Well, one benefit of excess time in airports and planes … is I’m getting some sleeping and a lot of reading done. I’ve finished the new uncensored In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and  The Unlearned Lessons Of the Twentieth Century by Chantal Delsol. The latter of these books pointedly demonstrates that the political and moral philosophies which led to the great human tragedies of the 20th century have not been abandoned. The former highlights life in the maw of one of those tragedies, that being life the “first circle” in Stalin’s gulag hell. Ms Delsol writes (pg 165-6):

The equality of collectivism was a fetish, and now hman rights have been reinvented as a fetish. The twenty-first century wil have to destroy idolized images of the Good just as the ancient iconoclasts destroyed images of God — not that they stopped believing, but they rightly saw these descriptions of God as diminishments that threatened his transcendence. The idolaters in the book of Exodus (20:4-5) prefigure the modern ideologies in the sacralization of the immanent. The texts in the Old Testament on the prohibition of idols, and Kant’s writings on the human ignorance of the Good, stigmatize certain permanent temptations of human thinking, ones that returned in full force in the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. We have yet to call them into question.

[…]

It is, however, difficult to see how the destruction of idols could be accomplished without openness toward the spiritual. The suppression of spiritual referents is precisely what conferred on secular referents their abusive status as absolutes. The return of spiritual referents alone would make possible the destruction of idols: idolatry cannot be avoided except through the recognition of transcendence.

It might be noted, that while Ms Delsol’s essay certainly indicates she is friendly to and appreciative of the Christian religious tradition, to my reading she does not present herself as a member of it. It is also interesting that I flagged this page to note … and with myself being an iconodule.

From Chuck Asay (click for a larger version):

There’s a very interesting comment thread going on over at First Things "Evangel" blog (a new group blog that our own Mark Olsen is contributing to) dealing with how Christians deal with the political realm.  Clearly I’m for engaging the world (in the world but not of it, as it were), but the writer Frank Turk, taking cues from the apostle Paul, is of a different opinion.  Other commenters have weighed in, in a very thought-provoking back-and-forth.  Additionally, another blogger, Matthew Anderson, has taken up the opposite side of the issue.

I encourage you to take a look at these, regardless of your position.  And the "Evangel" comes highly recommended. 

Clearly, the White House hasn’t quite figured out the difference between the two.  Now, I will say that some many who complain about liberal bias in the media and quote Keith Olbermann to, in part, prove it also need this bit of education.  (Quoting Keith Olbermann to show he’s an unserious clown is an entirely different matter.)  But the White House ought to certainly understand the difference.

After spending the week declaring that Fox News Channel isn’t a real news organization because it has perspective (while at the same time ignoring perspective of a worse kind from so many other news organizations), Jake Tapper of ABC News got White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to determine what the standard was for “perspective”.

Tapper: “That’s a sweeping declaration that they’re not a news organization. How are they different from say, ABC, MSNBC, Univision?”

Gibbs: “You and I should watch around 9:00 tonight or 5:00 this afternoon.”

Tapper: “I’m not talking about the opinion programs or issues you have with certain reports. I’m talking about saying that thousands of individuals who work for a media organization do not work for a news organization. Why is that appropriate for the White House to say?”

Gibbs: “That is our opinion.”

On FNC, the 9:00 hour is Sean Hannity’s show, and Glenn Beck runs at 5:00.  So expressing viewpoints, on shows that are not news shows but are transparently and openly opinionated, by the White House’s lights, disqualifies you from being a news organization.

Well, apparently there’s more to that than just expressing viewpoints.  Else, why would the President himself have had MSNBC’s Olberman and Rachel Maddow as part of an off-the-record briefing?  Apparently it’s not just perspective that’s the problem.  It’s disagreement they’re trying to suppress.

Because you know that other news organizations are watching how this administration is treating FNC.  The message is clear, “If you want access, you will tow the line.”  True, other administrations have had issues with the press, and with specific networks or newspapers, in the past.  But Obama is taking this into uncharted territory.

Ostracizing a news network for it’s opinion shows critical of you is way, way out of line.  While it’s not technically violating the First Amendment, since there are no legal impediments being thrown up to Fox News, the spirit of the amendment is being violated.  This is either thin skin or something worse.  I hope it’s the former, but I’m watching out for the latter.

Update: A commenter on this post (which tries to make an equivalence between Obama’s general dissing of FNC to when Bush would try to get NBC to air unedited quotes of himself) make a great point.

All three networks to opinion after 5, what’s the big deal? I don’t think FOX has tried to hide the fact that Beck, O’Relly, Hannity or Greta are opinion. Hell, it’s not like any of those three were ANCHORING the presidential elections.

A la Olberman.  Ouch.

Like the Bush strain before it, Obama Derangement Syndrome is an overly hysterical reaction to what are essentially policy differences.  The most recent episode of the podcast I contribute to, Shire Network News, dealt with this very real issue.  (And this is a right-leaning podcast; we do police our own.)  Talk of a possible military coup because of Obama’s policies is akin to suggesting that Bush would declare marshal law at the end of his term so he wouldn’t have to leave. 

As Col. Cucullu, the featured interviewee notes, during at least one time in our history we had a wholly unelected President — Gerald Ford — who first replaced Vice President Agnew, and then got a promotion when Nixon resigned.  We had this situation for a few years and yet no tires were burning in the streets.  This particular republic has proven to be extremely resilient in the face of strangeness like that

I’d like to point out another, more recent example; Oath Keepers.  Founded in March by a former Ron Paul staffer (which, in itself, throws a ‘paul’ over it), it is a group of "non-partisan association of currently serving military, reserves, National Guard, veterans, Peace Officers, and Fire Fighters who will fulfill the Oath we swore, with the support of like minded citizens who take an Oath to stand with us, to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, so help us God. Our Oath is to the Constitution."  They have a list of 10 specific orders they say they will not obey.  (Compare this to the 7 promises that men of the Promise Keepers say they will keep.  Odd coincidence there.)

OK, fair enough, although if they swore an oath, and they apparently take it very seriously, why do you need an organization to promote that fact?  Following a quote from Gen. George Washington that starts, "The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves…", they say "Such a time is near at hand again."  Really?  Why didn’t this organization get started any earlier that March, 2009?  Did something happen then that caused these people to think that they would need to strive even harder to keep said oaths? 

A Presidential inauguration, perhaps, just 2 months earlier?  Coincidence?  I think not, especially given whom its founder supported in that election.  And this from a group calling itself "non-partisan".  Here’s an article in the group’s hometown newspaper, Las Vegas.  I’ll let you decide how "non-partisan" they are.

This is ODS in action.  At best, it’s inappropriate and nonproductive.  At worst, it’s wrong and counter-productive.  This is America, folks.  We can handle this.

A brand new film from the Cornwall Alliance for Stewardship of Creation entitled Not Evil Just Wrong takes a critical look at the claims made by global warming fearmongers and attempts to separate the facts from fiction. Which is worse: the (alleged) problem or the proposed solutions? Click the video below to see the trailer.

Hat tip: Chuck Colson

Frankly I can’t understand why any White House would declare war on a single media outlet but that’s exactly what the Obama Administration has decided to do with Fox News. Fox’s own Brit Hume succinctly points out what a huge losing strategy this is:

Hat tip: Don Surber

Mr Obama has won a Nobel Peace prize. One reaction, from the left reads:

Of course the Republicans are going to freak out. Our guy wins a Nobel Peace Prize after 9 months in office, primarily for tinkering with the worst excesses of the wars their guy started. That’s humiliating. Humiliated Republicans lash out, news at eleven.

Hmm. Lash out? With remarks like this?

We appreciate his effort for peace which he just initiates and we have to wait for the result.

Isn’t it a bit premature for him to get the prize? We are not sure how it will affect his mindset.

or this?

Does Obama deserve The Prize? Has he done anything to warrant it? Does giving it to so young a man, in the infancy of his Presidency, devalue all those who worked long and hard to earn it? Or does it not matter at all, because the Nobel is such a political prize anyway (as anybody who has read Irving Wallace’s The Prize will know), given to Yasser Arafat and Menachem Begin?

or this?

This may well turn out to be the watershed year in the decline of Nobel Prizes. What were the committee members eating or smoking?

President Obama may well deserve this award in years to come. But not at this time. He has just begun his strive and is yet to leave a mark on world peace.

Oh, wait. Those weren’t conservative wingnuts at all. That was a collection of South East Asian blog reactions. Try Egypt.

There is a point here. The “conservative” bloggers  and “Republicans” are “lashing” out in exactly the same way as, it seems, is the rest of the world with at best, a collective “huh, wtf?” And if you don’t find that sort of reaction reasonable and ordinary … I suggest you need to dial the tension down your partisan wig and let some blood flow return to your little grey cells.

That’s what the Nobel Peace Prize has become.  This was evident when Yassar Arafat won it in 1994 for pretending to go along with a peace agreement with Israel while continuing hostilities.  This was evident when Al Gore won it in 2007 for his work on climate change of all things, because it might, maybe, in the worst of all possible worlds, lead to conflict.

When Jimmy Carter won it in 2002, it was not so much for his work on peace in the Middle East, because that was in 1978 and when he rightfully should have shared in it.  No, the belated award was a poke in George W. Bush’s eye, and the committee said as much.

Little by little, this award is becoming more about politics & intentions than about actual peace.  And today’s awarding of it to President Barack Obama continues that descent.

For one of America’s youngest presidents, in office less than nine months — and only for 12 days before the Nobel nomination deadline last February — it was an enormous honor.

The prize seems to be more for Obama’s promise than for his performance. Work on the president’s ambitious agenda, both at home and abroad, is barely underway, much less finished. He has no standout moment of victory that would seem to warrant a verdict as sweeping as that issued by the Nobel committee.

When even the Associated Press recognizes that this is entirely premature, that’s saying something.

Lech Walesa had this to say:

“So soon? Too early. He has no contribution so far,” former Polish President Lech Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, said Friday. “He is still at an early stage.”

In 1983, Walesa actually did something to promote peace. That was well-deserved.

12 days after taking office? Again we see, starkly, that for the liberal elite, talk is more important, promises more esteemed, than action actually is.  “If you want what we want in the way we want it, that’s good enough”, is the message.  The Nobel Peace Prize is slowly losing its meaning.

Even in Norway, where Mr. Obama enjoys huge popularity, the decision raised eyebrows among some. “It is just too soon,” said Siv Jensen, leader of Norway’s main opposition party, the Progress Party. “It is wrong to give him the peace prize for his ambition. You should receive it for results.”

She said that the decision to bestow the award on the president was the most controversial she could remember and was one of a number that had moved the prize further away from the ideals of Alfred Nobel.

Others made the same point in somewhat more diplomatic language. Amnesty International, which won the peace prize in 1977, congratulated Mr. Obama but said he couldn’t stop there. “President Obama has taken some positive steps towards improving human rights in the U.S.A. and abroad, but much remains to be done,” said Irene Kahn, Amnesty’s secretary general.

The Nobel Committee, by trying to give clout to someone who hasn’t produced results yet, is watering down the very clout that they’re intending to confer.  If results don’t matter, neither will the prize.

UPDATE: Apparently now I’m a terrorist sympathizer.

Eric Scheie at "Classical Values" points out that the word "deregulation" doesn’t mean what some users of it think it means.  After noting that some consider it an unmitigated evil, it seems that they are making it the scapegoat for many of our economic ills when in fact quite the opposite is true.

I’m no economist, but the problem is that deregulation is being seen in a vacuum, without reference to the bigger picture, and I think the bigger picture was influenced — possibly even dominated — by something worse than regulation.

I refer to the complete absence of any standards. Not long ago, Glenn Reynolds made a nostalgic reference to the stuffy uptightness of old-fashioned bankers:

You know, we may just find that all those "stuffy" and "uptight" traits that old-fashioned bankers used to be mocked for were actually a good thing. . . .

Truer words have never been spoken and I’ve blogged about this before. It used to be that you had to actually qualify for a loan. You had to demonstrate income, creditworthiness, equity in the home, that the downpayment wasn’t borrowed, etc. before the stuffy uptight pinstriped guys would even think about giving you a loan. It was good that they were uptight. The "system" (for lack of a better word) worked.

So, what made these stuffy uptight guys decide they could get away with ditching the old uptight unfair standards that said (among other things) that some people are more worthy of getting loans than others?

The answer, as most of us know, is the government. It wasn’t as if these guys just stripped off their pinstripes and dove into the economic orgy room; they did something that’s really perfectly in character for stuffy uptight guys — they did as they were told. And they were told not to ever under any circumstances do anything that might in any way be interpreted by anyone at ACORN to have so much as a smidgen of an appearance of anything resembling discrimination. (A word denoting pure, unmitigated evil.)

Bad as the loss of banking standards might be, it’s not what I think is the overarching problem.

In my view, the biggest the loss of standards came in the form of the all-encompassing government guarantee. It was a gigantic blank check, and it operated to cover all sins. That no bank could ever be allowed to fail, and every mortgage would be backed by big daddy at FANNIE and FREDDIE meant that there really was no downside to anything, whether deliberate irresponsibility or government-mandated irresponsibility. The taxpayers would be responsible.

This may be many things, and it may of course be profoundly immoral, but to call it "deregulation" or "an excess of the free market" is absurd.

This is the same thing as when Barney Frank blamed the housing crisis on a failure of the free market.  At the time, Republicans wanted to regulate more heavily Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; two entities that are themselves a demonstration of how non-free-market the mortgage industry is.  Democrats are blaming all the usual suspects and hoping their base isn’t paying attention.

While his accusation was out of order and unseemly, again we see he was right.  Wilson accused the President of lying when Obama said that health care reform wouldn’t cover illegal immigrants.  Recently, Obama tipped his hand on that claim, saying we had to make more the existing illegal ones legal so they can get health care.  The impression was not that they’d go back to their home country and use the legal process.  The President wants to simply, vaguely, go about "resolving the issue of 12 million undocumented people living and working in this country once and for all."

Poof, you’re legal!  Now, we still don’t cover illegal immigrants.

Except that any attempt to even figure out of someone is legal or not is being shut down by Democrats.

Senate Finance Committee Democrats rejected a proposed a requirement that immigrants prove their identity with photo identification when signing up for federal healthcare programs.

Finance Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said that current law and the healthcare bill under consideration are too lax and leave the door open to illegal immigrants defrauding the government using false or stolen identities to obtain benefits.

Grassley’s amendment was beaten back 10-13 on a party-line vote.

So they say that illegals won’t be covered, but they promise not to check.  Don’t ask, don’t tell. 

Accountability government at work.

Leave it to Mike Huckabee to nail the issue in the video below. In light of last week’s circus in New York it’s time to dump the UN.

My morning link posts usually arrive with virtually no editorial comment on my part, the sentence or so I give is mostly intended to interest the viewer to follow the link to the post indicated. I’ve got a short time this evening, and I’m caught up on my link browsing, so I thought I’d try to offer a smaller number of links here with a short paragraph surrounding it.

There’s been some discussion on and off about setting barriers. In general democrats think that bringing more to the table, irrespective of their seriousness or issues awareness is not relevant. What they feel is that more is always better. Yet, experience should, one might think, tell a different tale. Setting higher standards, yes it gets you less people making the decisions or performing the act, but it often raises the level of the result. Speaking of results that are not so impressive.

The friendly neighborhood Rust Belt Philosopher has a short post on fallacies. He starts off writing:

One of the nice things about fallacies is how they usually have equally fallacious mirror images. The ad populum fallacy, for instance, could be reversed into the invalid argument that a view is accurate because nobody (or very few people) believe it.

Recently I’ve come to find that ad populum point of view in historical reviews, i.e., the popular conception of what happened is wrong more than it is right. The popular view of what happened and why … is wrong. Not just a little wrong often, but exactly wrong. For example, virtually nobody believes that the BEF was innovative and responsive to situations in the field during WWI. Actually the common popular view was that the leadership was amazingly unresponsive, stupid and tradition/hidebound sending millions to their deaths in trenches because of their stupidity. This is alas, exactly wrong, but the popular view remains. The litany of “exactly wrong” historical popular views might be almost as long as the ones that the popular view gets right.

Joe Carter at First Thoughts has some ideas about monotony. The movie Up! offered the same theme, in part, in modern cinematic experience, highlighting the primacy of the ordinary in life. Ordinary moments with our spouse, children, neighbor, or for that matter God are really in the end more important than the ones we find to be pivotal. In a recent post of mine, arguments in favor of asceticism were made. In part, asceticism is about realizing those quiet moments with God are important and making that goal a formative in how you set your life and its goals.

This post will have evoke the standard responses from right and left. Up three paragraphs Mr Niven remarks in his post on the fallacy that correlation does not imply causation. That, in part, will be a crucial link in the argument by the left in this regard. Automation is part of the modern world. As a minimum wage goes up, the cost of replacing that unskilled worker with automation goes up. As the minimum wage goes up, it becomes harder to justify paying for the production of that same unskilled worker. It makes entry harder. Why does the left pretend this isn’t true?

democracy, fallacy, logic, Good, God, unemployment

One of the themes in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (of many) concerns the ability of great leaders to control the vicissitudes of fortune. In this manner, Napoleon is seen as not, as so many regarded him at the time, as a master of his fate and controller of his and many other’s destinies. But instead he was just the highest chip in the froth. That it was not his will that drove France to Empire and thereby pushing he and they willy nilly to disaster in the Russian snows (giving us Mr Minard’s completely amazing graph as well). Now Lev Tolstoy may have offered that a Higher Power determined the course of history. Alternatively in this modern era, one might instead propose that aggregate behaviour of the crowds might be the driving force.

Mr Obama is the head of our state. But he is likely less in control of events than we pretend. Now it is true that like, Mr Kerry, Mr Obama has been striving for the Presidency much of his adult life. While I find this personally distasteful ambition, I cannot project my personal animosity for the seeking for power on others. There may actually be admirable aspects to ambition even if they are a far cry from my personal makeup. Read the rest of this entry

From FoxNews (HT: Belmont Club),

The Obama administration is rethinking its course recommendations for students ahead of President Obama’s address to the the nation’s schoolchildren next week, rewriting its suggestions to teachers for student assignments on how to “help the president.”

(emphasis added)

From Hope & Change parents,

You’re certainly free to consider me paranoid. And I’m free to consider you naive.