The "privilege" of being born American

Former Federal Reserve Governor Lawrence Lindsay rightly takes Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to task for saying that,

the "most fortunate Americans" should pay more in taxes for the "privilege of being an American." One can debate different ways of balancing the budget. But Mr. Geithner's argument highlights an unfortunate and very destructive instinct that seems to permeate the Obama administration about the respective roles of citizens and their government. ...

Philosophically, the concept that being an American is a "privilege" upends the whole basis on which America was founded. Privileges are things granted to one individual by another, higher-ranking, individual. ...

This is an age-old view that our Founding Fathers rejected. First, they argued that the basic rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (i.e., economic liberty) were natural rights, endowed by our Creator, not by government.

But Geithner's statement absolutely accurately reflects the Left's basic view of government and the people, namely that the government rules supreme and the people are order takers from their government overlords. And "Turbo Tax Time," as the SecTreas is sometimes known, is far from the first Leftist to betray this world view.

In 2009, Ramesh Ponnuru wrote of an "insane" analogy used by Robert Frank in the NY Times. It's this:

"Anti-tax zealots denounce all taxation as theft, as depriving citizens of their right to spend their hard-earned incomes as they see fit. Yet nowhere does the Constitution grant us the right not to be taxed. Nor does it grant us the right to harm others with impunity. No one is permitted to steal our cars or vandalize our homes. Why should opponents of taxation be allowed to harm us in less direct ways?" Um, maybe because the analogy is insane?

Yes, but that's not the fundamental error Frank makes here. The real boneheaded, but typical liberal thinking Frank displays is that the Constitution grants rights.

It does not.

In America, the state apparatus grants no rights at all to the people because the government has no rights to grant. All rights reside in the people to begin with. The American founders understood that human rights are simply a fact of human existence; human beings are "endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights," as the Declaration of Independence puts it.

Therefore, in the American system, the people grant powers to the government, but no rights. Yet we still have to endure and rebut idiocy from people such as Geithner and Franks, who believe that the government is the fount of all things good in America, including our very rights. In fact, the First Amendment, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution as a whole give or grant no rights at all: all rights automatically are always held by the people in the first place. The Bill of Rights was intended to restrict the power of the government -- to make sure that government apparatchiks didn't step on the rights of the people. The Constitution secures our rights against encroachment. It does not found them to begin with.

So in Geithner land, being born an American is a privilege. (Of course, to most of the Left, being born at all is a prvilege.)

Exhibit C: The government also claims that owning a passport is a "privilege," too.

NASCAR is boring now

Saw most of the rain-delayed Daytona 500 Monday night, and I have to say that it was an incredibly boring race - except, of course, when driver Pablo Montoya blasted into a jet-engine-blower truck and everything blew up. No one was injured, incredibly, and so I can guiltlessly say that the episode was the only truly entertaining period of the race.

The problem is not new. NASCAR races became boring when NASCAR mandated that every Sprint Cup driver had to drive the "Car of Tomorrow" racer beginning in 2008. That means that all the Sprint Cup races - the big leagues of NASCAR - are basically just one big IROC series, a now-defunct racing series in which, "Drivers raced identically-prepared stock cars set up by a single team of mechanics in an effort to make the race purely a test of driver ability."

The problem with using the COT in NASCAR is that brand distinction (Ford, Chevy, etc.) now means nothing at all. It did back in, say, Richard Petty's day. The cars now are all the same except for very minor and immaterial differences. In Daytona there was a field of 30-plus cars that all had almost exactly the same performance envelopes and so most all the race looked like this:



A giant clump of cars in which almost none of the drivers are actually racing except for the handful at the front. Inside the gaggle there is no real racing, just each driver awaiting a screwup by someone else to leave an opening. The problem is that the screwups turn out this way:



This was merely the first of several (IIRC, four) such wrecks. Again, no one hurt, thankfully. In the old days it was rare for NASCAR wrecks to wipe out eight or so cars at a time. It happened, but not much. Now, it's rare when wrecks don't do so. All this does is stop the race (well, what little racing there actually is) for many laps under the yellow. What it does not do is make the race a race when the green flag gets waved again. There are fewer cars to clump together at 195 mph, but it's still just a clump. And so: another such wreck. In fact, the last of these wrecks of the evening took place mere minutes before the end, and when it started I thought for a moment that Fox was replaying the wreck in the video above.

NASCAR blames its multiyear attendance drop on the recession. Problem is that attendance peaked in 2005 and has shrunk every year since. Both 2009's and 2010's attendance were less than 2003's.

Why? Because the drivers aren't racing anymore; the winner usually just turns out to be the luckiest of the last men standing, having missed being wiped out in a pile up. That means the "race" is boring because viewers are not actually watching a competition, just a high-speed game of Russian Roulette. Even the wrecks are not entertaining, not because drivers don't get hurt (that's a good thing) but because they are so predictable and frequent that there is no longer a surprise factor in them and all they do is interrupt what little racing there might be. "Look, honey, twelve cars are spinning out of control again. I'll go get that popcorn for you now."

As I said at the beginning, the only entertaining part of the evening was this:



Related: The day I raced against Darrell Waltrip. He won.

NASCAR remains the palest of professional sports: "It makes the NHL look like a melting pot."

What is the fastest you have ever driven?

The coolest guy who ever lived

Who was the coolest guy who ever lived. Why, Freddie Tavares, of course:

You know, this:

First, we kill all the newborns

William M. Briggs, Statistician » Academics—Who Else?—Call For The Killing Of Babies:

Academic philosophers Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva—shockingly working in Australia1, a land where commonsense was once held sacred—have written a peer-reviewed paper in which they say that killing newborns is A-OK, and even in some cases to be encouraged.

Their “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” is in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

The academics argue that killing a newborn should be legally permissible because the baby could have been aborted and even if not, there is no "personhood" distinction between a fetus and a newly-born infant. Of course, observes Mr. Briggs, "They do not choose to call this killing infanticide, presumably because they are squeamish." Well, not very squeamish - the reason they do not use that word, I think, is because "infanticide" is a legal term for the unlawful killing of an infant, precisely the thing that G-M are arguing should not be illegal.

They begin by claiming that “having a child can itself be an unbearable burden” to a mother. Unbearable is that which cannot be born. It is an extreme word describing an impossibility and not an unlikelihood. Since a birth and the subsequent care of a child is a contingent event, we cannot claim that any birth and rearing is unbearable in advance. Even if it turns out unbearable in some instances, it is not always so and cannot be predicted to be so perfectly.

What this proposal really means is that not only should an abortion be available on demand by the woman for any reason she wants - for whom else could possibly decide what is "unbearable?" - she can also decide post-partum that she can abort retroactively, so to speak:

To answer my own question at the end of that post, G-M say that in fact there is no moral difference at all, and that not only are pre-delivery and partial-birth abortions quite okay, but so is taking the newborn baby and snuffing its life out.

But why stop there? I have long argued that the very same arguments pro-abortion advocates use to support abortion can be used to support capital punishment. We would simply no longer sentence convicts to death, we would simply perform a post-live-birth abortion. So what if the live birth was, say, 60 years ago?

And since “having a child can itself be an unbearable burden” to a mother, who can set moral limits on just when that burden becomes unbearable? The "burden" might be light for several years but then become unbearable after the child is still of minor age. Why not let the mother decide on "after-birth abortion" then? Consider these unbearable circumstances:

1. Child is perfectly healthy and normal until she is brain damaged in an auto accident at age 12 and in unable to dress or feed or bathe herself. Mom decides that this burden is unbearable. Abort? Why not?

2. Boy reaches age 14 and becomes rebellious and "wild" - finally becoming a drug addict and is finally arrested for assault and robbery. Cops call the mom to let her know and she replies, "This is unbearable. Just go ahead and abort him."

Briggs comments on this kind of question:

What contingent, measurable event turns the newborn baby into a human being? When it can talk and say, “I want”? Their lame response is “we do not put forward any claim about the moment at which after-birth abortion would no longer be permissible.”

Translation: "We do not see any meaningful point at which after-birth abortion would no longer be permissible."

At heart, the two academics are anti-human and specifically anti-child. At the outset they characterize parenthood (well, motherhood, since dads don't seem to exist in their ivory-tower minds) as a "burden" that is all too easily "unbearable." And so, of course, the children concerned should die.

That they should hold such a view is shocking enough, but even more disturbing is that apparently this very point of view is "not uncommon in bioethics."

And so we have arrived at what I can only characterize as moral arson with no comprehensibility.

Update: Discussion: Hot Air, Weasel Zippers, Verum Serum, LifeNews.com,Wake up America and Conservative Hideout 2.0, National Catholic Register, First Things.

Wheat and Weeds remarks,

Can you all please now agree that "Ethicist" is a bogus profession, existing for the sole purpose of rubber stamping whatever Mengelean wickedness we care to dream up?

Um, yes. Didn't used to be, though. One of my most subsequently-useful classes in seminary was ethics, but even in the ,latter 1990s at Vanderbilt, the subject was still taught from a classical tradition, starting with Aristotle and working up through the centuries to H. Reinhold Niebuhr.

Update: Reader P.S. writes,

In pagan times it was customary for the father to have the right to decide whether newborn children would live or die. Infants were generally killed because they were deformed in some way, and the most common method of killing unwanted newborns was exposure.

Now we have abortion on demand, for the mere convenience of the mother, not because of some deformity.

So:

Is the West returning to the evils of its pre-Christian past?

Babies were sacrificed to Baal (and other gods) in order to bring some benefit on the community.

Now we have babies sacrificed in order to bring some benefit to the mother. (Or to the community--see Steven Pinker's argument that abortion lowers the crime rate by reducing the number of unwanted children of poor mothers.)

I think one can argue that our bloody sacrifices, done for rationalistic utilitarian reasons, are morally inferior to the pagan sacrifices done in the service of ignorant superstitions: We are supposed to know better.

The next question must be: Is there anything that the West will not stoop to, for crass utililtarian advantage? Is everyone a candidate for sacrifice when it becomes convenient? Life is not sacred, and I get the impression that my liberal friends would not stand in my defense if that would endanger them--or even inconvenience them.

One could make a viciously bitter joke about those academics' argument for "post-birth abortion": Since abortion is sanctified under the cliche "a woman's right to choose", could one suggest, in a return to tradition, that the decision to kill newborns be left to the father as "a man's right to choose"? Or perhaps another one about how not so long ago it was "a white man's right to choose" whether a dark-skinned person was a human being or not.

Time to do something else; I'm too angry to go to bed right now.

The 21st-century human is not morally superior to his ancestors, and paganism is not a bad way to describe our growing spiritual and psychological dysfunctions.

Update: How exactly have G-M proposed anything different from "life unworthy of life?"

The Apostles - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine

The Apostles - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine:

Worth reading, "go thou and do likewise."

Obama: Screw the troops

Trashing Tricare | Washington Free Beacon:

The Obama administration’s proposed defense budget calls for military families and retirees to pay sharply more for their healthcare, while leaving unionized civilian defense workers’ benefits untouched. The proposal is causing a major rift within the Pentagon, according to U.S. officials. Several congressional aides suggested the move is designed to increase the enrollment in Obamacare’s state-run insurance exchanges.

The disparity in treatment between civilian and uniformed personnel is causing a backlash within the military that could undermine recruitment and retention.

The proposed increases in health care payments by service members, which must be approved by Congress, are part of the Pentagon’s $487 billion cut in spending. It seeks to save $1.8 billion from the Tricare medical system in the fiscal 2013 budget, and $12.9 billion by 2017.

Many in Congress are opposing the proposed changes, which would require the passage of new legislation before being put in place.

“We shouldn’t ask our military to pay our bills when we aren’t willing to impose a similar hardship on the rest of the population,” Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a Republican from California, said in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon. “We can’t keep asking those who have given so much to give that much more.”

Administration officials told Congress that one goal of the increased fees is to force military retirees to reduce their involvement in Tricare and eventually opt out of the program in favor of alternatives established by the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

Well, of course.

Just remember the president's latest speech - on any topic:

Unemployment boosts the economy!

This video has made the rounds recently. Its Youtube cutline says, "At the Student Summit at North Carolina Central University in Durham, NC, White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett speaks about the stimulative effects of unemployment (February 21, 2012)."



Now, let's be clear: to point out that this is economic lunacy is not to say that unemployment checks should be stopped and that no one should get unemployment. When people of the non-Left have pointed out the economic ignorance of Jarrett's claim they have been assailed by the Left of not caring about the unemployed. This is the typical tactic of the Left: ignore the merits of an argument and tar their opponents with accusations of hostile intent. Because, after all, Republicans want you to die.

Peter at BRM blog points out the obvious fallacies of Jarrett's position, namely that the money sent to people in the form of unemployment checks doesn't just appear from thin air. The checks do not introduce money into the economy, they reintroduce it. For:

To get that money, the government had to first take it away from productive citizens and/or corporations through taxation. In effect, it denied those citizens and/or corporations the right to use their own money for their own purposes, and instead confiscated it from them to use for purposes deemed necessary by the government. (Whether or not they were, or are, or will be 'necessary' is, of course, highly debatable.) What it can't raise through taxation, it must borrow (and at present the US government is borrowing almost half of every dollar it spends). Those loans must be repaid, plus the interest on them, which represents a further drain on the national purse. [Italics original]

But the Left, of course, simply assumes that the money for the checks can simply be harvested; the Left seems not understand that wealth is created, it does not simply appear. Add the administrative costs of the program, and it should be easy to see that the unemployment-check system is a net drain on the economy. This is not to argue that the unemployment benefit programs should be ended. It is simply to say that nothing is free. But none of these facts and logic are relevant to the Left.

However, Jarrett is only treading a path already blazed by then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in 2010:



Government dependency good. Self sufficiency bad. That's where the Left is today, folks. And along the way, remember that raising taxes creates jobs!

Update: This seems to be a meme all within the administration:

Carney: Unemployment Benefits Could Create Up To 1 Million Jobs | RealClearPolitics

Agriculture secretary says food stamps are a stimulus

So the obvious question: If issuing unemployment checks and food stamps stimulates the economy, that is, results in net economic gain rather than loss, then would it not be wonderful for the economy for everyone to stop working and start receiving those checks? If your answer is no, then you necessarily agree that unemployment and food stamps are net loss. Thank you for being part of the actual reality-based segment of the population! If you think the question is ridiculous, then you're a Leftist. And if your answer is yes, then you are not even thinking as clearly as Leonid Brezhnev.

"without moral idiocy, we could have no nanny state"

Canadian journalist David Warren on America's looming socialist health-care system:

We take it almost for granted that, under our [Canada's-DS] unambiguously socialist health care system, taxpayers like me, who consider abortion to be a grave crime - the killing of a defenceless human being - must pay for abortions under any circumstances.

And I give the example of abortion only because it is obvious and unmistakable, not subtle and progressive like so many other moral issues in which the centralized state imposes social policies with moral dimensions on an entire population; often not even by majority vote, but by administrative fiat.

And the individual citizen becomes so much chaff in the face of bureaucratic tyranny.

Americans do not yet fully realize that ObamaCare is a "work in progress." What they see now is only the thin end of the wedge, and the current controversial HHS Mandate is modest compared to what will arise farther down the road.

A "Preventive Services Task Force" has been empowered to "prioritize" (thus effectively decide) everything to be covered by private health insurance - and with perfect Kafkaesque serenity, for it makes all decisions behind closed doors, need not announce decisions in draft, and is under no obligation to consider any external suggestions. Its decisions cannot be directly appealed, and it cannot be sued for the consequences of them.

If the Americans fail to repeal ObamaCare, they will soon learn it was a stalking horse for the full "socialization" of their health-care system - for there will be no other way to resolve the contradiction between commercial competition and total regulation.

And then they will have a system like ours, in which an abortion is about the only thing you can get without waiting, committees can decide what your life is worth, and every moral nuance is crushed beneath the weight of administrative expediency. Or in a word: "progress."

Read the whole thing.

Obama's Sheriff of Nottingham Plan

Robin Hood took from the rich and gave to the poor. No doubt, that's what millions of Americans thought that is what then-candidate Obama meant when he told Joe "the plumber" that he wanted to "spread the wealth around."

Well, we can see where that wound up in the president's just-announced plan to raise overall taxes on corporations. The American Spectator: Obama's Corporate Tax Hike:

When we see the details, however, expect the closed loopholes to target oil and other non-"green" energy companies with particular aggressiveness, meaning higher gasoline and home heating oil prices for all Americans. After all, Obama needs to pay for his increasing the subsidy for the Chevy Volt from $7,500 to $10,000 per vehicle -- for a car whose average buyer has an annual income of $170,000. Now that's income redistribution!

And so the Sheriff of Nottingham - taking from the poorer to give to the richer.

Ash Wednesday 2012

The death of Jesus Christ was not unusual. In a long line of lethal violence stretching from Cain and Abel to Auschwitz, Hiroshima, New York and Baghdad, Jesus’s personal fate was simply one of untold millions for which evil triumphed and goodness was buried. Nor, on the day he died, did Jesus’s death seem un-ordinary. As Leander Keck observed of Jesus's execution day, “All three men [on Golgotha] were equally dead by sundown.”

Nor can we say that Jesus was the first person to give his life on the behalf of others. In fact, it is not readily apparent that Jesus died on anyone’s behalf. None of his disciples were arrested, for example, and there was no opportunity, hence no occurrence, of Jesus telling the Romans, “Execute me in place of them.”

Since the apostles’ day, though, Christian people have held it as an article of faith that Jesus lived and died to offer himself as a ransom for all, as atonement for our sins, as a blood offering and sacrifice by which we may be made right before God. How can this be? And even if we accept the scriptural claim that there are none of us who do good, no not one, and that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, then what made it necessary that God become man and die on a cross to redeem us from our sorry state?

For this there is, really, no answer, for it would require us to know the imponderable mind of God. As orthodoxy has held, we have the assurance that we are redeemed through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, but there is no way for us to know why redemption comes this way and not some other. As the Catholic Church has explained, God could save by any means God chooses, for God is sovereign in power and decision. But this Christ is the way we know God chose.

And yet the question, “Why?” is not so easily dismissed and answerable only from the perspective of love. For we know that God became man because of love, and that the purpose of God’s ultimate self-sacrifice was the fulfillment of love.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him (John 3:16-17).

I knew a man at Vanderbilt who had lost his son, eight, to cancer. The man said that when his son was first diagnosed, he knelt by his son's bed and prayed to God to heal his son. The cancer worsened until it was clear the boy’s illness would end in death. The man said when this fear gripped him, he started offering himself in prayer to God, kneeling by his sleeping boy and begging God with tears and anguish that if cancer there must be, to take the cancer from his son and put it inside himself.

To me, that’s what God concluded: there is no cure for human sin and its end in death except for me to be born of woman and take all the sin of the world to my death, even death on a cross.

We tend to think of sin judicially and see it dealt with in a kind of theological court, where we are found not guilty based on the pleading of Christ. But I think it is helpful also to see sin as a deep illness in the human being that we cannot cure ourselves. In the mind of God, healing this illness must be of ultimate value, the very perfection of creation. And out of love for his children, God became born of woman and took upon himself all the spiritual deficiencies of the human race. Jesus, “in whom dwelt the Godhead bodily,” who was without sin or spiritual sickness, took upon himself the sin of humankind, the deep illness of the human soul. And so we are made well. The prophet Isaiah put it this way:

Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all (Isa 53:4-6).

The apostle Paul wrote in Second Corinthians,

... God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting human sins against them. ... God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:19, 21).

The book of Hebrews offers this insight: "Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death ..." (Heb 2:14).

And so Lent: when for forty days leading to Easter’s glory we are drawn to confront today's horror and to look inside ourselves, examine our souls and reconsider how we live and why. For even though Jesus’s death was ordinary in nature, it was extraordinary in character, for in his death we find our life. Old Testament scholar Gene Tucker, pondering Isaiah’s prophecy, wrote,

There are times when we must simply surrender because we can find no way forward without God’s grace and truth. There are times when we must surrender because the ways we have chosen to go bear only God’s judgment, and we know that. But there are also times when we must surrender because God has laid hold of us so dramatically that we can scarcely do else. When this happens, the speech we get is directly from God. It comes upon us and shows us a truth we never before could have entertained. And then our tongue is free for confession and release; our sins do not overwhelm us because we can see them clearly and report them freely, because they have been clearly and freely taken away from us and laid upon another.

The tragedy of the human condition is that this salvation cost God the life of his Son, but the deep mystery of the divine nature is that in Christ's death, God sacrificed himself, for the Son and the Father are the one and the same. By the wounds that we inflicted upon him, we are made whole.

"Everybody in my area was ready to go"

When you board a domestic US airline flight and stand in the aisle, screaming "Allah is great!" after takeoff, understand that since 9/11, the other passengers will not be passive:



Hat tip: Blackfive

It begins in ashes

David Warren: "Ash Wednesday is upon us again ... ."

While we are used to getting the upbeat tone from church leaders in all congregations - that sick-making, public-relations blather I find especially irritating in sellout bishops - the Christian teaching begins instead in that assertion of Christ's. The truth may be extremely uncomfortable, and from many angles desolating, but it must be faced. We cannot build our lives or our churches upon pathetic lies.

For the truth is indivisible. Little truths matter, as well as big. Little sins matter - hypocrisy matters - and the "either/or" is a choice between truth and falsehood, not a catalogue of "lesser evils." The way forward begins in the smallest of truths, in the here and now.

It begins in ashes. Through Lent we are called upon - those who hear the call - to wear the ashes. To wear the truth of defeat and desolation, for there is no other position from which we can hope to rise.

America's best gun salesman

Is Barack Obama the "Greatest Gun Salesman in America"?

Last fall, I wrote about a surprising trend: gun sales have skyrocketed since Barack Obama became president. During that time, the stock of gunmaker Sturm Ruger (RGR) has outperformed gold. Analysts aren’t quite sure what’s causing the trend. Many anticipated a boost in sales after the election from gun owners fearful that Obama might outlaw assault weapons — the so-called “fear trade.” But they expected a brief spike, no more. Instead, gun sales kept rising, and they’ve continued to rise even since last fall. Ruger, which was up 400 percent at the time, is now up more than 500 percent.

Here is Ruger's one-year chart as of today (click for larger size):

On Feb. 22 of last year, Sturm-Ruger (RGR) could be bought for $15.60. At yesterday's close it was up 191 percent from a year ago (don't know where the writer cited above gets "500 percent").

This is a revealing graphic.

Sports and religious foolishness

Does God Want Jeremy Lin to Win? | (A)theologies | Religion Dispatches

Lin, like Tebow, is a deeply religious evangelical Christian. And while his own religious utterances have been both humble and thoughtful—Lin went to Harvard, after all—the press swirling around him has led to a spate of bad theology, which is a shame, because sports stories have the ability to capture the public imagination and have the potential to inspire us to reflect on truly important religious values, instead of truly awful ones.

The awful values, of course, have to do with theodicy: that God picks sides, and roots for one sports team over another. In the case of athletics, this belief is both ridiculous and widespread. Student athletes, and those old enough to know better, routinely pray to God to help them score the winning touchdown, vanquish their nasty opponents, or win the big trophy. During Tebow’s stunning ascent, and now during Lin’s, dozens of commentators have joined the fray. Their careers, at least the beginnings of them, have indeed been miraculous, so doesn’t this show the hand of God at work in American sports?

Of course it doesn’t. The trouble with this bad theodicy isn’t that it’s ridiculous; it’s that it’s inhuman. If God loves the Broncos, does He hate the Seahawks?

Well, not the Seahawks. The Colts, maybe.

There are three kinds of people . . .

... those who can count, and those who can't. And so with Robert Reich. Read the embedded post, below, carefully, and see whether you can count better than he.

The Left's unhinged faith

Obama's Faith-Based Liberalism

Rick Santorum’s assertion that President Obama’s agenda is not about the quality of life or jobs but “some phony ideal. Some phony theology” may not be an appropriate characterization of his religious views. However, it is an accurate description of what is wrong with the hard left in American politics, and the thinking that drives domestic policy in the Obama Administration.

Too often liberal policies are based more on faith than reason—often those are premised on assertions having little foundation in facts or modern economics. Consequently, the President advocates or imposes solutions that make the nation’s problems worse, and when confronted with disappointing results he often tells us what he believes, without offering the data and logic that brought him to those conclusions.

Leftist believe in leftism: "Beliefs over facts, assertions in place of reason, vilification of opponents—that looks a lot like religion—the worst kind."

Because they hate competition

Sure, the game is rigged, but it's the only game in town. So we need to change the rules.

In order to create the kind of job and service explosion that can provide better incomes for more Americans going forward, the government needs to shift policy. It must favor the small firm and entrepreneur: the owner-proprietor group needs to become the apple of the government’s eye. Their taxes should be cut; their paperwork burdens drastically reduced; regulations should be rewritten and simplified to meet their needs.

The reason that the country's business climate is so hostile to entrepreneurs, start-ups and small businesses is simple: when small businesses become big businesses, they buy politicians to make laws to suppress competition. Business people love competition when they're small, when they become big, not so much.

As de Tocqueville said, the government,

"... covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrial animals of which the government is the shepherd."

How blind folks can text message

Georgia Tech has developed an app for smartphones that enables users to type without looking at the screen. Great for visually impaired people.

Georgia Tech researchers have designed a texting solution that could become a modern substitute for passing notes under the table. BrailleTouch is a prototype texting app that requires only finger gestures to key in letters on touch screen devices - no sight required. Credit: The Georgia Institute of Technology

Georgia Tech researchers have built a prototype app for touch-screen mobile devices that is vying to be a complete solution for texting without the need to look at a mobile gadget's screen.
"Research has shown that chorded, or gesture-based, texting is a viable solution for eyes-free written communication in the future, making obsolete the need for users to look at their devices while inputting text on them," said Mario Romero, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Interactive Computing (IC) and the project's principal investigator.
The free open-source app, called BrailleTouch, incorporates the Braille writing system used by the visually impaired. It has been conceived as a texting tool for any of the millions of smartphone phone users worldwide.
Early studies with visually impaired participants proficient in Braille typing have demonstrated that users can input at least six times the number of words per minute when compared to other research prototypes for eyes-free texting on a touch screen. Users reach up to 32 words per minute with 92 percent accuracy with the prototype app for the iPhone.

It takes both hands to work, so it won't solve the problem of texting while driving.

Texting makes you stupid

Medical Express:

Texting affects ability to interpret words
February 20, 2012 in Psychology & Psychiatry

(Medical Xpress) -- Research designed to understand the effect of text messaging on language found that texting has a negative impact on people's linguistic ability to interpret and accept words.

The study, conducted by Joan Lee for her master's thesis in linguistics, revealed that those who texted more were less accepting of new words. On the other hand, those who read more traditional print media such as books, magazines, and newspapers were more accepting of the same words.
The study asked university students about their reading habits, including text messaging, and presented them with a range of words both real and fictitious.

"Our assumption about text messaging is that it encourages unconstrained language. But the study found this to be a myth," says Lee. "The people who accepted more words did so because they were better able to interpret the meaning of the word, or tolerate the word, even if they didn't recognize the word. Students who reported texting more rejected more words instead of acknowledging them as possible words."

Isaac Newton, theologian

It's not widely known that Sir Isaac Newton wrote more about religion than he did about science. So many more, in fact, that an Israeli library uploads Newton's theological texts.

He's considered to be one of the greatest scientists of all time. But Sir Isaac Newton was also an influential theologian who applied a scientific approach to the study of scripture, Hebrew and Jewish mysticism.

Now Israel's national library, an unlikely owner of a vast trove of Newton's writings, has digitized his theological collection - some 7,500 pages in Newton's own handwriting - and put it online. Among the yellowed texts are Newton's famous prediction of the apocalypse in 2060.

Newton revolutionized physics, mathematics and astronomy in the 17th and 18th century, laying the foundations for most of classical mechanics - with the principal of universal gravitation and the three laws of motion bearing his name.

However, the curator of Israel's national library's humanities collection said Newton was also a devout Christian who dealt far more in theology than he did in physics and believed that scripture provided a "code" to the natural world.

Empirical tests show universe is filled with dark matter

The two images illustrate the effect of gravitational lensing. A massive galaxy at the center of the right panel causes the images of the background galaxies (white spots) to be enlarged and brightened.(Image credit: Joerg Colberg, Ryan Scranton, Robert Lupton, SDSS

Physorg.com: Missing dark matter located: Intergalactic space is filled with dark matter

Researchers at the University of Tokyo’s Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU) and Nagoya University used large-scale computer simulations and recent observational data of gravitational lensing to reveal how dark matter is distributed around galaxies.

The new research concludes that galaxies have no definite “edges.” Instead galaxies have long outskirts of dark matter that extend to nearby galaxies and the intergalactic space is not empty but filled with dark matter.

The theory of dark matter was developed since 1932 to account for the fact the observable matter in the universe does not account, by far, of the calculations of massive effects in the universe.

House values plunge deeper than ever; no end in sight

First-century fragment of Gospel of Mark found?

Baptist Press - Q&A: A first-century fragment of Mark found?:

WAKE FOREST, N.C. (BP) -- Much of the biblical scholarly world has been buzzing since Feb. 1, when a New Testament professor made a claim during a debate that was news to most everyone who heard it -- a first-century fragment of Mark's Gospel may have been found.

It would be the earliest-known fragment of the New Testament, placing it in the very century of Christ and the apostles.

America in Obama's crosshairs

More Than a Touch of Malice - Ricochet.com:

In 2008, when he first ran for the Presidency, Barack Obama posed as a moderate most of the time. This time, he is openly running as a radical. His aim is to win a mandate for the fundamental transformation of the United States that he promised in passing on the eve of his election four years ago and that he promised again when he called his administration The New Foundation. In the process, he intends to reshape the Democratic coalition – to bring the old hypocrisy to an end, to eliminate those who stand in the way of the final consolidation of the administrative entitlements state, to drive out the faithful Catholics once and for all, to jettison the white working class, and to build a new American regime on a coalition of  highly educated upper-middle class whites, feminists, African-Americans, Hispanics, illegal immigrants, and those belonging to the public-sector unions. To Americans outside this coalition, he intends to show no mercy.

RealClearReligion - Faith, No Faith, and 2.1 Babies

Demographers have long know that in a modern society, it takes an average birth rate of 2.1 live-born infants per woman to maintain a steady population level. Almost all of Europe, however, has been for many, many years now is a "demographic death spiral" with dramatically falling birth rates.

Not coincidentally, the smaller families have become (and even in many cases, vanished altogether), the lower the ratio of people in Europe who adhere to religion (any religion, but especially, of course, Christianity).

However, the news about falling fertility rates, vis-a-vis religion, is not all bad:

Since the 1980s, fertility rates in several Muslim countries have collapsed at rates even faster than Europe's. The change is most spectacularly marked in Iran, where a typical woman can expect to bear 1.88 children in her lifetime (down from over 6.0 in the mid-1980s). Almost as dramatic are the falls in North African countries such as Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.

Coincidentally or not, the wave of social protest that we call the Arab Spring began in Tunisia, where sharply declining fertility illustrated the radical ongoing changes in gender and family structures, and individual expectations. I believe that these changes are the harbingers of a long-term secularization that within a few decades will make countries like Iran as cool to organized faith as Western Europe itself.

Read the whole thing:
RealClearReligion - Faith, No Faith, and 2.1 Babies

However again: As Mark Steyn has pointed out,

... demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage.

Despite their falling birth rates now in Iran and many other other Muslim lands, the rate is till very well above the replacement rate.

Should have D-U-M tatooed on his forehead

At Outside the Beltway:

From the “Sheer Genius” File

STEVEN L. TAYLOR · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2012 · 7 COMMENTS

Via WSFA: Coach resigns over nude photo on Facebook

Oxford Hills Superintendent Rick Colpitts said Paul Withee apparently meant to send a naked picture of himself to his girlfriend, but accidentally posted the image on his Facebook page.

Withee took down the picture in a matter of minutes, but the damage was done. A student saw the photo and a parent reported it.

Attention humanity: nothing good can come of sending naked pictures of yourself to other people.

For commentary, we turn to social critic Bugs Bunny:

Unemployment expired? No problem! Uncle Sugar will still pay you!

What do you do when your unemployment payments stop? Why, just go on disability, of course.

"Get ready for $5 gasoline"

Gas prices are rising fast. - mcall.com

American motorists have seen the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline rise above $3.50 a gallon on just three occasions, but it has never happened this early in the year. Analysts say it's likely a sign that pain at the pump will rise to some of the highest levels ever seen later this year.

In 2008, average gasoline prices had hit inflation-adjusted records nationally by the summer, but they didn't climb above $3.50 a gallon across the U.S. that year until April 21, according to the AAA Fuel Gauge Report. It happened again last year, but not until March 6.

But $3.50 a gallon gasoline is already here in 2012, weeks before refineries typically shut down for springtime maintenance, and weeks before the states switch from their less expensive winter blends of gasoline to more complicated and pricier summer blends.

"This definitely sets the stage, potentially, for much higher prices later this year," said Brian L. Milne, refined fuels editor for Telvent DTN, a commodity information services firm. "There's a chance that the U.S. average tops $4 a gallon by June, with some parts of the country approaching $5 a gallon."

That'll do wonders for the economy...

The illusion of recovery

Americans are deeper into personal debt than ever, which creates only an illusion of economic recovery.

“There is no means of avoiding a final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as the final and total catastrophe of the currency involved.” – Ludwig von Mises

For which evidence is before us:

ATHENS—Greece's economy contracted at an annual rate of 7% in the fourth quarter, versus a decline of 5% in the previous quarter, official data showed Tuesday.

An entry in the world's thinnest book ...

Which is, goes the old joke, Liberals Who Have Been Mugged and Are Still Liberals. To wit:

I'm sorry, but this has me

A Supreme Court spokeswoman says Justice Stephen Breyer was robbed last week by a machete-wielding intruder at his vacation home in the West Indies.

Why is that funny?  Becasue Justice Bryer has said in a Supreme Court opinion: 

“I can find nothing in the Second Amendment’s text, history, or underlying rationale that could warrant characterizing it as ‘fundamental’ insofar as it seeks to protect the keeping and bearing of arms for private self-defense purposes.”

What I'd like to know is whether Justice Bryer has now changed his mind, or whether he still continues to hold that opinion, 

American Catholicism's Pact With the Devil - Ricochet.com

American Catholicism’s Pact With the Devil - Ricochet.com

When entitlements stand in for charity and the Social Gospel is preached in place of the Word of God, heaven on earth becomes the end, and Christianity goes by the boards.

Don't forget as well the Church Left's subordination of its orientation to Marxism.

Time To Admit It: The Church Has Always Been Right On Birth Control

Time To Admit It: The Church Has Always Been Right On Birth Control:

Here's the thing, though: the Catholic Church is the world's biggest and oldest organization. It has buried all of the greatest empires known to man, from the Romans to the Soviets. It has establishments literally all over the world, touching every area of human endeavor. It's given us some of the world's greatest thinkers, from Saint Augustine on down to René Girard. When it does things, it usually has a good reason. Everyone has a right to disagree, but it's not that they're a bunch of crazy old white dudes who are stuck in the Middle Ages.

So, what's going on?

The Church teaches that love, marriage, sex, and procreation are all things that belong together. That's it. But it's pretty important. And though the Church has been teaching this for 2,000 years, it's probably never been as salient as today.

Video proof that Libya's freedom fighters have turned into brutal torturers | Mail Online

Video proof that Libya's freedom fighters have turned into brutal torturers | Mail Online:

A terrified Libyan man is beaten and tortured with electric shocks by youths who appear to be former revolutionary fighters.
The images, taken from a video handed to The Mail on Sunday in a Tripoli refugee camp, will be seen as fresh evidence that those who deposed Colonel Gaddafi with the help of the West are adopting methods as brutal as the dead tyrant’s.
The film shows three men tying up the blood-spattered man before whipping him repeatedly with cables, touching him on his skin with electric wires and taunting him as he pleads for mercy.

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so - back in March.

When/if the rebels take control of the country, they will carry out a bloodbath against their tribal foes that we are not willing to imagine today.

See also.

Even Harvard faculty denounce Obama

Notre Dame Faculty to Obama: ‘This Is a Grave Violation of Religious Freedom and Cannot Stand’ | CNSnews.com:

(CNSNews.com) - Twenty-five Notre Dame faculty members--led by the university’s top ethics expert, and including some of the school’s most eminent scholars--have signed a statement declaring that President Barack Obama’s latest version of his administration’s mandate that all health insurance plans in the United States must cover sterilizations and all FDA-approved contraceptives, including those that cause abortions, is “a grave violation of religious freedom and cannot stand."

The statement—put out on the letterhead of the University of Notre Dame Law School--is also signed by leading scholars from other major American colleges and universities, including Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Georgetown, Brigham Young, Yeshiva and Wheaton College.

The solar system has extra oxygen

"This just in: The Solar System is different from the space just outside it."
Alien matter in the solar system: A galactic mismatch.

RealClearReligion - No Room for Catholics in Obama Country

RealClearReligion - No Room for Catholics in Obama Country:

Here is what is particularly worrisome: the state seems no longer satisfied with a slow but steady evolution toward secularity; it is aggressively forcing Catholic hospitals off the stage, for it is creating for them an impossible situation. If they cave in and provide insurance for these verboten procedures, they have effectively de-Catholicized themselves; and if they refuse to provide such insurance, they will be met with fines of millions of dollars, which they cannot possibly pay.

In either case, they are forced out of business as Catholic. And this seems, sadly, to be precisely what the Obama administration wants.

At the University of Notre Dame, on the occasion of his receiving (controversially enough) an honorary degree of laws, President Obama publicly and vociferously pledged that he would provide for a "conscience clause" for those who wanted, for religious reasons, to opt out of a policy they find objectionable. But with this recent mandate, he has utterly gone back on his word.

The secularist state recognizes that its principle enemy is the Church Catholic. Accordingly, it wants Catholicism off the public stage and relegated to a private realm where it cannot interfere with secularism's totalitarian agenda. I realize that in using that particular term, I'm dropping a rhetorical bomb, but I am not doing so casually.

As I wrote before, the Obama administration believes in, "Nothing outside the state."

On Sabbatical

I am taking an indefinite sabbatical from Sense of Events. From time to time I will post links to interesting things I find on my Tumblr blog, "Accuratio!" Below is a frame insert thereof. To scroll, place your cursor over the frame and scroll away. The headlines on Accuratio! are all links to the site referenced in the post; click on the headline and the link will open inside the frame. Or just click over to the actual site.