Aug 10 2008

To young, Christian Obama supporters

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 9:46 am

Hugh Hewitt has written a pamphlet available online in either print or pdf form, called “Letter to a Young Obama Supporter“. It costs $6.00. If you’re a young Obama supporter, it likely contains information you’ve never heard, and should, if you really want to understand the issues.

In it, Hewitt focuses mainly on two issues, the economy and the Islamic terrorist threat. But first, he explains his understanding of why Obama is so attractive to young idealists, acknowledges Obama’s skill in delivering speeches, etc. He wants the twenty-somethings to understand that he “gets it”, the appeal of Obama and his “new kind of politician” image. Hewitt understands the excitement that millennials, perhaps the least racist generation in American history, have in seeing an African-American candidate get so far

He calculates, correctly, I think, that twenty-somethings who are already in Obama’s camp are probably not particulary concerned about abortion, gay marriage, Obama’s connections to black liberation theology, 1960s radical leftist American grown terrorists, corrupt local political fixers in the Chicago political machine, etc.

Not being quite as nice a person as Hewitt, I’ll just say that the young twenty-somethings are mostly ignorant of the association of black liberation theology with Communism (and the 100 million or so people murdered in Communism’s name in the 20th century). They are likely to know almost nothing about the phenomenon of radical leftist home-grown terrorists in the 1960s and 70s, and so won’t take seriously the fact that Obama associates with known conspirators to murder, assuming falsely that it is an exaggeration. (It is not.)

Continue reading “To young, Christian Obama supporters”

Aug 09 2008

Why The Twenty-Somethings Should Vote For Obama #2

Category: election 2008,Obama,politics,terrorism,Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 9:10 am

Because the War on Islamic Extremism (the real meaning of “the war on terror”) is going to go on awhile. If Obama is elected, he will be likely to radically reduce the number of US troops recruited over the next 8 years (if he is a two-term president), meaning that my teenage son may be well into his twenties and established in a career before the president after Obama (or the one after that) finds it impossible to keep the USA out of war. Maybe my son can miss the war entirely. That’s good. I want grandchildren, and he has a disturbing sense of honor that might make him think he should volunteer, which won’t really be an option if Obama is just bombing from 30,000 feet like Clinton in Bosnia, or whacking tents and camel pens with Tomahawks, or whatever. Who cares if a couple of major US cities have serious terrorist attacks. I live in the boonies. All you urban twenty-somethings will just have to take what you get. Those of us with the good sense to live out of town aren’t too worried about bombs showing up in our PO Boxes.

Not so for the twenty-somethings, whose 5-10 year old children NOW are precisely the ones who are going to be fighting in the war that will inevitably follow 8 years of Obama “peace mongering” (that war will go on awhile, so that today’s 5 yr olds can enjoy it, too). My kids will be doing their part though, paying the taxes to fund the rifles and body armor for the children of the now twenty/thirty-somethings (but then thirty/forty-somethings). Your kids will have grown up seeing terrorist attacks getting feckless responses from THE ONE. They’ll be itching to volunteer when they come of age, and get some back, using all those skills gained playing Grand Theft Auto and Kill the Creeps on their WIIIIIs. Think how proud you’ll be.

I figure Obama will be the perfect Batman character (Dark Knight style, and no, that is not a racial comment…. don’t you go to movies?). He’ll refuse to run over the machine-gun-toting Joker when he has the chance (out of an excess of high moral feeling, even though the Joker has just murdered many innocents, and is threatening Batman), so that the Joker has a chance to murder dozens more… with the difference that it’ll be up to the next guy (Robin?) to go after the Joker and put an end to it (although Obama will spend lots of time talking about talking with the Joker before his presidency is over, and he will doubtless end his presidency feeling heroic and misunderstood, accepting salutes right and left from military officers glad to see him go).

The floor is open as to who President “Robin” will be. Certainly not Hillary. Or George Clooney. Maybe Bobby Jindal. Or Tim Pawlenty.

So: if you’re a twenty-something, a vote for Obama is a vote to keep my son out of war, and let your kids do it instead a few years later (they’re bound to have women carrying rifles by then…. hooray for equality). And anyway, I won’t need your kids to take care of me in old age… there will be plenty of nice, shiny new immigrants to do that (all legal, by then, of course). But cheer up: by then, the military are all going to have satellite computer connections in their helmets, so you should get lots of email from your kids, while mine will be visiting me most days in the old-muscians-home (extra luxurious), to make sure I have enough Doritos. I’ll bet live coverage of the wars will be incredible. Helmet cams for everyone.

Works for me. I like watching war movies on TV.

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Aug 08 2008

Brutal Peace Lovers

Category: abortion — harmonicminer @ 8:56 am

Signs on the back of a compact car in Riverside, California, Aug 7, 2008.

No War For Oil

War Is Not The Answer

Imagine World Peace

Bring Our Troops Home!

Proud Member ACLU

War Is Terrorism

Abolish The Death Penalty

There were more, but these are all I could remember.  And the last one (appropiately on the far left of the trunk lid as seen from behind the car):

Keep Abortion Legal

The Left is simply incoherent.  The lives of terrorists and assorted murderers matter more to the Left than the lives of the most innocent and powerless among us.  The level of moral confusion this represents is simply beyond belief, as is the inability of the bumper sticker driver to see the irony of having put Abolish The Death Penalty immediately adjacent to Keep Abortion Legal.

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Aug 07 2008

Obama’s speech to the Germans: trying to make sense of it

Category: election 2008,Europe,McCain,Obama,politics,White House — harmonicminer @ 9:00 am

Dennis Prager has written two articles analyzing Obama’s speech to the Germans:

First article

Second article

As this analysis makes clear, Obama employs just about every progressive-liberal cliche in the Left’s panoply of double-think and half-truth. He reveals himself to be exactly what objective measures say he is: the farthest Left senator in the United States Senate, and the farthest left nominee for President of the US in history. The main stream dinosaur media won’t report this, or do fair analyses of his speeches, preferring to talk about his tone and delivery, rather than his substance, such as it is.

Instead of holding Obama’s feet to the fire for ducking townhall style debates with John McCain, the media continue to swoon in abject worship at his hypnotic oratory…. when they aren’t throwing their underwear at the stage, like rock-star groupies everywhere. (Except for the French reporters, of course, who are reputed to “go commando”. I really don’t want to think about what they’re throwing at the stage.)

After all, we can’t force Obama to go off teleprompter… people might find out what he really thinks, and how well he thinks, neither of which is conducive to his being elected. Who knows, though: maybe a couple of extra-enthusiastic reporters’ boxers will accidentally land on the teleprompter, and Obama will have to speak off-script because the cameras are rolling.

I can hear it now: “America must cease acting only in its own self-interest and step up to its responsibilities to coordinate multilaterally with… with…. Fruit-Of-The-Loom… and…. and….. Joe Boxer….”

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Aug 06 2008

The next great awakening: Part 3, Why is rationality a feature of the universe, and of human beings?

Category: Intelligent Design,theology — harmonicminer @ 9:48 am

The previous post in this series is here.

One of our finest Christian philosophers, J.P. Moreland, has clearly described the central problems with trying to explain human rationality with a purely naturalistic approach:

The recalcitrant nature of human persons for scientific naturalism has been widely noticed. Thus, Berkeley philosopher John Searle recently observed, “There is exactly one overriding question in contemporary philosophy. How do we fit in? How can we square this self-conception of ourselves as mindful, meaning-creating, free, rational, etc., agents with a universe that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles?”  For the scientific naturalist, the answer is not very well.

The difficulty for scientific naturalism in accounting for these commonsense features of human beings has not been noticed simply by notable atheists. In fact, the nature of human persons has lead some to embrace theism. In the seismic book recounting the shift to theism by famous atheist Anthony Flew in There is a God, Roy Abraham Varghese notes that

“…the rationality that we unmistakably experience” ranging from the laws of nature to our capacity for rational thought cannot be explained if it does not have an ultimate ground, which can be nothing less than an infinite mind.

Read the whole thing, and if you find it at all interesting, you can easily find many books and articles by Moreland.

The anthropic principle (really, more of an observation) points out that the universe seems eerily fine-tuned for human beings to inhabit. But the flip side of the anthropic principle is that we are able to notice the fine-tuning, and create the anthropic principle to reflect our observations. As Robert M. Pirsig pointed out in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (if you haven’t read this, you should indulge yourself), science is not sufficient to explain the existence of science.

To put it another way, naturalism is not sufficient to explain its own existence as a conjecture about the nature of the universe.

Do you suppose Someone is trying to tell us something?

The next post in this series is here.

Aug 05 2008

Christians, War and Obama

Category: election 2008,McCain,military,Obama,politics,White House — harmonicminer @ 9:26 am

The appeal of Obama to some Christians is his stance on war. He is not a pacifist… not considering his (ill-considered) threats to invade Pakistan and his plan to do a surge in Afghanistan. Yet, simply because he wants a complete, hurried pullout from Iraq, essentially regardless of consequences in Iraq, he seems to reap the “peacemaker award” from some Christians, just because they think he seems more reluctant to go to war… although how they square that with his plans for Pakistan is beyond me.

Nevertheless, here are two statements about the Christian requirement to wage just war.

The first is a straightforward “everyman” type of argument, that is quite clear, concise, and hard to deny.

The second is a very thorough treatment of the entire topic of just war, pacifism and jihad. It is the product of very careful scholarship, with references aplenty for every assertion it makes about Christian tradition. At the Amazon link, there are a couple of reviews. Be warned that the single very negative review commits all the failures to engage with the central arguments of the book that it accuses the author of the book of committing. I can only encourage you to read the book for yourself, and come to your own conclusions about the scholarly rigor and theological care the author employs. The writer of the very negative review does not want you to read the book. One wonders what he is afraid you might learn.

It is odd that the Left gives Obama “peacemaker” status because he chooses to fight different wars, to different degrees, than the Bush Administration.  It is, I suppose, more evidence of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Aug 04 2008

Privatized Profit, Socialized Risk: the problem of public/private companies

Category: capitalism,corporations,corruption,economy,housing,Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 11:28 am

Larry Summers on the underlying problem of joint private/public companies, and how they led to the current housing market crunch.

Here is a really good creative capitalism idea. All Americans benefit from increases in home ownership because of the values like hard work, community, and respect for property that ownership instills. Families want desperately to own their own homes and accumulate equity. Yet it is very hard for conventional banks that borrow money over the short term to lend over the kind of 30-year horizons that best help families buy houses.

Continue reading “Privatized Profit, Socialized Risk: the problem of public/private companies”

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Aug 03 2008

A Cautionary Tale of Post-Ideological Politics in Israel: Visions of a future Obama presidency?

Category: Hamas,Hizbullah,Israel,middle east,Obama,politics — harmonicminer @ 9:16 am

Pretty much anyone who can read, and bothers to, knows that the Olmert government in Israel is hopelessly corrupt. The old notion of a “fish rotting from the head” comes to mind. Olmert is the target of seven different corruption investigations, a likely candidate for prison unless he cuts a deal before leaving office, and the most feckless leader in recent memory at fighting Israel’s enemies and protecting its people.

Building a governing coalition based on the Kadima party, the self-confessedly post-ideological creation of Ariel Sharon, a party which claimed to be neither right nor left (shades of Obama’s claim to “unify” and be “beyond old categories”), a party which would simply do what was necessary without reference to previously stated ideological positions, Olmert has actually accomplished nothing but to stay in power and stretch out his tenure, while causing great harm to Israel’s security.

This is all made very clear by Caroline Glick as she describes the ebb and flow of the Israeli electorate in response to events on the ground, and the way a “post-ideological” leader is captive to swings in public mood, but lacks the strength to actually carry out a coherent policy:

With the nation in a left leaning mood in the run-up to the last election, Kadima announced its plan to give Judea and Samaria to terrorists from Fatah and Hamas. Distinguishing their party from the radical left, which shares their plan, Kadima’s leaders explained that they sought to place Israel’s major urban centers in Palestinian rocket range not in the interest of peace – as the leftist ideologues would have it – but in the interest of the hardnosed “demographic” aim of putting all the country’s Jews in one concentrated area.

Before the nation had an opportunity to fully understand what Kadima’s “convergence” plan entailed, Israel’s body politic shifted to the right in June 2006 after the Palestinians attacked an IDF post near Gaza and kidnapped Cpl. Gilad Schalit. Two weeks later it shifted further to the right when Hizbullah carried out a nearly identical attack along the border with Lebanon and abducted reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser.

Noticing the public’s rightward shift, Olmert and his colleagues followed immediately. When Olmert launched the Second Lebanon War, he sounded downright Churchillian as he promised the nation nothing less than the total defeat of Hizbullah and the return of our hostage servicemen.

Continue reading “A Cautionary Tale of Post-Ideological Politics in Israel: Visions of a future Obama presidency?”

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Aug 02 2008

HE Is The ONE

Category: election 2008,Obama,politics — harmonicminer @ 1:41 pm

It may be getting to be time for a C.S.Lewis style “Lord, Liar or Lunatic” type of argument. I’m trying to decide between the last two.

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Aug 02 2008

Environmentalism unleashed = disaster

Category: Al Gore,environment,global warming,media — harmonicminer @ 9:26 am

Here is a new book that exposes the really, really inconvenient truth behind eco-panic myths about the environment, and what the real effect of many “environmental policies” has been.

Who is the inspiration behind the single biggest human caused environmental catastrophe, causing the most preventable death, of the 20th Century? Al Gore’s heroine, Rachel Carson, with her crusade against DDT, the use of which would have saved tens of millions of lives taken by malaria, but which was banned due to her efforts, and a sycophantic crowd of Gore’s predecessors in the eco-panic movement.

Yep: Al’s in fine company.

This book is a needed corrective for the total collapse of the media’s reporting in the area.

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