Chadwick Boy Comes Home

He walked into the room to the chorus of 300 kazoos playing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Michael Reagan is truly loved in these parts. The Republican Women luncheon was sold out, and we were not disappointed. Michael shared some of his childhood experiences here on the Hill. -- He attended Chadwick School because Ron and Jane did not want their adopted son to be exposed to the temptations of Beverly Hills High (and they wanted him out of the house).

He told heartwarming stories about his dad, who was a bit of a cheap skate.

Michael walked into his father’s hospital room --

Michael: How are you doing dad?

Ronald: Well, you know son, I was shot yesterday. (in that soft, slow Reagan tone)

Michael: I know that dad; I just wanted to know how you are feeling.

Ronald: Well, Michael, I’m feeling OK. But I have some advice for you.

Michael: What’s that dad?

Ronald: If you’re going to get shot, don’t wear your new suit.

Michael: I see it dad, the blue suit all cut up lying in the corner.

Ronald: Yes, they had to cut it off me. I was hoping they would try to save the suit. After all, I am the President.

Michael: I know dad.

Ronald: Michael, the boy who shot me; his name is Hinkley. Do you think his parents have money?

Michael: They are oil people, dad.

Ronald: Well, do you think they’d buy me a new suit?

And so it went, one endearing story after another, for over an hour, without a single note.

But there were serious moments as well. Like when he spoke about how we just have to beat Obama before he destroys our country. Michael would vote for any of the Republican candidates (even Ron Paul) and he wishes they would stop taking pot shots at each other and concentrate on Obama. Republicans are sometimes their own worst enemies.

Democrats, being ideologically pure, have no problem with any Democrat candidate (even Barbara Boxer), while Republicans are a more diverse bunch. I thought about what I believe, as a conservative Republican, and contrasted it to mainline Democrat ideology.

Republican vs. Democrat

Rights bestowed by God vs. Rights granted by the State
Individual liberty vs. Government control of our lives
The Constitution vs. A living constitution
Individual responsibility vs. Cradle-to-grave welfare
Life vs. “Choice” (ie a woman’s right to kill)
American is exceptional vs. Just like Greece is exceptional, or China, or..
Right to bear arms vs. Gun control
Legal immigration vs. Open borders
Right to work vs. Unions

Democrats are congenitally wedded to their beliefs, in some cases with a religious fervor (eg. the sacred right of a woman to reproductive freedom). By contrast, Republicans are renegades: Goldwater was pro choice, Reagan granted amnesty to illegal aliens, Bush gave us prescription drugs at government expense, and, did you know, William F. Buckley supported legalizing pot.

Michael told the story about his dad appointing Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court in order to keep a promise to his daughter, Maureen, who in return gave up campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment.

Several times Michael reminded us to be more like Democrats – to get into the game. Write letters to the editor, knock on doors, don’t just send money like we always do.

Now we need to nominate a ticket and get behind it. For my money the best would be Mitt Romney as the presidential nominee with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. or New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for VP. It’s a WASP-free ticket -- a Mormon and a Roman Catholic -- How diverse is that!!

Car Wars

Imagine your teenage son and his cheerleader girlfriend hopping into his brand new jazzy sports scar for its maiden spin. OK, I know this merely reinforces the Palos Verdes stereotype of indulgent parents and spoiled kids. But, hey, the kid is an honor student who will be attending Stanford U. in the fall. Anyway, the car enters the 405 freeway and carefully moves across toward the HOV speed lane. Suddenly the unimaginable happens: the throttle opens wide, the engine revs into the red zone, the brakes cease to function and the steering wheel locks tight. A disaster is imminent.

This is merely the opening scene of Chris Malburg’s new techno-thriller, “Car Wars: A Novel of Industrial Terrorism.” (Get it at http://www.carwarsebook.com/ or at Amazon.com). My friend and PVE neighbor, Chris is a noted business writer who is trying his hand at fiction. And his new book is a fun read, especially on a Kindle at RAT Beach. Without giving away the plot, let me just say that there are plenty of villains in the book, among them Yonggan Zhanshi, ruthless industrialist in control of a devastating weapon of mass destruction, the head of the Chinese National Bank and the honorable President of the PRC.

In a memorable scene the Chinese President reads the riot act to the American president. Here is an excerpt:

...The Chinese President frowned at his American counterpart. “America is bankrupt,” he began. “Morally as well as economically. I can do nothing about the former, but I can do something about your economics. I am your banker. I am now calling in the money I have lent to you. From this moment on, you work for me.” The Chinese President paused for a few seconds to let the shock of what he had just said fully sink in.

“America’s Social Security, its Medicare and Medicaid and its unfunded pension liabilities created by the powerful labor unions now comes to 93 percent of your gross domestic product. There is no more money left to pay for anything else. And so you rely on China, Japan and the UK to buy your Treasury debt to fund your cash needs. No more!
“Your baby-boom generation is now retired. This large portion of your former workforce no longer pays taxes, but they do suck down your government’s benefits like hogs on a teet. Had you raised taxes to pay for all this years ago and reduced spending, things might have been different--”

“I have been in consultation with my fellow holders of US debt. The IMF is calling the temporary line of credit it granted the United States. You have 30 days to repay the $100 billion you borrowed. Additionally, China demands that the US immediately repay $500 billion in Treasury securities coming due in the next 60 days. Not only will China not lend you the $300 billion you have come here to borrow, but my country will no longer be in attendance at your Treasury auctions.”

The Chinese President stopped his pacing in front of his counterpart, turned and looked him in the eye. “This financial hiatus China is taking from America does not have to be permanent. If the US puts its financial house in order and affords China one other courtesy, I may elect to resume doing business on a limited scale.”

The American President sat very still in his chair. He rejoiced that there might yet be a way out of this financial morass. “Yes, Mr. President? What kinds of house cleaning tasks do you have in mind?”

The Chinese President’s knife-edged hand slashed the air, making his first point. “America will limit the coverage of Medicare and Medicaid--no more expensive treatments. Either your people will pay for them on their own or they will do without.” The hand slashed the air a second time, “Next, no health insurance subsidies. You will explain to your greedy, unemployed nation of welfare recipients that healthcare is not a right of citizenship but instead, a personal responsibility.”

“Next,” continued the Chinese President, “You will eliminate all nonessential governmental expenses. You will begin with farming subsidies, ethanol production, public broadcasting, energy conservation and trade promotion.” The knife-edged hand slashed the air yet a third time, “You will go to a flat tax system where everyone--every single American citizen--pays taxes equivalent to 18 percent on the income they earn. You will eliminate all deductions and tax credits. You will also increase the gasoline tax to $2 a gallon. You will balance your federal budget.”

The US President raised his hand for permission to speak. “That’s a lot to take in. Are you finished, Mr. President?”

“I will tell you when I am finished...

Good stuff that. I had no idea that the PRC President was a Republican. In fact some of his action items could be taken straight from Newt Gingrich’s new 21st Century Contract with America.

Faster than Light

"We don't serve faster than light neutrinos in here" said the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.

The cognoscenti were abuzz -- Einstein was wrong! Relativity was debunked! European scientists at CERN in Switzerland and Gran Sasso in Italy had shown that the speed of light is not really the limit. Physicists, on the other hand, were mildly amused, one, even, who promised to eat his shorts if the experimental result was correct. The great majority of physicists, a clear consensus, were skeptical of the results, thinking that there must be an experimental error.

Interestingly, no one in the physics establishment mentioned the consensus. No one accused the experimenters of being Relativity-deniers. No one tried to stop publication of the seminal paper in a prestigious journal. And no one claimed that the CERN-Sasso scientists were bigots – after all, Einstein was a Jew. In short, the physics community reacted not at all like the global warming community when confronted with contrary evidence.

So what was all the excitement about? The experiment, code named OPERA, was built to detect neutrinos, ghostly subatomic particles, which are produced at CERN and aimed towards Gran Sasso, 700kms away. There are several types of neutrinos and two of the species are called mu neutrinos (mu-nu) and tau neutrinos (tau-nu). The primary purpose of the experiment was to determine if any of the mu-nus from CERN had converted into tau-nus along the way. If so, this would help establish the idea that neutrinos have a finite (really tiny) mass that might account for the much-sought-after “Dark Matter” hidden in the universe. A sidelight was to measure the time of flight of the neutrinos and compare it to the time light would take to travel the same distance. Surprise! The neutrinos took less time, 60 nanoseconds less.

OPERA chief scientist Antonio Ereditato explained that “we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy. And of course the consequences can be very serious.” Indeed, much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his Special Theory of Relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light (in vacuum).

Faster-than-light particles, so-called tachyons, have long been contemplated by theoretical physicists. If they did exist they could be used to send signals into one's own past, a clear paradox of causality -- and an explanation of the backwards joke at the beginning of this note. In fact, the most famous quip about “faster than light” has by now attained a venerable age (Reginald Buller in Punch, 12/19/23):

There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She started one day
In a relative way,
And returned on the previous night.

The upheaval of known physics resulting from the discovery of tachyons would be momentous. A few astounding effects are discussed briefly in the Appendix.

In a related development, the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics has been granted for an experimental error! It was 1997 and Adam Riess was sure he'd spotted a blatant error in his results -- measurements of exploding stars implied that the universe was expanding at a faster and faster rate, instead of slowing down, as everyone expected. Indeed, astrophysicists believed that the rate of expansion of the universe -- set in motion by the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago -- would be slowing down due to the influence of gravity. The goal was to figure out how rapid the deceleration was. What the scientists found, instead, was that the expansion of the universe was accelerating -- an observation that could be explained by the existence of a mysterious “Dark Energy” that acts like anti-gravity. Further experiments supported this finding and, even though no one knows what the Dark Energy is, the experimenters were awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize.

In breaking news (10/5/11): The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Dan Shechtman, an Israeli scientist, for his discovery of quasi-crystals, a form of matter that was not thought to exist. Shechtman faced skepticism, even expulsion from his research team, before his discovery won widespread acceptance as a fundamental breakthrough. “The main lesson that I have learned over time is that a good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he read in the textbooks,” Shechtman, 70, told a news conference in Haifa, Israel.

These cases illustrate the way real science should work. It is not politically motivated, and is not right just because it is believed, no matter the consensus.

Appendix

In classical physics, mass is independent of speed. In Relativity, however, Einstein showed that the mass of a particle is related to its velocity, v:

M = M0/sqrt(1- v2/c2)

where M0 is the particle’s rest mass (mass at zero speed), c is the light speed and sqrt(…..) signifies the square root of the quantity in brackets. As one tries to accelerate a particle, and its velocity increases, so does its mass because of the v in the denominator of the equation. That makes it harder to speed up the particle. The result is that for all normal particles (we might call the tardyons) the speed has an upper limit of c, the speed of light.

Note that for tachyons, if they exist, the term v/c exceeds one, and the term in the brackets is negative. Since the square root of a negative number is imaginary, the mass of a tachyon is a strange thing indeed.

Another curious effect is that, unlike ordinary particles, the speed of a tachyon increases as its energy decreases. In particular, energy approaches zero when v approaches infinity. Therefore, just as tardyons are forbidden to break the light-speed barrier, so too are tachyons forbidden from slowing down to below c, because infinite energy is required to reach the barrier from either above or below.

Some Scary Numbers

You may recall the catchphrase “Billions and Billions” (of stars) that was associated with astronomer Carl Sagan’s popular TV show Cosmos.(1) It seemed like an enormous number, commensurate with the vastness of the universe. Now, however, Billion is passe’, Trillion has become the new Billion –- such as in the US Federal budget deficit for 2011 is more than a Trillion dollars – and we need to recalibrate our mental calculators. So much has changed.

I remember making $1.80 an hour hauling beef for Wilson & Co, the meat packers. That was 1961 and I was not making much more than the black maids in that new movie “The Help.” And I was paying income tax and FICA.

Today the Government Motors unionized workers make $28 an hour (plus another equal amount in benefits) and yet complain. They just got a signing bonus of $5,000 plus inflation protection to ink their latest contract. Now that $28/hr is a scary number because it is unsustainable. We cannot compete in the global marketplace when nut-turners make $28 an hour. And thus far we have been somewhat lucky since the countries that make good cars –- Germany, Japan, South Korea –- are all expensive places to manufacture them. When the $5 per hour Chinese learns how to make a good car – say in 5 years – it will be all over except the shouting.

But I digress. What I really want to talk about are the scary large numbers. Take $1 Trillion (that is a million x $million) for example. $1 Trillion is the amount the US Federal Government collects in income taxes from those of us lucky enough to pay income taxes. It is also equal to the amount we claim on our deductions; thus the tax code saves us an equal amount, ie $1 Trillion. For the average Joe the deductions come from mortgage interest, charitable contributions, supporting your mother-in-law, and the like. Note that only about 10% of the $1 Trillion tax savings goes to those evil corporations (which happen to employ our neighbors). So when Obama talks about generating a few hundred billion dollars by closing tax loopholes, it is largely our loopholes he wants to close. And remember, also, that nearly half of US households pay no Federal income tax at all. When the President talks about paying our fair share, I wonder if it is those folks he wants to do more.

An even scarier number is $14 Trillion. That is roughly the US Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the total value of all goods and services produced in a year. But $14Trillion is also roughly the value of the Federal government debt, and also the total US household debt. Let’s do some arithmetic. If we divide the GDP by the US population, some 310 million, then the GDP per person is about $45,000, so is the Federal debt per person, and so is the personal debt of each person. For a family of four, that sums up to $180,000 in all three categories. Thus the average family owes $180,000 in government debt (not including State debt) and another $180,000 in family debt. Those are some scary numbers. Could it get much worse?

Oh, yes it can. Have you heard about the UNFUNDED LIABILITIES? Projecting into the future, the revenues from all Federal taxes will not be able to fund the required expenditures. The numbers are actually quite staggering: Social Security - $17T, Medicare - $88T, adding up to more than $100 Trillion dollars. Since the private net worth of all Americans together is estimated at just over $50 Trillion dollars by the Federal Reserve, you can see the problem.

James Madison foresaw the problem with government excess in Federalist 51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.

It is pretty clear that the government, at least since FDR, and at all levels, has failed to live up to its obligation of restraint. Then Obama goosed it, but good!

(1) The title of Sagan’s last book was “Billions and Billions.” As a humorous tribute to him, a sagan was defined as a unit of measurement equal to at least four billion, since the lower bound of a number conforming to the constraint of billions and billions must be two billion plus two billion. What is the US deficit measured in sagans? Or should we call it an obama?

Imagine God and Country

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try…

It was the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and we were at church. The service was moving and memorable. Then the minister announced that the next song would be John Lennon’s Imagine, and added that he was very glad it was chosen. I wondered why?

In the book Lennon in America, by Geoffrey Giuliano, Lennon himself explained that Imagine was “anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it's sugar-coated, it's accepted.” Imagine is commonly referred to as the “atheist’s anthem.” So why sing such a song in church? Why, especially, on a day of national sorrow? Have we somehow misplaced our moral compasses?

The next day I read about a research study by eminent Notre Dame sociology professor Christian Smith. The study asked about the moral lives of young people 18 - 23 years of age, and the results are depressing. (“If it Feels Right,” David Brooks, New York Times, 9/12/11)

When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. The default position is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. The study revealed an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism -- of moral relativism and nonjudgmentalism.

Imagine all the people
Living for today

When there is no God or Heaven, living for today seems like a reasonable ethics.

For decades, thinkers in many disciplines have warned about the erosion of a shared moral framework. Alaisdair MacIntyre argues that the disintegration began during the Enlightenment with the rejection of Aristotle’s teleological idea -- that human life had a proper end, and that human beings could not reach this natural end without preparation. Throughout history, society has served to provide this preparation through the family, the church, school and the state. The group was seen to be the essential moral unit. Religion defined rules and practices, families imposed moral discipline and schools supported the families. Now, however, we are told that it does not matter what we believe as long as we follow our hearts -- the individual as the essential moral unit.

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too

The founders of our great country firmly believed that God was the foundation of virtue and that “respect for His authority, mediated by the authority of parents, was the foundation of godly character.” The public schools were established with the goal of reinforcing this parental obligation to mold moral citizens.

Somehow, through machinations known only to the intellectual soul, the “Men in Black” decided that religion needed to be banished from the public square. Thus teachers were left toothless in their battle with the child’s instinctive willfulness. Now there are movements afoot to banish the Pledge of Allegiance from the schools as well. Heaven help us if the courts get to decide.

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

Imagine, indeed! Every time the sharing all the world crowd has taken control of a society or nation the result has been violence and widespread destitution. The forces that are trying to transform this country into a Lennonesque utopia must be resisted, or we will inherit the culture we deserve, and it won’t be pretty.

References

Barzun, Jacques, The Culture We Deserve
Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind
Bork, Robert, Slouching Toward Gomorrah
Himmelfarb, Gertrude, The De-Moralization of Society
Hunter, James, The Death of Character
Levin, Mark, Men in Black
MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue

PolyMath or Pretender

I like to read the New York Times articles by Paul Krugman: though pretentious, they are usually good for a few laughs. You see, Krugman is a Nobel Prize winner in Economics who yet adheres to Keynesianism, an outmoded and generally discredited economic theory. Although it has been clearly shown that Keynesian government “investment” actually prolonged the Great Depression, and that his theory utterly failed to explain Jimmy Carter’s stagflation, Krugman still clings to his childish belief that yet another “stimulus” is just what we need to cure the Obama recession.

Occasionally Krugman goes off the reservation and tries to display his scientific acumen. He is, after all, the guy who wrote an essay on the computation of interest rates on goods in transit near the speed of light. I kid you not. (See “Sixty-seven, and Smarter than Paul Krugman,” palosverdesblog, 5/5/09.) In his recent Times piece, “Republicans Against Science” (8/28/11), Krugman criticized Rick Perry for this “vile” statement: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.” Yep, Krugman called that “vile.” Let us see if Mr. Krugman knows what he is talking about, or is he just a pretender.

What makes a scientific theory? Let me use an example to illustrate the concept. If I say that things fall down, that is true, but is not a scientific theory. If I add that things fall down because the Earth attracts them that is a hypothesis, still not a theory. If say that all the planets move in orbits because the Sun attracts them, that generalization is still less than a theory. When, however, I say that the force of attraction between the planets and the sun is proportional to the product of the masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them, then I am able to calculate the motion of the planets for comparison (and prediction). Now I have a scientific theory.

Thus a scientific theory is more than an idea. It must be descriptive, quantitative, predictive and testable. Thus, it must also be falsifiable. Newton’s gravity meets all these criteria. As an exercise for the reader, ask yourself if evolution does the same. Treat microevolution (Lamarck, c1800, which predates Darwin) and macroevolution (Darwin’s big idea) separately. Here I’ll put global warming “science” to the test.

The central premise of global warming theory is that man-made carbon dioxide emissions have been trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere and warming the earth. Since the beginning of the industrial age, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing inexorably, from about 280 ppm in 1800 to 390 ppm today, an increase of 39%. Yet during that time the average global temperature has gone up and down. And during the Medieval Warming (900 -1300AD), before the advent of the industrial age, the global temperature was comparable to today.
Even overlooking the obvious fact that to base your science on one variable – actually a small proportion of one variable – is not science, the evidence does not even support the idea. Indeed, the global warming “science” - based on computer models - fails the criteria of a scientific theory. In the memorable words of physicist Wolfgang Pauli, it is “not even wrong.”

As for pseudo-polymath Paul Krugman, his theme song should be
“Yes, I’m the great pretender…”

The Logical Dead End of the Nanny State

The Western world, as I recently noted (“The Abolition of America,” 7/4/11) is in the process of rejecting the natural tradition of objective right and wrong. One of the sad consequences has been a cultural and moral decay that has infected the greater part of old Europe. Now, only a month or so later, we have witnessed riots in the streets of London and throughout England. Many observers of the British scene have commented on the root causes of the senseless destruction. Three of my favorites - Mark Steyn, Theodore Dalrymple, Ann Coulter - plus Prime Minister David Cameron -- contributed their wisdom to the following analysis.
Lord, please forgive my plagiarizing.

There are many lessons for us from London in flames, as gangs of feral youths trashed and looted their own neighborhoods. There is a saying in Britain for people who undermine their own living quarters – they call it “shitting on your own doorstep.” And this rioting suggests that the welfare state has given rise to a generation perfectly happy to do that.

The London rioters are the children of dependency, the progeny of Big Government: they have been marinated in stimulus their entire lives. One-fifth of children are raised in homes in which no adult works – in which the weekday ritual of rising, dressing and leaving for gainful employment is entirely unknown. One-tenth of the adult population has done not a day's work since Tony Blair took office on May 1, 1997.

The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and if it does not receive that high standard, that is a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived, even though each one has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor, quite likely, any member of his family made much of a contribution. Indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognize this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude.

And consigning the violence to rage over reduced job opportunities and welfare doesn’t quite wash. A large number of the vandals and looters are teenagers on their school vacations rather than desperate twenty- or thirty-year olds recently out of a job and with a family to support. As written in the Daily Telegraph, the rioters hardly represented a beleaguered minority neglected by the state:
So far, those arrested and charged include an 11-year-old girl, a 31-year-old primary school teacher and the 19-year-old daughter of a company director who is currently at Exeter University. The participation of those from relatively affluent backgrounds, either in full-time education or full-time employment, makes nonsense of the knee-jerk response of blaming cuts to the Education Maintenance Allowance, among other things.

A more plausible “root cause” is the parlous state of British inner-city state education, which has turned out a generation of unemployable youth, who are understandably angry at their dim prospects and their miserable state-provided living environments. This introduces a different, and altogether more damning, diagnosis: the failure of the policies of post-war social democratic orthodoxy, and the cumulative growth of the welfare state, to address the problems of urban poverty and the integration of marginalized classes into wider society – indeed, the state’s role in destroying the integrity of families, in discouraging bourgeois aspiration, and in uprooting traditional community values which historically served to harmonize and reconcile society to itself.

Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed to address the “moral collapse” that led to the widespread looting and violence. He has pledged to “review every aspect of our work to mend our broken society: schools, welfare, families, parenting, addiction,… to the twisting and misrepresenting of human rights that has undermined personal responsibility.

“These riots were not about race,” Cameron said. “These riots were not about government cuts ... And these riots were not about poverty.”

“No, this was about behavior ... people showing indifference to right and wrong; people with a twisted moral code; people with a complete absence of self-restraint.”

He listed irresponsibility, selfishness, fatherless children, reward without effort, crime without punishment and behaving as if one’s choices have no consequences as some of the problems contributing to a “slow-motion moral collapse.”

“What last week has shown is that this moral neutrality, this relativism – it’s not going to cut it anymore,” he stressed.

And the “social fightback” starts with families. “If we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we’ve got to start.”

When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the British welfare regime in 1942, his goal was the "abolition of want" to be accomplished by "co-operation between the State and the individual." In attempting to insulate the citizenry from life's vicissitudes, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Today want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.

For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population. Here is America, the Democrats' real achievement has been in destroying the family, thereby creating an endless supply of potential rioters. When blacks were only four generations out of slavery, their illegitimacy rate was about 23 percent (lower than the white illegitimacy rate is now). Then Democrats decided to help them!

It is barely two generations since LBJ's Great Society programs began and the rate of black illegitimacy has tripled to 72 percent. Meanwhile, the white illegitimacy rate has exploded from 4 percent to 29 percent. Instead of a “War on Poverty,” it should have been called a “War on the Family.”

The vast and permanent underclass created by the welfare state is a great success story for the Democratic Party, which now has a loyal constituency of deadbeats who automatically vote for the Democrats to keep their “benefits” flowing.

It's the Democrat Party “heroin dealer” model of government.

The Abolition of America July 4. 2011

As Americans celebrate our Independence, it behooves us to heed the warning of a man who did not live in freedom. “To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots,” said Alexander Solzhenitzyn. You sever a people’s roots by destroying the memory of their historical past. Today, too many Americans, particularly young people, are ignorant of our past, or believe a distorted version of it.

Jesus said “I am the Truth,” and without truth there can be no freedom. In the past century, British author C.S. Lewis wrote eloquently on the subjects of truth and identity. Clive Staples Lewis (“Jack” to his friends) wrote everything from children’s fiction to philosophy and theology, from The Chronicles of Narnia to Mere Christianity. The Abolition of Man was his classic defense of truth (the natural law) and his goal was nothing short of an attempt to salvage Western civilization. Lewis believed that the Western world was in the process of rejecting the tradition of objective right and wrong, and he saw this rejection of truth being taught in the school systems of his day. Fifty years later, with the advent of post-modernity, the question of “Truth” is, indeed, the question of our time.

Lewis would be appalled to find that the “debunking” program he described in The Abolition of Man has done so much damage to the Britain he knew. As Lewis feared, the cultural demolition was deliberate. The self-anointed reformers admitted as much: “We recognize that the British people love the old ways, and that there is no popular clamour for change. Nevertheless, change we must.” Sadly, this change has led to a cultural and moral decline that has infected the greater part of old Europe. The last two Roman Catholic popes have written with passion on the dangers of a “dictatorship of relativism” in Europe. But how did this cultural sea change come about? Was the root cause intellectual or material? And to what degree has America been infected?

The radical idea that truth is a state constructed by the mind is at the root of a cultural infection. With reason as the sole guide, each reasoning person could (should) construct his own private version of truth (subjectivism). What inevitably follows is relativism -- that each individual’s conception of truth is as valid as any other individual’s. When applied to society, there are no objective truths, only prevailing versions disseminated by ruling social groups. When applied to virtue, moral relativism is the result. Each society creates its own ethics. The ideology of relativism holds that all cultures, ethnic groups, sexual preference or special interest group are equally valid, deserve communal support and mandated representation. This is “multiculturalism” today.

Radical thought in America has a long history but it entered the mainstream in the 1930’s and marinated through the 60’s. Intellectuals in fields such as education and psychology had been infected by Radical Enlightenment philosophy and Marxism. Scholars taught the tactics of “Critical Theory:” destructive criticism of all the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, morality, the family, sexual restraint, capitalism, patriotism and conservatism. Their strategy was psychological conditioning: “America’s children could be conditioned at school to reject their parent’s social and moral beliefs as racist, sexist and homophobic, and conditioned to embrace a new morality.”

Now the radicals of the 1960’s have become professors of philosophy, sociology, literature, black studies, feminine studies, GLBT studies,… and, most ominously, professors at the education schools of nearly all colleges and universities in America. In the Ed. schools they are able to indoctrinate the future teachers of America in all manner of radical thought including relativism, multiculturalism, gender equality and hateful criticism of Western culture, America in particular.
Their first step is the deconstruction and reinvention of history. Lying about our history has now become commonplace. Take, for example, the National History Standards published by UCLA in 1994. This curriculum promoted multiculturalism by minimizing the achievements of Europeans and their descendents in America in order to focus attention on blacks and American Indians. Students were told they need to “Analyze the Declaration of Independence (mentioned only once) from the perspective of men and women, and people of Native American, European, and African descent.” The US Senate denounced the UCLA farce by a vote of 99-1.
But that did not stop the revisionists.

In 2005 the California State Board of Education approved the eighth-grade history text, Creating America. Produced by Houghton Mifflin, Creating America identifies ten representative American heroes: Abigail Adams, Crispus Attucks, Andrew Jackson, Queen Liluokalanai, Abraham Lincoln, Juan Sequin, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, George Washington, Ida B. Wells and Zitkala-Sa. In fact, this highly unrepresentative American history rather vaguely resembles a “Soviet-style history” cobbled together from representative national heroes that conforms to multicultural ideology.

One of the most popular American history texts at the high school level is Howard Zinn’s People’s History. Reflecting postmodern revisionist ideology, Zinn declares that “there is no such thing as pure fact.” The theory of history offered by Marx --“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle”-- is relied upon by Zinn to explain all of American history, which is portrayed as a continuous chain of immoral colonialism, imperialism and exploitation of minorities and the laboring underclass. Predictably, Zinn draws a moral equivalence between America and the 9/11 terrorists. Yet nowhere in his book will the student learn about Washington's Farewell Address, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or Reagan's speech at the Brandenburg Gate.

More recently, the state of CA passed a bill that would require teaching the contributions of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people. The textbooks will need to be modified accordingly. Is it actually a fact that GLBT contributions have been systematically excluded from the texts? Of course, facts mean nothing when you are pursuing an agenda, in this case the abolition of the centuries old tradition of heterosexual marriage.

So what is left of our culture? Was the redefinition of the words “is” and “sex” by President Clinton an aberration? In one of the founding texts of sociology, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Emile Durkheim wrote that by defining what is “deviant,” we are enabled to know what is not, and hence to live by shared standards. In 1993, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan authored a now-famous essay, “Defining Deviancy Down.” In it, he argued that social scientists, the courts, politicians, and some in the general public had been busy redefining deviancy down, so much so “as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, (while) also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard.”

How far have we regressed since then? “This is the Brave New World that mindless tolerance, diversity and lawsuits on their behalf have wrought. The decline of American civilization since the 1960s has been so fast and so dramatic that it takes one's breath away,” said my friend Dennis Prager. As Dostoyevsky prophesized many years ago, “If there is no God, everything is permitted.”

I’m confident that Jack would agree.

Ask a Jew

One Sunday past I traveled out to Pasadena with good buddy Jersey George to attend a show billed as “Religion on the Line” but promoted by the performers as “Ask a Jew.” Longtime friends and KRLA Radio hosts Dennis Prager and Hugh Hewitt put on quite a show for the 700+ religious conservatives gathered in the Hilton Hotel ballroom.

Throughout the performance Hugh played the straight man to Dennis’ wise man. At the start Hugh asked the audience how many were Jewish (about one quarter), Roman Catholic (same), Evangelical (half), Muslim (none) and atheist (1). It is interesting that three fourths were Christian and that Mainline Protestant was not polled, perhaps signifying the conservatism of the audience.

Hugh asked questions of Dennis for two hours, dealing mostly with what it means to be Jewish in America. Prager was ever-ready with insightful and, frequently hysterical, responses, having spoken on the topic hundreds of times and written several best-selling books, including “Nine Questions People Ask about Judaism” with Rabbi Joseph Telushkin.

Just a sample question dealt with the afterlife. Dennis explained that most Jews do not believe in heaven or hell, in spite of what the Torah says. Judaism preaches an afterlife, including the resurrection of the body, but Jews say -- whatever?

In describing the Orthodox, Conservative and Reform branches of Judaism, Dennis mentioned that the Orthodox Jews do not generally accept converts. You may be an Orthodox Jew only if your mother was born a Jew. I thought what a wonderful place America is, where there can be three radically different forms of a single religion, and no one bats an eye. It reminded me of an incident that occurred in England last year that was not so wonderful.

Europe’s largest Orthodox Jewish school is in London and it has long accepted only Jewish students. Last year, when it denied entry to the son of a Jewish father and convert Jewish mother, the parents sued. In a scary decision, the British court found for the parents and against the school on the grounds that the basis for Orthodox Judaism is “racist.” In his bizarre opinion, the chief justice equated the Jewish doctrine of matrilineal descent with South African apartheid. Britain’s chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, was apoplectic: “An English court has declared the religious definition of Jewish status to be racist,… in effect declaring Judaism racist.” (David Goldman, First Things magazine, Jan. 2010)

Just last week the British courts again interjected themselves in religious matters. A black Christian couple was denied the right to continue raising foster children because their views on homosexuality were in conflict with gay rights, which take precedence over their religious beliefs. The grandparents, Owen and Eunice Johns, have already fostered 15 children and were praised by social workers as “kind and hospitable people” who “respond sensitively” to youngsters.

But social workers raised concerns that their attitudes to homosexuality would conflict with the new Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations. During the case, the Equality and Human Rights Commission argued that the children risk being “infected by Christian moral views.”

Outside court, Mr. and Mrs. Johns, aged 65 and 62, said they were “extremely distressed and had only wanted to offer a loving home to a child in need.” They believe homosexuality is “against God’s law and morals” – but said they are not homophobic and would “accept and love” any child. (Tamara Cohen, UK Mail Online, 1st March 2011)

Meanwhile, Islamic religious (sharia) courts have been established in Britain to operate in parallel to British courts. A report entitled “Sharia Law in Britain: A Threat to One Law for All and Equal Rights” begins with Suhaib Hasan, Secretary General of the Islamic Sharia Council, saying, “If Sharia law is implemented, then you can turn this country into a haven of peace because once a thief's hand is cut off nobody is going to steal.” There are presently over 85 Islamic sharia courts operating in Britain, sanctioned by the British government that has declared their rulings “enforceable with the full power of the judicial system.”

Thus far the Islamic courts deal with civil matters only. Still the “sharia courts threaten the integrity of law in the British democracy, by promoting the unequal treatment of women in the British Islamic community.” For example, “in disputes over child custody, sharia recognizes the absoluteness of a father's ownership if the child is over seven years old.” (Ellen Toplansky, Sharia Law in Canada and Britain.)

This unholy trifecta reveals the sad state of religious freedom in Great Britain. Of course, these things could never happen in America. Or could they? (Obama appointee Dalia Mogahed is a sharia law advocate.)

Toward the end of the show Dennis stated that the essence of Judaism is fighting evil. Hugh responded that the essence of Christianity is forgiveness. On the way home after the show, George and I had plenty to gab about over Sicilian pizza and Italian beer at a great place just off Colorado.

Unholy Debt

With the Federal government debt exceeding the total output of the entire US economy (the GDP), serious minded people are seriously concerned about the economic health of the country. Depending on inflation and interest rates, the interest payments on the debt could, by the end of the decade, exceed the total Federal budget of only a few years ago. The effect of such excessive government spending is to remove money from the private economy, keeping unemployment at unhealthy levels, nearly 10% now, and double that if you include the underemployed.

The same problem exists in the States where typical yearly deficits are in the billions of dollars, in excess of $20B in California. States are trying all kinds of tricks to balance their budgets, usually including borrowing tons of money if they can get it. Unfunded future liabilities for government retiree’s pensions and health care costs are impossible hurdles in many States. (In California it exceeds $500 Billion.)

Now church leaders are beginning to speak out about the immorality of massive debt. "America's growing debt is a not just a financial issue, it's a spiritual one," said Jerry Newcombe, of the Coral Ridge Ministries. "The Bible is very clear about the moral dangers of debt." The evangelical ministry has been sounding the alarm about the "monstrous debt burden" to its estimated 500,000 devotees through radio programs, print publications and its website.

Likewise, the Family Research Council has delivered "action alerts" about the debt to its network of 40,000 pastors. The Christian Coalition, Concerned Women for America, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition are also warning members that the deficit is reaching immoral proportions. ("National debt is new hot issue for evangelicals," by Daniel Burke, Religion News Service)

Generally, people are concerned about the effect on unemployment and the threat to long-term prosperity of historically high levels of spending and debt. Another, perhaps even greater, issue is the harmful effects on the targets of government largess. The sad state of New York welfare is a prime example.

New York’s Medicaid program covers nearly 5 million people, a quarter of the total population at a cost of $53 billion (combined federal and state money), more than any other state, even California, with twice as many enrollees. Think about that. One quarter of New York residents receive Medicaid, at a cost of over $10,000 per person.

Now Medicaid is supposed to be a last-resort safety net for those who do not receive medical care through their own or employee insurance or Medicare. Yet New York Medicaid covers parents who earn up to 150 percent of the federal poverty level and childless adults up to the poverty level. New York also provides optional benefits including prescription drugs, dental and vision care and even long-term care. (New York Times editorial, 2/19/11.) Quite the nice safety net! In addition to the Medicaid giveaway, this quarter of New York residents likely receive food, rent and energy subsidies, and pay no Federal or State income taxes. These 5 million people are effectively wards of the State.

So what about these millions of (mostly) able-bodied folks who receive welfare, food stamps, rent and energy subsidies, Medicaid, etc, and pay nothing at all for it? Do they feel good about it? Are they motivated to improve their lot? Daniel Patrick Moynihan, working for Lyndon Johnson in 1965, warned America about the self-destructive consequences of the Welfare State. Star Parker’s Uncle Sam’s Plantation exposed the personal tragedy of a young woman “chewed up and spit out by our country’s ruthless welfare system.” If you look at the many longitudinal studies of welfare recipients from the 1960s until today you find a dismal record of social improvement.

As Aristotle said 2500 years ago, “If you want to encourage something, reward it.” President Johnson’s war on Poverty has had the unintended consequences of “family breakdown and illegitimacy; cycles of dependency that transfer from one generation to the next; anger, despair and hopelessness. Judged by its results, the war on Poverty was more a War on the Poor.” (Jay Richards, Money, Greed and God)

This is the unholy Welfare State. It must be stopped.

Oh the Inanity!

I sometimes wonder if I can continue reading the New York Times. OK, I only read it at Equinox where it is free, and I use it to get my heart pumping. But the editorial and op-ed writers (excepting David Brooks) are so ideologically tilted as to overshadow the Leaning Tower of Pisa. One could make a career out of debunking the economic “wisdom” of Paul Krugman (whose answer to every question is more government spending) and the socio-political confusion of Bob Herbert.

On Feb 11, while the throngs celebrated in Cairo, Herbert wrote a piece called “When Democracy Weakens.” In it he mused: “I couldn’t help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States. I think it’s on the ropes. We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.”

I wondered what was going on in Bob’s head? Why is he so worried about America?

Herbert again: “So what we get in this democracy of ours are astounding and increasingly obscene tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest, while the bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services and the social safety net, saying we can’t afford them. Public employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of thousands.”

There it is. Bob frets that the top tax rate is still “only” 36% and politicians, faced with a $14 trillion federal debt and a $1.6 trillion deficit this year, are looking to cut the budget. “We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.”

Well, what about that? The dictionary definition of democracy is a “form of government in which all the people hold the ruling power either directly or through elected representatives.” It is generally agreed that democracies must guarantee “equality of rights, opportunity and treatment” through the rule of law and that includes the right to hold public office. By that definition there were exactly zero democracies in the world in 1900. Women did not get the vote until somewhat later. Today, however, there are 89 democracies in the world comprising 46% of the world population. That is remarkable progress!

Like all leftists, Herbert thinks of democracy primarily in economic terms. So what about the poor that he thinks are, somehow, disenfranchised? Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a DVD player, and a stereo. In fact, 46% of all poor households actually own their own homes. As a group, America's poor are far from being chronically undernourished. The average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle class children and, in most cases, is well above recommended norms.

Not one poor American is denied the right to vote or hold public office or equality under the law. And not one pays a single dollar in Federal income tax. Bob needs to stop the inanity and worry about what is really wrong with American culture.
There are two main reasons why American children are poor: Their parents don't work much, and fathers are absent from the home.

The typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work during a year. (16 hours of work per week) If total work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per year, the equivalent of one adult working 40 hours per week, nearly 75% of poor children would be lifted out of official poverty.

Father absence is another major cause of child poverty. Nearly two thirds of poor children reside in single parent homes; each year, an additional 1.3 million children are born out of wedlock. If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, almost three quarters would immediately be lifted out of poverty.

Look to your community, Bob.

The Job Myth

The fabric of a culture contains both truths and myths -– falsehoods believed by a large number of people. Many times, truths and myths straddle the same objective reality. For example, a truth about America is that it was created as “one nation, under God.” The myth is that it was designed to be a secular nation with a “wall of separation” between church and state. If you saw the SOTU on Tuesday night, one thing you did not see was the words “In God We Trust” chiseled into the granite behind and above the President. As Denis Prager has noted, that was a deliberate choice of the TV stations in service of their secular-America myth. The God-in-America myth has been profoundly damaging to our culture. It will be a primary subject of these blogs.

Today, however, I’d like to talk about another type of myth, also harmful, dealing with the economy. This very popular myth involves jobs, or more specifically, job creation. (Isn’t it interesting that job and Job – “an upright man whose faith in God survived the test of repeated calamities” -- are the same word.)

Now, Government is able to create jobs, but it involves the force-able transfer of income from one group of people to another. The stimulus package did a lot of that income transfer, but the President has now come to realize that it did not keep the jobless rate below 8%, as he promised, and, with unemployment in the mid 9% range, the people have given up on a government fix. Indeed, “Obama put the business community on notice that they have to deliver on new jobs.” (Timothy Egan, New York Times, 1/26/11)

It is unfortunate that this viewpoint reflects an ignorance of basic economics that seems to be mythological. Even the intellectual elites fall for it. The raison d’etre of private companies is to produce goods and services. Jobs are a means to that end. If sufficient demand for goods and services is lacking, jobs will be lost. The law of supply and demand, the most basic in economics, seems to have evaded the Times writers.

While many believe that the creation of jobs is a universal good, and is the moral responsibility of us all, the Bible puts all such duties below the rights of property. Michael Medved (http://www.michaelmedved.com/) described it thus:

While leaders of the religious left portray the Bible as a neo-socialist document that emphasizes sharing resources with the poor, the stone tablets at the core of our tradition tell a different story. In late January, Jewish congregations around the world read the Exodus passage introducing the Ten Commandments, and two of those ten explicitly stress the sanctity of private property. God commands humanity not to steal—seizing wealth belonging to someone else – and not to covet your neighbor’s house, his animals, or “anything that belongs to your neighbor.” The commandment says material goods belong to the individual, not the state, or even to God. We are obliged to help the poor through acts of personal charity, but nothing suggests that government should seize private property against the will of its owners to achieve some higher good.

The history of the past two decades shows that lower government spending as a share of GDP is associated with lower unemployment rates. A much better way to reduce unemployment is to encourage private investment with lower tax rates and reduced regulations. The following graph shows how lower tax rates caused falling unemployment fell when private investment increased as a share of GDP. (John B. Taylor, The Wall Street Journal, 1/29/11)






Economics is a serious business, not the stuff of myths.

Two Culture Wars

In the wake of the Tucson tragedy there were accusations that political rhetoric encouraged Jared Loughner on his murderous rampage. Of course, that was mere nonsense. “None of Aristotle's four causes -- not first, not final, not formal, not efficient -- link Loughner's rampage to political chatter.” One of the great things about Americans is that we can and do engage in rhetorical battles about politics, religion, popular mores, MTV (“Skins” – yuck!), without descending into physical violence.

Two of the most consequential culture wars in America today deal with religion and the source of authority. The “Faith Matters” survey conducted by Robert Putnam and David Campbell (see the book “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us”) found that “Americans are increasingly concentrated at opposite ends of the spectrum – the seriously religious at one pole and the avowedly secular at the other.” The authority war faces off those who wish to conserve the culture handed down from the past and those who would radically change it.

The conservative modus operandi for cultural change is a slow series of tiny tweaks meant to improve an already magnificent tapestry. For the change agent, on the other hand, the campaign must begin with the destruction of the culture as it exists. Usually the change campaign begins with contemptuous dismissal of the past as when Marx declared that “culture is mere training to act as a machine,” or when the deconstructionists denied the validity of all culture as being the corrupt products of “dead white men.”

Tectonic cultural shifts generally originate from within a culture, motivated by the cultural elite, intellectuals and political class. The books I reviewed in my last post (by Dalrymple and Hitchens) showed the devastating effects of the cultural revolution in England since the 1960s. “To regret religion is to regret Western civilization,” said Dalrymple, summing up the British loss. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) has written passionately about how Europe’s denial of its religious and moral foundations led to the loss of faith, optimism and courage. Reflecting on the ever declining birth rate, Ratzinger noted that “Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future.” (See for example, “Without Roots” by Ratzinger and Marcello Pera)

The culture wars over religion and authority are inter-related in the Putnam and Campbell data. The “Faith Matters” survey shows that religiosity is not correlated to positions on foreign or immigration policies, and the correlation is modest when the issue is the size of government (The religious like smaller). However, the statistical correlations are strong when it comes to abortion and same sex marriage. By large margins, religious people are opposed to both. Abortion and gay marriage are simply steps too far for most religious people.

Protecting the lives of the weakest humans against a culturally approved slaughter is about the clearest possible moral stand the church could hope for. Standing against gay marriage continues the church’s protection of the innocent after birth.

However, some churches (eg. the Episcopal and the United Church of Christ) have abandoned these traditional stands to their own peril; membership in such progressive churches has plummeted in the last decades. This sad story will be the subject of a future post.

Is Britain Civilized?

When the great British bulldog was laid to rest on 31 January 1965, the crowds (more than 300,000) who queued up to see him lying in state were typically British: loyal, proud, sentimental, yet self controlled. During the darkest days of the war, when England was on the precipice of surrender, Winston Churchill had been the indispensable man. The British people were a proud family honoring their father figure, sure that British institutions were the best in the world. Thus it came as something of a surprise when the newly elected Labour government set about to “reform” British culture.

In 1965 the youthful Roy Jenkins was appointed to head the Home Office. Jenkins had made a name for him-self with the publication of a manifesto called “Is Britain Civilized?” in which he attacked Britain's "archaic" laws on abortion, censorship, homosexuality, and divorce, as well as arguing for the abolition of capital punishment. His reform of the criminal justice system was designed to make it as “civilized” to the criminal as possible. Jenkins and his Labour co-conspirators believed that a more permissive society would be a more civilized society.

One of the greatest blows was to the stability of family life. In his 1967 Reith lectures, Edmund Leach actually blamed the traditional family for most of society’s problems. In 1965 British society was one of the most stable, decent and law-abiding in the world. By the turn of the century, English society had been radicalized.

In his book “Our Culture, What’s left of It” the British ex-pat Theodore Dalrymple documents the destruction of English character: rampant alcoholism and drug use; increasing illegitimacy; children raised without any form of parental supervision or guidance; the destruction of traditional mores and respect for law.

And what happened to the family? Labour MP Jon Cruddas, a staunch liberal, said recently that the “biggest calamity facing society is the relentless disintegration of the family and the profoundly dangerous consequential element of a lack of male role models.”

Neil Clark summarized the damage in the 2003 Opinion-Telegraph: “The damaging impact of Jenkins's reforms on the society we live in is all too clear to see. One marriage in three now ends in divorce. Almost 40 per cent of children are now born out of wedlock, the highest figure in Europe. Since the 1967 Abortion Act, more than six million unborn children have been aborted. The legalization of homosexuality has not been the end of the chapter, but merely the beginning, with an aggressive ‘gay rights’ lobby demanding more and more concessions. The policy of early release of prisoners has had a catastrophic effect on the safety of the general public: 14 per cent of violent criminals freed early are convicted of fresh violence within two years of their release.”

Liberalizing political reforms made a mess of British society turning England into perhaps the “most libertine -- and frankly immoral -- country in Europe.” You may think these judgments are rather harsh, perhaps exaggerated. Well by the late 1970s the damage was already so severe that English novelist Kingsley Amis wrote a withering satire on the decay of the national culture. In “Russian Hide and Seek” Amis suggests that the trashing of English culture could only have been achieved by a ruthless foreign invader.

At the same time the churches in England were undergoing their own reforms and contributing to the destruction of English character. In his scathing critique of British social life --“The Abolition of Britain”-- Peter Hitchens notes that “Hell was abolished around the same time that abortion was legalized and the death penalty was done away with.” Anglican bishops, headed by John Robinson, began to admit that they were “not sure about the existence of God or the truths of their religion’s central beliefs.” The Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins (another Jenkins!) spoke of the resurrection as “conjuring tricks with bones.”

Lacking the “faith once given,” English churches decided to become relevant and post-modern. Traditional forms and the most cherished beliefs were jettisoned. Scripture was increasingly replaced by social theology, suited to the new social democracy, in which “Christian charity was expressed through political action rather than in your own conduct.” The churches became booster clubs for the political reforms imposed on the working class people by Roy Jenkins and his crew. And the churches became increasingly empty.

Some Anglican pastors described in “The Rise and fall of the Nine o’Clock Service” tried to entice the lost parishioners with pseudo-Christian services: “Druidic white-robed figures around an alter resembling a crescent moon… hundreds of black-clad figures peer out of the darkness, swaying to swirling, strangely ethereal breaths of ambient techno.” Very clearly, it could no longer be said that the Anglican Church was the “Tory party at prayer.” It did not work.

Amis describes a church service after the Russians have purified England. A young woman reciting the Creed wonders what it is all about: “The whole catalogue was very odd – remote and fanciful. It made sense to believe in keeping oneself to oneself, in a hot-water bottle on a cold night. But what difference could it make to think the Holy Ghost advisable, to be in favor of the life everlasting.”

So what do you think? Is Britain still civilized? Do you see any parallels in America?

Onward Christian Soldiers

Onward then, ye people, join our happy throng
blend with ours your voices in the triumph song.

In this time between Christmas and the New Year it is appropriate to reflect on our blessings. We who live in “this greatest nation on God’s green earth” have a lot to be thankful for. Although there are many who have had to struggle during the economic downturn, we all of us enjoy the most freedom and economic opportunity ever experienced in the history of mankind. Yet we read that many well off people are unsatisfied and unfulfilled. Depression is a growing malady. Perhaps the remedy is to “choose life.”

At our church (Neighborhood Church in PVE) my friend, the Rev. George Baum, conducts a monthly Happiness Hour (or two or three). At these gatherings we try to follow the admonition of Dennis Prager that “Happiness is a Serious Problem.” We owe it to others – our family and friends foremost -- to be happy, or at least to pretend to be happy. Of course this instruction did not originate with Dennis. Indeed the Church fathers preached the same message. “The Apostle Paul — who spent an inordinate amount of time in cold, dark Roman prisons — instructed his followers to give thanks in all things. Paul's advice is consistent with research showing that the single biggest ‘happiness variable’ we can control is our attitude.” (Oliver Thomas, “In New Year's trying times, choose life,” USA Today, 12/26/10). My aunt Judy was wrong: We were not “put on the earth to suffer.”

That said gratitude and happiness are not cause for Pollyanna. Indeed, there are troubling signs of moral decay in culture and society. Much of the trouble can be traced to a loss of faith associated with growing secularization. In the twentieth century secularism was enforced by totalitarian regimes. Totalitarianism cannot tolerate God since the state must be the source of all human rights. The extreme consequence was the mass murder of over one hundred million in Europe, China and the Soviet Union.

But secularism does not need to be enforced. In advanced democratic countries God can be chased from the public square in the service of toleration and “the separation of church and state.” Europe provides a sad example of the loss of faith. In his books, “The Abolition of Britain” and “The Rage Against God,” Peter Hitchens, brother of the flagrant atheist Christopher Hitchens (“God is Not Great”) chronicles the parallel decline of religion and culture in the formerly great -- Great Britain.

We Christian Soldiers must be diligent. Faith is like a muscle that needs to be exercised to remain strong. In America the protestant mainline churches became flabby and lost millions of members. But the void of belief had to be filled. Some turned to environmentalism, others to post-modern religious movements such as Emerging Christianity that welcome flabby Christians. But that story is for another time.

When I was a blogger a few friends found my musings to be of interest. Now I would like to resume the practice with a weekly post on the subject of culture and its most significant artifact -- religion. You may well wonder why I care enough to expend the effort of writing a regular blog on religion. It's simple: If we do not speak up the other side will win. I refer again to St. Paul: “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel” (1 Cor 9:16).

Sweetheart Government Jobs

Isn’t it astounding how little most people learn from history? Or, perhaps, it is not so surprising considering the political correctness and downright slander found in many historical treatments used in our underperforming schools. Someone said that those who ignore history are bound to repeat it, much to their chagrin. For example, what can we learn from the Chinese?

In medieval times the Chinese empire dominated the Eastern world and led the whole world in culture and innovation. By 1300 the Chinese had invented gunpowder, canal locks, movable type, the compass and rockets, among many other notable achievements. Then it stopped. While the Ming dynasty astonished outsiders with their wealth, knowledge and power through the fourteenth century, eventually Chinese technology and innovation withered and the empire waned. What happened to this great culture? What does history tell us? I’ll return to those questions later, after talking a bit about a modern parallel.

According to a report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the typical federal worker is paid 20% more than a private-sector worker in the same occupation.
For example, broadcast technicians earn on average $90,000 working for the Federal government vs. only $49,000 in private industry. Some other comparisons (federal/private): graphic designer ($70,800/$46,600), landscape architect ($80,800/$58,400), public relations manager ($132,000/$88,000) and clergy ($70,500/$39,200). Overall federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector while the average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046.

Furthermore these salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Adding it up you get a grand total of $111,476 per year for government work vs. $69,928 for the same work in the private sector. The difference is $41,548 or 59% in favor of government work!

Mama, you must send your clile to work for the gubment. Those who labor in the private sector have become an underclass.

So what does this analysis have to do with the downfall of the Chinese empire? There are several reasons why technology, innovation and progress waned in China. One was Confusion ideology wherein the universe simply is and always was and there is no reason to suppose that it functions according to rational laws. Thus the scientific revolution that awoke the West did not seem possible to Chinese minds. Another reason is the massiveness of the Chinese bureaucracy and its sweetheart government jobs. Eventually the “best and the brightest” in Chinese society entered government service where the pay and benefits far surpassed the “private” sector. History provides a valuable lesson.

And while we labor to reverse the profligacy and malfeasance in Washington, we must not overlook the problems here in California. As the State government goes bankrupt, and brings down the local entities by their egregious spending, it is past time to demand changes. Surely the size of government needs to be reduced by insisting that government does what it must do and no more. At the same time efficiency can be dramatically improved by balancing incomes.

In the 3/29 Daily Breeze, the editorial summarized the “political pay gap,” meaning the discrepancy between state government workers and those who labor in the private economy. The magnitude of the problem created by this overspending is understood through a simple fact. States and local governments would save $339 billion a year if they paid their workers the same as private workers. That is enough to more than cover the estimated 2010-2011 deficits of every state in the nation.

In California, about half of government expenditures go to support government employees and the State alone has a $20+ billion yearly deficit. The government employee unions control the Democrat party and are rewarded with sweetheart deals in contract negotiations. Somehow we need to find a way to break the cycle of public union - elected official back scratching.

A good first step will be to elect Meg Whitman as governor (and John Eastman as attorney general). Then we need to replace as many of the Sacramento Democrats as possible and put the fear of the people into the rest of them.

At the local level it is time to demand that city officials, school boards, library trustees and other government entities look at their employees’ total compensation and make appropriate adjustments. It is no longer valid to benchmark government employees’ compensation against other government employees, ie city vs. city, school district vs. school district, library vs. library. The only legitimate comparison is with the private sector, and the ensuing action should lead to fiscal solvency. To do otherwise is an abrogation of our citizen-patriot duties.

The New Socialism

Remember the old saw: How do you know when a politician is lying?.… His lips are moving! There seems to be more and more truth in that. But I have a sure fire test for lying. If a story appears as “news” in the New York Times, also as the lead editorial and then as an opinion piece written by one of their hacks, well that’s proof positive that the whole thing is a lie. You’ve all seen it on topics as diverse as the health care debate, the war on terror and Sarah Palin. (God bless her!)

Monday 12/6 the Times did it again, this time on the subject of manmade global warming. The “news” story, “In Face of Skeptics, Experts Affirm Climate Peril” assured us that the circulation of several thousand e-mail messages between climate scientists urging their brethren to delete embarrassing e-mails, to keep papers by competing scientists from publication and to make “adjustments” in research data to hide the recent global cooling trend is a mere tempest in a teapot. The editorial “Beyond Copenhagen” sounds an encouraging note because the United States and China, the world’s two biggest emitters, have promised to reduce or slow their emissions. The op-ed “An Affordable Truth” by Paul Krugman warns about a likely reaction to Copenhagen. “We’ll hear cries that the whole notion of global warming is a hoax perpetrated by a vast scientific conspiracy, as demonstrated by stolen e-mail messages that show — well, actually all they show is that scientists are human.” Uh huh. He closes with hope for Copenhagen: “A deal there would save the planet at a price we can easily afford. And it would actually help us in our current economic predicament.” Krugman also has a bridge he would like to unload. Those lying Times!

The truth of the matter is that manmade global warming is perhaps the greatest hoax ever perpetrated by the science-government establishment. And our president is in a leadership role. This week his EPA declared that carbon dioxide is a threat to humans and will be regulated under the Clean Air Act. According to Obama’s hand-picked EPA head Lisa Jackson, “there are no more excuses for delaying.” Yet it is obvious to school children that carbon dioxide is actually a life-giving gas. We humans exhale it, plants gobble it up and give us food and shelter and oxygen to breath. Everything should be so harmful.

What’s more, trying to significantly reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emissions will have many deleterious side effects, including skyrocketing energy prices, loss of jobs, unsafe cars, and, most of all, loss of freedom. That is because energy use is a driving force of prosperity. Consider just a few numbers.

From 2002 to 2006 the US Gross Domestic Product grew from $10 trillion to $13 trillion, a 30% increase. Over the same time frame the US emissions of carbon dioxide stayed nearly flat at 5.8 billion metric tons. Thus the US energy efficiency rose by 30% in five years. That’s what can happen in an advanced economy like ours (where the per capita GDP exceeds $47,000) when it transitions from heavy industry and manufacturing to a service and information economy and makes more efficient use of energy.

Over that same time period, the Chinese GDP grew dramatically, from $1.5 trillion to $2.25 trillion (50%), while the Chinese yearly emissions of carbon dioxide grew from 3.8 billion tons to 6.1 billion tons (60%). Relatively poor countries like China ($2000 per capita GDP) require excess energy to grow their economies. This is likely to remain the case for the foreseeable future as the Chinese try to raise another several hundred million people from poverty up to medium development levels. It is no surprise that the Chinese are building one coal-fired power plant per week and will continue doing so for the next ten years.

Worldwide there are 1.6 billion people who do not have access to electricity and 2.4 billion people -- more than a third of the world's total -- still cook and heat with traditional fuels such as firewood or dung. To raise the 2.4 billion people up to the Chinese economic level will require energy use double that of China. The UN estimates that energy use will jump by 50 percent over the next 25 years, with two-thirds of that hike expected in the developing world.

Now one might think that raising people up from abject poverty is a good thing. Except, that is, if you place the environment above people. And that is just what motivates the global warming fascists. Instead of allowing the people in poor countries to benefit from globalization, their goal is to pay those countries to curb their energy use and their economic development. Some numbers will elucidate the folly of this approach. To pay just $1 per day to the 2.4 billion poorest people in the world would cost $876 billion annually. Guess where that cash will be coming from. And that exercise assumes that the bucks get to the actual people. Fat chance! Only pennies on the dollar of foreign aid distributed through kleptocratic governments in the third world reaches the poor. Of course, the real objective of the fascists is to use the one buck a day to buy sleeping bags and K-rations so the poor won’t need to burn those pesky fossil fuels to cook or to heat their homes.

Liberals like to ask, “What would Jesus do?” It seems to me that Jesus would put the plight of the poor today above the potential temperature of the planet in 2100.

Those who predict catastrophe if the emissions of carbon-dioxide are not curbed right now have been found out. “Climategate” has emerged. The thousands of emails urging trickery, deletion of data, hiding the decline and punishing or silencing dissidents have shed the light of reason on the chicanery that has been employed by the UC climate science community in order to convince the world that “the science has been settled.” When the first UN (IPCC) report appeared in 1990 it contained a reconstruction of 1000 years of global temperature data that clearly showed the Medieval Warm Period (circa 1000 – 1300) and the Little Ice Age (circa 1350 – 1850) preceding the Modern Warming (1850 – 1990). But those very natural temperature variations that occurred before the Industrial Revolution did not fit the alarmist model of manmade global warming. Thus the MWP and the LIA had to go and, sure enough, the second UN report in 1995 used 1400 AD as its base -- effectively wiping the MWP off the radar screen. Then in the third report (2001) the MWP and LIA both simply vanished, replaced by a downward trend throughout the millennium until a sharp jump upward last century.

This 2001 reconstruction was the infamous “Hockey Stick” fabricated by Michael Mann and his cronies at Penn State. “Mike’s Nature trick,” as it has become known, involved two pieces of scientific fraud. First, a flawed filtering technique was used on the temperature data (reconstructed from proxies) effectively wiping out the MWP and the LIA and resulting in a gradual downward-trending global temperature from 1000AD until 1850. Second, the data reconstruction was abruptly terminated in 1980 when it was starting to trend downward (cooler) and replaced with actual measured temperatures which were rising. Climate scientists concluded that “the rate and duration of warming of the 20th century has been much greater than in any of the previous nine centuries.” This conclusion has been the poster child for the fraudulent Anthropogenic Global Warming movement.

The most accurate temperature reconstruction derived from tree-rings and lake and ocean sediments by Moberg et al (2005) actually emphasizes rather than hides the MWP.

Note that the MWP was warmer than the late 20th century peak. Since 1998 the global temperature has been declining. Yet the alarmists warn that catastrophe looms.

You have to wonder why the AGW movement has captured the hearts and minds of world leaders. The third worlders are sensibly looking for a handout, in the form of reparations for the “climate debt” incurred by the developed nations. But the first worlders have to be driven by something other than self interest. Charles Krauthammer nailed it: “The new socialism: A shift from red to green.” Environmentalism is becoming the new socialism, “the totemic ideal in the name of which government seizes the commanding heights of the economy and society.” God, help us.