming a three-year-old,
His awakened mind lacks naught but age;

Or a cute little girl
On the verge of being well and truly
A young woman, for all men a flag unfurled.

‘Tis simply true that a child youth gains
Brains and body age
But hardly become decrepit or tamed:

O the child in growing youth gains
In him society procreates
In his flowering the cliché faints.

Every parent, no matter how aged
Or oppressed and dragged down
Need only think to his child as a babe

To say to himself in all truth
That “younger indeed I’m getting:
The babe in my arms was proof.”

Demographics and political economy

2012-01-22T08:52:08Z

Here is a memorable little essay by a Canadian economics professor demonstrating that behind even very sophisticated economic systems lie the brute facts of demographics. It begins this way:

As you get older, your productivity will, eventually, decline. If you live long enough, you will reach a point when you can no longer provide for yourself.
You cannot bake bread when you are young, bury it in the ground, and then dig it up and consume it when you are old. In your golden years, you must rely on someone younger and fitter to bake bread for you.

In every society, the old have some claim on the resources of the young. Only the nature of the claim varies.

From this, in syllogistic fashion, the author unpacks some implications for modern political economies.

]]> For instance:

Tax-financed supports for the elderly are also vulnerable to demographics. Yes, taxes can be raised to provide bread for large numbers of elderly folks, but there is a limit to how much revenue can be raised from a given tax base. Eventually bread rations may have to be cut.
Accumulating assets — burying gold in the ground — doesn't protect one from demographic forces either. If you're a member of a large generation, then everyone else will be digging up their gold and trying to exchange it for bread at the same time as you are. The price of gold will fall, the price of bread will rise. (Substitute housing for gold if you wish).

I would drill even deeper into this and ask: what is at back of demographics? The answer is human reproduction, what George Gilder in his brave and brilliant book Men and Marriage called the sexual constitution. From there it is a very simple trace of logic to the realization that human sexuality can never, ever, be a purely "private" matter. It is, always and inevitably, a matter of absolutely vital public importance.

It is a mark of the degradation of our civilization’s sexual constitution that most folks accept without critique the popular reduction of “sexuality” to the momentary pleasure of the act. The irrevocable connection of this act to such momentous matters as human procreation and the perpetuation of society has been obscured by an extraordinary collection of deceit, impudence, fraud and hucksterism.

Western society has now spent many years involved in various experiments where the culling of younger generations comprises the true (though concealed) content of a vast propagandistic effort of reducing procreation to that momentary pleasure. We have embarked, under false pretenses, on a revolution in the human sexual constitution.

At last we are beginning to suffer the demographic consequences. Our prosperity suffers; our political economy groans under pressure from the revolution. The claims of the old upon the resources of the young must be extracted from ever-smaller cohorts of the young, millions of them having been snuffed out before birth and millions more contracepted into oblivion. The difficulties entailed in this straitening are in evidence across the Western world, most spectacularly in Europe.

At base the crisis is spiritual, but its consequences ramify into virtually all areas of life.

Blocking the mentally disabled from receiving organ donation

2012-01-20T14:07:46Z

This is a slightly tricky post for me to write. As my regular readers know, my position on vital organ donation is ambivalent at best and anti- at worst. I might be open to live donation of a kidney from a relative, though even there I have questions because of the dangers to the donor of going the rest of his life without one kidney. So-called "dead donor" donation is, really, a huge problem. You can see this page for many of my posts on that subject.

However, what has come out recently is sufficiently important that I think the donation issue should be set aside when discussing it. For one thing, live donation from a relative is what the parents are proposing and hope will be possible, and that is the most defensible form of vital organ donation. For another thing, the ramifications of what they have run into, especially just now in our national life, are much wider than organ donation.

The post that has kicked off a firestorm on the pro-life internet, which you may have already seen, is here. Here is the AP story. Briefly, parents of a mentally disabled child being treated a CHOP claim that, after the child's regular doctor gave them the impression that their child was eligible for transplant, they were expressly told in an interview with a doctor and a social worker that their child could not receive a kidney transplant because she is "mentally retarded" and because of her "quality of life." The social worker also cited the concern that in thirty years (if the parents themselves are dead by that time) the child would not take anti-rejection medications. Here are some quotations:

In the middle of both papers, he highlighted in pink two phrases. Paper number one has the words, “Mentally Retarded” in cotton candy pink right under Hepatitis C. Paper number two has the phrase, “Brain Damage” in the same pink right under HIV.
[snip]

I put my hand up. “Stop talking for a minute. Did you just say that Amelia shouldn’t have the transplant done because she is mentally retarded. I am confused. Did you really just say that?”

[snip]

I point to the paper and he lets me rant a minute. I can’t stop pointing to the paper. “This phrase. This word. This is why she can’t have the transplant done.”

“Yes.”

I begin to shake. My whole body trembles and he begins to tell me how she will never be able to get on the waiting list because she is mentally retarded.

A bit of hope. I sit up and get excited.

“Oh, that’s ok! We plan on donating. If we aren’t a match, we come from a large family and someone will donate. We don’t want to be on the list. We will find our own donor.”

“Noooo. She—is—not—eligible –because—of—her—quality– of –life—Because—of—her—mental—delays” He says each word very slowly as if I am hard of hearing.

[snip]

[The social worker] smirks a little. “Well, what happens when she is thirty and neither of you are around to take care of her. What happens to her then? Who will make sure she takes her medications then?”

]]> Clearly, the mother is very upset (understandably so). I don't know if that is the reason, or if it is because the hospital has stolidly stated that it "does not disqualify potential transplant candidates on the basis of intellectual abilities," but even Wesley J. Smith has cautiously said that we "still don’t know that is what happened, or that the supposed decision to deny the transplant was based on quality of life."

Now, that seems to me to be going a bit too far in the caution direction. What we have even in the mother's blog post is what purports to be a word-for-word account of a conversation in which, the mother alleges, the doctor told her in so many words that the decision was based on the child's quality of life. That's evidence. If the mother did not make up or hallucinate that sentence by the doctor, the word for word sentence, "She is not eligible because of her quality of life, because of her mental delays," then a person in a central decision-making position has said that the denial of the transplant is based at least in part on quality of life and mental disability. It doesn't get much clearer than that, and the hospital really isn't in a very strong position to say that this simply didn't happen.

Perhaps the doctor shouldn't have been so frank. That gets the hospital in trouble. Or, one could argue, the doctor was speaking confusedly. It would, in fact, have made a lot more medical sense (and caused less of a firestorm) if the decision had been based squarely on the fact (which the social worker mentions in the recounted conversation) that Amelia will need another transplant in a little over a decade. Presumably that is the type of consideration that would be taken into account even for a potential kidney recipient who is a Nobel-prize-winning physicist. And the social worker did mention that factor. But she mentioned other things as well (to which I'll get in a moment), and the doctor didn't mention it at all. Besides, even if "quality of life" due to mental disability were only one factor among others, it shouldn't be.

If the conversation as reported took place, then we have a problem, Houston, and the hospital is stalling about admitting it.

There is additional, independent confirmation that the conversation is accurately reported. The Hastings Center says,

Some centers exclude patients with moderate mental retardation, HIV, a history of addiction, or a long criminal record.

Notice the confirmation here in two ways. First, Hastings just outright says that some centers exclude mentally retarded patients as organ recipients. Second, the mother recounts that mental retardation and brain damage were highlighted on lists the doctor was holding which included HIV. In other words, this appears to have been a list of exactly the sorts of contraindications (of which it is plausible that Hepatitis C would be another) the Hastings report describes, with Amelia's mental disability highlighted as the contraindication applicable to her case.

This detailed article discusses the fact that denial of organ transplant because of mental retardation is a long-standing issue in organ transplant. The AP article gets into this a bit as well, though I found the article independently. Here are a few quotations:

Prior to the 1990s, MR [mental retardation] was regarded as a contraindication for solid organ transplant operations (1, 2). The main concern was that people with MR, especially those with severe or profound MR, lacked the necessary cognitive skills to comply with complex post-transplant, antirejection medication regimens. As the number of organs available has been insufficient to transplant everyone with a medical need, some authorities felt ethically obligated to allocate organs based on the individual’s quality of life. People with MR were disadvantaged or not considered altogether for transplant operations because they were presumed to have a poor quality of life.
In 1995, Sandra Jensen, a 32-yr-old woman with Down syndrome, was initially denied a heart-lung transplant at Stanford University Medical Center and also at the University of California at San Diego (3). Hospital authorities rejected Jensen’s application because of her MR. Jensen’s advocates, however, obtained sufficient publicity and political support to persuade the Stanford Medical Center to reconsider.

[snip]

Collins et al. (1) reported a case study of a 20-yr-old woman with an IQ of 55 who needed a heart-lung transplant. The hospital’s evaluation team denied the woman an opportunity to be listed for transplantation because of her cognitive limitations and concern about her potential to learn to comply with post-transplant medication regimens.

In their summary of indications and contraindications for heart transplants, Copeland and Solomon (2) stated that, “any mental or psychological condition which would make the patient unable to comply with a difficult medical regimen over the long term is an absolute contraindication to heart transplantation. Included in this category would be patients with psychosis or mental deficiency and also patients addicted to drugs.”

[snip]

In 1995, the Patient Care and Education Committee of The American Society of Transplant Physicians (17) developed clinical practice guidelines on renal transplant candidates. These guidelines stated that MR should only be considered a contraindication to transplantation when the cognitive impairment is so severe that it impairs compliance with essential medical regimens. The guidelines also stated that support from family and/or caregivers can compensate for an individual’s inability to comply with medical regimens on his/her own.

Now, one can say that the doctor at CHOP is living in the past, prior to 1995. But say what one will, what he is reported as saying and what the social worker is reported as saying are exactly the sorts of things this article is discussing. Mental retardation as disqualifying because of presumed poor quality of life? Check. Patient presumed not to comply with the anti-rejection regimen because of mental disability? Check. The doctor and social worker don't seem to have gotten the memo from the guidelines about how family support can compensate for the fact that the patient won't take the medication on his own.

(What is also silly about this is that Amelia is so young right now that even if she were mentally perfectly normal her parents would have to give her her medications after transplant! Does transplant for mentally average children really normally depend on what they might be doing or forgetting to do approximately thirty years from now? What about a healthy forty-five-year-old who might develop Alzheimer's decades later and might then have insufficient support to continue taking anti-rejection medications for a previously successful organ transplant? The social worker's question seems to be, to put it mildly, rather a selective concern about this particular child.)

In any event, the resemblance between the considerations discussed in the article and what the parents report from the interview is so striking that I think there can't be much reasonable doubt that their report is accurate.

I hardly need to say what is disturbing about this. Many others have said it for me. I would add this, though: Organ transplant is the perfect little test tube for medical rationing. Rationing in organ donation is frank and straightforward. There are only so many organs to go around, so they are rationed. (Though I would note that if the family really can find a usable organ for Amelia which would be donated solely for her, this point is a lot less straightforward.) If it is acceptable now to ration life-saving medical care on the basis of mental retardation as a cause of "poor quality of life," this is extremely ominous for the future, as centralized medical rationing takes over more and more of our ordinary medical care. There are so many bad omens for the treatment of the disabled in the future that it might seem hardly worth highlighting this one, especially since in this area things may have improved for the mentally disabled over the past couple of decades (though no one seems quite sure about that). But I don't think we should drop the ball on this. Rationing is coming to the fore now more than ever as something advocates think should be the new normal in medical care in the West. When the public becomes aware of discrimination against the mentally disabled in medical care, even if that discrimination is "old news" to some, it's worth pointing out the ramifications. It isn't old news to most people. If it were old news to everyone, no one would be doubting the parents' story. And if it's going on now, I very much doubt that matters will improve from here on out. The contempt for the mentally disabled is far more likely to metastasize than to recede. For that reason, if for no other, Amelia's case bears watching.

The Holocaust revisionist with "respectable" friends

2012-01-20T02:30:51Z

This is a follow-up to this post. As before, comments are directed to a moderated venue. Subsequent to writing that post, I did more research on the British anti-semite whose book was lauded by allegedly respectable political scientist John Mearsheimer and who was defended (in the course of defending Mearsheimer) by philosopher Brian Leiter. I am indebted to this post by Pejman Yousefzadeh for links to this additional information. I put this information into the comments in Extra Thoughts on my earlier post, but I think it deserves more attention than that is likely to get.

One of the questions that arose in the course of Mearsheimer's and Leiter's defense of Mearsheimer's blurb was whether or not Atzmon, the author of the bizarre book that Mearsheimer blurbed, is either a Holocaust denier or Holocaust revisionist. Mearsheimer, in the course of doubling down and refusing to budge, stated unequivocally:

I cannot find evidence in his book or in his other writings that indicate he 'traffics in Holocaust denial.

Notice that this concerns other things Atzmon has written, not just the book Mearsheimer blurbed. Like Leiter, who blandly declared Atzmon (on the basis of extremely brief research) a "cosmopolitan" rather than an anti-semite, Mearsheimer declares him no Holocaust denier at all.

In the very first comment on Mearsheimer's post defending himself (and Atzmon), a reader attempted to provide more data. The reader provided a partial quotation and a link. I am here providing a longer quotation with a different link to the same post. Here is Atzmon on the Holocaust (emphasis added).

It took me years to accept that the Holocaust narrative, in its current form, doesn’t make any historical sense. Here is just one little anecdote to elaborate on:
If, for instance, the Nazis wanted the Jews out of their Reich (Judenrein - free of Jews), or even dead, as the Zionist narrative insists, how come they marched hundreds of thousands of them back into the Reich at the end of the war? I have been concerned with this simple question for more than a while.

[snip]

I am left puzzled here; if the Nazis ran a death factory in Auschwitz-Birkenau, why would the Jewish prisoners join them at the end of the war? Why didn’t the Jews wait for their Red liberators?

I think that 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we must be entitled to start to ask the necessary questions. We should ask for some conclusive historical evidence and arguments rather than follow a religious narrative that is sustained by political pressure and laws.

If this is not "trafficking" in Holocaust denial, I'm not sure what would count. In my earlier post I pointed out that Atzmon plays the post-modernist and says that he "neither affirms nor denies" the Holocaust. That's bad enough. Oddly, the postmodern mask seems to have slipped here. He's talking about "historical sense" and saying in so many words that such Holocaust details as the desire of the Nazis to eradicate the Jews from the Reich and the existence of a death camp at Auschwitz do not make historical sense. Yet I have no evidence that Mearsheimer and Leiter have revised their opinion on the subject or on Mearsheimer's endorsement of Atzmon, despite the fact that this information was made available to Mearsheimer. If readers have evidence that either Mearsheimer or Leiter has done a 180 and repudiated Atzmon, do post that evidence in comments at Extra Thoughts.

Pray for the persecuted church in Pakistan

2012-01-18T14:43:34Z

The rule of law simply does not exist in certain parts of Pakistan, at least when it comes to Christian victims. In that context, horrific persecution of Christians by their Muslim "neighbors" goes on unchecked. It includes the kidnap and torture (for ransom) of children, sacking of churches, and rape. One of the "offenses" for which children were beaten (hey, at least those particular children weren't kidnapped and tortured) was singing too loudly and offending Muslims. (Compare Jihad Watch's repeated point that Christians kept in dhimmitude are forbidden to ring bells that the surrounding Muslims can hear.) Police authorities are, to put it mildly, unmotivated to stop or punish these evils. Christians are leaving Karachi as fast as they can, but these are poor people. Emigrating isn't exactly a simple matter.

One of the stories mentions an attempt to "promote meetings of reconciliation" between Christians and Muslims. Um, sure: Group A beats, kidnaps, and tortures the children of Group B and destroys its places of worship; Group B does nothing of the kind to Group A. So what we really need is a meeting of reconciliation between these opposed groups. I don't think so. The situation calls for official keepers of the peace, official posses, and official hangmen to protect, rescue, and avenge the innocent. But in Muslim Pakistan, that's not likely to happen.

Meanwhile, let us pray for our brethren under persecution from merciless Islam.