Here. The funniest is Obama's reference to the construction of the "Intercontinental Railroad" in the 19th century. That would be something, a railroad that crossed oceans. Think of all the pontoons that would be needed to float the tracks on.
The article documents Obama and his gang's unconcern with truth — as if we needed more evidence of that.
Another outstanding column by Victor Davis Hanson. Excerpt:
Attorney General Eric Holder dropped charges against the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation. That may explain why he said nothing when the same group put out a dead-or-alive bounty poster on George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin shooting case. Holder's department is suing the state of Arizona for passing a law to enforce the largely unenforced federal immigration law. Holder suggested that the Arizona law was racially inspired even as he admitted that he had never read it. Holder has praised the race-baiting Al Sharpton for his "partnership" and called the country "cowards" for not holding a national conversation on race on his terms. The attorney general has referred to African-Americans as "my people," and he has characterized congressional oversight of his office's failure to rein in the Fast and Furious scandal as racially motivated attacks on himself.
It is well known by now that NRO has cut its ties with John Derbyshire ('Derb') over the latter's publication in another venue of The Talk: Nonblack Version. Both Rich Lowry and Andrew McCarthy have commented on this severing of ties and both sets of comments are unbelievably lame. Here is the substance (or rather 'substance') of McCarthy's response (numerals added):
[1] We believe in the equal dignity and presumption of equal decency toward every person — no matter what race, no matter what science tells us about comparative intelligence, and no matter what is to be gleaned from crime statistics. [2] It is important that research be done, that conclusions not be rigged, and that we are at liberty to speak frankly about what it tells us. [3] But that is not an argument for a priori conclusions about how individual persons ought to be treated in various situations — or for calculating fear or friendship based on race alone. [4] To hold or teach otherwise is to prescribe the disintegration of a pluralistic society, to undermine the aspiration of e pluribus unum.
Ad [1]. Well, don't we all (including Derb) believe in the equal dignity of human persons regardless of race, creed, national origin, sex, age? Is McCarthy suggesting that Derb rejects this principle? But of course equality of rights is not the same as empirical equality. That people are not empirically equal is a factual claim in two senses of 'factual': it is a non-normative claim, and it is a true claim. That people have equal rights is a normative claim. The non-normative and normative claims are logically independent. One cannot infer empirical equality from normative equality. More importantly, one cannot infer normative inequality from empirical inequality. For example, human infants are pretty much helpless, but this fact does not detract from their equal right to life. Women are on average shorter than men, and less muscular, but these facts do not detract from their status as persons, as rights-possessors. 90 year-olds tend to be more frail than 60 year-olds, but this fact does not entail that a 90 year-old is less of a person, has a lesser normative status, than a 60 year-old.
Ad [2]. Who could disagree with this bromide?
Ad [3]. It is in his third sentence where McCarthy ascends into Cloud Cuckoo Land. Suppose it is a fact that "Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery." A fact is a fact. There are no false facts, and there are no racist facts. There are racial facts (facts about race), but a racial fact is not a racist fact. Now suppose I encounter at night, in a bad part of town, an "individual person" in McCarthy's phrase whom I do not know, a person who is young, male, black, and dressed gangsta-style. His dark glasses prevent me from seeing his eyes and judging his sobriety. His deep pockets might conceal a pistol. Would I be justified in using statistical common sense and avoiding said individual? Of course. The guy might be harmless, but I do not know that. I do know that he fits the profile of an individual who could cause me some serious trouble. Common sense dictates that I give him a wide berth just as I would with a drunken Hells (no apostrophe) Angel exiting a strip joint. There are no black Hells Angels, by the way.
Does that mean that I don't consider the black man or the biker to have rights equal to mine? No. It means that I understand that we are not mere rights-possessors or Kantian noumenal agents, but also possessors of animal bodies and socially formed (and mal-formed) psyches and that these latter facts induce empirical inequalities of various sorts.
Am I drawing an a priori conclusion when I avoid the black guy? Of course not. My reasoning is a posteriori and inductive. I am reasoning from certain perceived facts: race (not skin color!), behavior, dress, location, time of day, etc. to a conclusion that is rendered probable (not certain) by these facts. And note that in a situation like this one does not consider "race alone" in McCarthy's phrase. If I considered "race alone" then there would be no difference between the dude I have just described and Condoleeza Rice.
Is my inductive reasoning and consequent avoidance behavior morally censurable? Of course not. After all, I have a moral duty to attend to my own welfare. (See Kant on duties to oneself.) If anything, my reasoning and behavior are morally obligatory. And I am quite sure that Andrew McCarthy would reason and behave in the same way in the same circumstances.
Ad [4]. What McCarthy is saying here is nonsense and beneath commentary. But I will point out the tension between calling for a "pluralistic society" while invoking the phrase e pluribus unum, "out of many, one." One wonders how long before McCarthy cries for more "diversity."
The Pee Cee conservative is an interesting breed of cat. We shall have to study him more carefully.
This is one of the points made by Mona Charen in her excellent column, If Obama Had a Son:
We are now engaged in another fruitless shouting match about whether young black men are being hunted on the streets of America and whether "stand your ground" laws are dangerous. But as the estimable Ann Coulter has pointed out, Florida's "stand your ground" law was irrelevant to the Martin case. Whichever version of events that night you believe: A) that Zimmerman followed and shot Martin in cold blood; or B) that Zimmerman shot Martin in the midst of a fight; the law, which does not require a person who fears for his life to retreat before using deadly force, is not implicated.
Here is what the laws says:
It establishes that law-abiding residents and visitors may legally presume the threat of bodily harm or death from anyone who breaks into a residence or occupied vehicle and may use defensive force, including deadly force, against the intruder.
In any other place where a person “has a right to be,” that person has “no duty to retreat” if attacked and may “meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”
In either case, a person using any force permitted by the law is immune from criminal prosecution or civil action and cannot be arrested unless a law enforcement agency determines there is probable cause that the force used was unlawful.
If a civil action is brought and the court finds the defendant to be immune based on the parameters of the law, the defendant will be awarded all costs of defense.
On scenario (A), the law does not apply because Zimmerman on that scenario is not defending himself. On scenario (B), the law does not apply because Zimmerman is not able to retreat. (Charen does not make this clear, but this was basically Coulter's point.) If someone is on top of you pounding you then you don't have the option to either retreat or not retreat.
But of course much depends on what exactly happened. In any case, the law is eminently reasonable whether or not it applies to the Trayvon Martin case.
And note the law is not a gun law despite what lying liberals will tell you. You can stand your ground with your fists, a baseball bat, a knife, a can of Easy-Off oven cleaner . . . .
Feel-good liberalism at its best worst:
Divorce. Dinosaurs, Birthdays. Religion. Halloween. Christmas. Television. These are a few of the 50-plus words and references the New York City Department of Education is hoping to ban from the city’s standardized tests.
My astute readers do not need to have it explained to them what is wrong with this. But it is one more example of the triumph of feelings-based Unsinn over thought and sense on the Left and another reason why you should never vote for a Democrat.
Of course, there are a few Dems who are not completely unhinged . But unless you know who they are, it is best to be on the safe side and vote for Republicans and Libertarians.
A WSJ piece by a professor of physics.
Robert Samuelson comments on Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 and finds some grounds for a measure of optimism. Conclusion:
America's distinctive beliefs and values are fading, says Murray. Maybe. But our history is that the bedrock values — the belief in freedom, faith in the individual, self-reliance, a moralism rooted in religion — endure against all odds. They've survived depressions, waves of immigration, wars and political scandals.
There is such a thing as the American character and, though not immutable, it is durable. In 2011, only 36 percent of Americans believed that "success in life is determined by outside forces," reports the Pew Global Attitudes survey. In France and Germany, the responses were 57 and 72 percent, respectively. America is different, even exceptional, and it is likely to stay that way.
Here.
If state-run lotteries are a bad idea, as I have argued, then state-run casinos are even worse. But they are starting to pop up. Moral rot is at the root of all other rot. Overextended abroad, collapsing within, how long can we last? Bread and circuses are the people's pablum supplied by a government whose power and reach are its main concerns, not the common weal.
Philosophers hate a contradiction, but love a paradox. There are paradoxes everywhere, in the precincts of the most abstruse as well as in the precincts of the prosaic. Here are eight paradoxes of illegal immigration suggested to me by Victor Davis Hanson. The titles and formulations are my own. For good measure, I add a ninth, of my own invention.
The Paradox of Profiling. Racial profiling is supposed to be verboten. And yet it is employed by American border guards when they nab and deport thousands of illegal border crossers. Otherwise, how could they pick out illegals from citizens who are merely in the vicinity of the border? How can what is permissible near the border be impermissible far from it in, say, Phoenix? At what distance does permissibility transmogrify into impermissibility? If a border patrolman may profile why may not a highway patrolman? Is legal permissibility within a state indexed to spatiotemporal position and variable with variations in the latter?
The Paradox of Encroachment. The Federal government sues the state of Arizona for upholding Federal immigration law on the ground that it is an encroachment upon Federal jurisdiction. But sanctuary cities flout Federal law by not allowing the enforcement of Federal immigration statutes. Clearly, impeding the enforcement of Federal laws is far worse than duplicating and perhaps interfering with Federal law enforcement efforts. And yet the Feds go after Arizona while ignoring sanctuary cities. Paradoxical, eh?
The Paradox of Blaming the Benefactor. Millions flee Mexico for the U.S. because of the desirability of living and working here and the undesirability of living in a crime-ridden, corrupt, and impoverished country. So what does Mexican president Felipe Calderon do? Why, he criticizes the U.S. even though the U.S. provides to his citizens what he and his government cannot! And what do many Mexicans do? They wave the Mexican flag in a country whose laws they violate and from whose toleration they benefit.
The Paradox of Differential Sovereignty and Variable Border Violability. Apparently, some states are more sovereign than others. The U.S., for some reason, is less sovereign than Mexico, which is highly intolerant of invaders from Central America. Paradoxically, the violability of a border is a function of the countries between which the border falls.
The Paradox of Los Locos Gringos. The gringos are crazy, and racist xenophobes to boot, inasmuch as 70% of them demand border security and support AZ SB 1070. Why then do so many Mexicans want to live among the crazy gringos?
The Paradox of Supporting While Stiffing the Working Stiff. Liberals have traditionally been for the working man. But by being soft on illegal immigration they help drive down the hourly wages of the working poor north of the Rio Grande. (As I have said in other posts, there are liberal arguments against illegal immigration, and here are the makings of one.)
The Paradox of Penalizing the Legal while Tolerating the Illegal. Legal immigrants face hurdles and long waits while illegals are tolerated. But liberals are supposed to be big on fairness. How fair is this?
The Paradox of Subsidizing a Country Whose Citizens Violate our Laws. "America extends housing, food and education subsidies to illegal aliens in need. But Mexico receives more than $20 billion in American remittances a year — its second-highest source of foreign exchange, and almost all of it from its own nationals living in the United States." So the U.S. takes care of illegal aliens from a failed state while subsidizing that state, making it more dependent, and less likely to clean up its act.
The Paradox of the Reconquista. Some Hispanics claim that the Southwest and California were 'stolen' from Mexico by the gringos. Well, suppose that this vast chunk of real estate had not been 'stolen' and now belonged to Mexico. Then it would be as screwed up as the rest of Mexico: as economically indigent, as politically corrupt, as crime-ridden, as drug-infested. Illegal immigrants from southern Mexico would then, in that counterfactual scenario, have farther to travel to get to the U.S., and there would be less of the U.S. for their use and enjoyment. The U.S. would be able to take in fewer of them. They would be worse off. So if Mexico were to re-conquer the lands 'stolen' from it, then it would make itself worse off than it is now. Gaining territory it would lose ground — if I may put paradoxically the Paradox of the Reconquista.
Exercise for the reader: Find more paradoxes!
Here. Excerpt:
As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people [you mean, like, Al Gore?] pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers." And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.
The terminological shift is what really kicked my skepticism into high gear. Global climate change is a genus of which global warming is but a species, global cooling being another species. And of course none of this much matters practically speaking if it is not anthropogenic. Are we now being asked to believe that burning fossil fuels causes climate change whether or not the change is a warming? That would be curious: contrary effects having the same cause.
They occupy, but they themselves are vacant.
Robert Samuelson makes the case.
The guy is amazing. Here is his latest. He comments on Paterno, Cain, Wall Street, and illegal immigration. Excerpt:
Those accused of racism for wishing immigration law enforced can make the argument that they are racially blind and wish it applied without regard to specific individuals; those accusing others of racism wish to render immigration law null and void, only because of the shared race or ethnic background of those who break it.
The frightening thing about illegal immigration is that it is racially/ethnically driven; its advocates have little concern about extending their principles to others, and, in that sense, it is a sort of selfishness, designed to enhance one’s own political constituency within the United States while eroding the law, as if to say, “U.S. law must not apply to my ethnic group but should be enforced in all other cases.”
