Freedom, Mistakes and Progress

Thought Piece of the Day

Does reality always win out over spin in the end?

What level of certainty should we have before we make a decision? How do we grapple with "anti-knowledge" - the things we don't know?

Does the absence of mistakes mean you're making progress, or is it a sign of danger?

What level of certainty should reporters have before reporting a news item? Should their level of certainty be higher than for bloggers who present information with caveats, asking others for further information?

What level of certainty should we have before running the risk of bearing false witness against a neighbor?

. . . Freedom implies the ability to make mistakes; it may even imply the necessity of them. Well might the perfect being exclaim: “not till now have I understood the tale of your people and their fall. … For if this is indeed, as the Eldar say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive.” Bitter indeed; for freedom is humanity’s curse and greatest gift, the ground of both fall and redemption. It is our common fate and our staircase to the stars.

What do you think?

Surprising summary concerning Honduras on CNN!

Famous Quote: Liberalism and Conservatism

Attributed to Winston Churchill:

Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.

(There are several versions of the quote, and variations have been attributed to other political figures.)

Demographic Crises and Obama's Science Czar

Mark Steyn notes that more people are starting to pay attention to the looming crisis caused by falling birthrates in developed countries. This was a main focus of Steyn's book, America Alone. We're talking about countries which seem the most secular and sophisticated, where cradle-to-grave government supports are most established and where family supports are nice, but not necessary, in order to feel secure about raising a child. Countries where most everyone believes in the importance of collective social responsibility. Like Japan and Canada - the two countries mentioned in Steyn's post. Ironically, these are often the countries where people don't seem to want to have children - or at least more than one or two. For a while, Japan was paying college-educated couples to have children. Don't know if they still are.

As Lawrence M. Miller notes, everybody wants security, but when people in an organization or a society feel too secure, everything starts to fall apart. One of the paradoxes of life.

Japan has added problems caused by suddenly opening the workplace to women not long ago, giving them an alternative to the often repressive traditional marriage customs in Japan. When I was in school, it was the policy of the Japanese government to send only girls as exchange students because the boys often acted like demanding, spoiled jerks in home settings. They gave Japan a bad image. When women found themselves with more choices in Japan, many either decided not to marry or decided to drastically limit their families to reduce their responsibilities.

Which brings us to a scary book co-authored by Obama's Science Czar:

. . . If society’s survival depended on having more children, women could he required to bear children, just as men can constitutionally be required to serve in the armed forces. Similarly, given a crisis caused by overpopulation, reasonably necessary laws to control excessive reproduction could be enacted.

Other nice ideas: Forcibly taking children from single mothers, putting sterilants in the water, forced abortions and preventing reproduction by "undesirables".

The last point was one of the assumed reasons for Roe v. Wade, according to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Not that we know whether she ascribed to this view personally or if she was just describing the thinking of Roe v. Wade proponents. But we still have the issue of Medicaid funding for abortions - whether taxpayers deeply opposed to abortions should be forced to pay for them. It always seemed strange to me that with all the ultra-rich liberals in America, they couldn't come up with some way to fund abortions for poor women themselves, without turning to the public sector and thus, ratcheting up opposition to "pro-choice". But I digress.

There are a lot of important ideas to think about here. But one thing is clear: Obama's science czar was incredibly wrong about the "coming population crisis" - at least with respect to developed countries where the measures he suggested might be feasible. The maturing generation in America will have trouble paying for the entitlements of aging baby boomers in the future, even though our reproductive rates have not yet fallen below the number necessary for replacement. Other developed countries are in much worse shape in terms of demographics. Holdren was wrong during the 1970s about the prospects for global cooling, too. He also incorrectly predicted shortages in commodities - the availability of all 5 he listed increased. Could Holdren also be wrong now about other things?

The American Left has, in the last 40 years, been incredibly short-sighted about most of their social causes and scientific preoccupations. For example, Holdren would probably not have thought much about taking children away from single mothers if Lyndon Johnson's Great Society welfare programs had not done so much to encourage single motherhood among the poor, especially among poor blacks.

If you start to think that American conservatism is an important source of potential tyranny in our age, read through the links above one more time. Do a little reading on your own, too. Check the references if you like.

Update: This is the party of "impartial science"?

And Holdren never has ceased peddling calamity as science.

Today, for instance, though Holdren publicly has tempered his aversion to population growth, he still advocates that government nudge us toward fewer children.

Instead of coercion, though, he is a fan of "motivation."

When, during his Senate confirmation hearing, Holdren was asked about his penchant for scientific overstatements, he responded that "the motivation for looking at the downside possibilities, the possibilities that can go wrong if things continue in a bad direction, is to motivate people to change direction. That was my intention at the time."

"Motivation" is when Holdren tells us that global warming could cause the deaths of 1 billion people by 2020. Or when he claimed that sea levels could rise by 13 feet by the end of this century when your run-of-the-mill alarmist warns of only 13 inches.

"Motivating"—or, in other words, scaring the hell out of people—about "possibilities" is an ideological and political weapon unsheathed in the effort to pass policies that, in the end, coerce us to do the right thing.

Read the whole thing. There's no reason why "motivation" could not become "coercion" again during a perceived crisis. And this guy is very good at perceiving crises. They're just usually not the real crises. There are plenty more policy wonks and politicians out there just like him. No, this is NOT the party of "impartial science". It is the party of post-normal science.

Post-normal science allows EPA officials to feel like they're doing the right thing when they suppress a report by one of their employees which suggests looking more closely at recent science on global warming, for example. It allows Holdren to engage in "scientific overstatements" in order "to motivate people to change direction". Post-normal science is a drastic break with previously accepted ethical rules regarding scientific research. Most older scientists would likely think of it as "lying".

High Noon for Eastern Europe?

Recently, VDH discussed some surprising changes being forced on Western Europe by the "new politics" here in the U.S. Here, Wretchard discusses the changes being forced upon Eastern Europe - perhaps with the unintended consequence down the road of increased nuclear armament. Glance through the comments for some interesting points of view.

Actually, Donald Rumsfeld started the trend toward making Western Europe more responsible for its own defense, when he announced the closing of US bases in Germany and elsewhere after the start of the Iraq war. Many Germans who decried American military imperialism were, ironically, not real enthusiastic about the US ending its occupation of Germany (since WWII). President Bush allowed Europe to take the lead in negotiations with Iran concerning its nuclear ambitions. Suddenly, the "cowboy" who ignored his allies was criticized for not taking the lead in the negotiations. But at the same time, the Bush administration made steps toward increased support for Central and Eastern European nations recently emerged from Soviet domination. It appears that this support is now being withdrawn to a large extent.

Many unanticipated changes will take place in the world because of current changes in U.S. foreign policy. Some of them will be good. Some of them will not. But it's important to look beyond the immediate intentions of changes in our foreign policies as far as is possible. The abandonment of Central and Eastern Europe to Putin's regime doesn't seem altogether wise to me.

China - an Empire trying to look like a State

The Uighur uprising throws new light on China's imperial ambitions. Interesting history of the transition from "Imperial China" to "Maoist China". Implications for Taiwan and other nearby areas.

Senator Embarrassment on gender and race

Dennis Prager nails it when he calls Senator Boxer "Senator Embarrassment". As he points out, even Californians who disagree with Senator Feinstein aren't embarrassed by her, as a general rule. But with Senator Boxer, jaw-dropping, embarrassing statements just keep coming, year after year.

Here, our junior senator, Barbara Boxer, gets arrogant about her title while questioning a general. Because she worked so hard to get that title. Her bristly feminist hostility seems so oddly out of date. Plus juvenile and rude, especially given the setting. And ignorant of the military tradition of referring to superior officers as "sir" or "ma'am". She was being honored, not disrespected.

I don't remember Senator Boxer's election as being a result of her hard work (especially compared to the work of becoming a Brigadier General). If the California Democratic Party machine had not been so dishonest and sleazy, we would have had the courteous, serious thinker Bruce Herschensohn as a senator, instead of "Senator Boxer, Ma'am". I don't think the party machine has reformed much since then. That's one reason that our state is in such sad financial shape.

And here she goes again, playing the race card against a black man. He takes offense at the suggestion that he should agree with the leaders of other black organizations just because he is black. Rightly so. The liberal hostility toward minorities who "leave the reservation" is a corrosive thing in American life. Senator Boxer was pretty clumsy in presenting her expectation that all blacks should think alike.

Interestingly, he got away with taking offense even though he was not expressing the official liberal "consensus". That's sort of rare. But remember, from Andrew Breitbart's heirarchy of political correctness:

Black trumps Woman.

From the comments: "Evidently, she was shaken but not stirred! . . why didn't she object when this guy called her ma'am?" She needs some shaking up from time to time or she'll get more and more condescending. "It was like being in Mississippi in 1945."

On the other hand, James Taranto makes a good point:

We watched the video, and we can see Alford's point. Boxer does come across as condescending, and, weirdly, she doesn't even seem to understand why a he would find it offensive for her to rebut his argument not on the merits but via a racially specific appeal to authority.

Yet Alford, by speaking on behalf the National Black Chamber of Commerce, is himself relying on just such a racially specific appeal to authority. We tend to agree with Alford and disagree with Boxer on the subject they were discussing, but the rule of etiquette he invoked--blacks may claim authority on account of their race, but whites may not seek to undermine that authority--put her at an unfair disadvantage, one that was particularly unwarranted given that the topic at hand had nothing to do with race.

On the third hand, she didn't think she had to prepare for her opponent.

More:

Boxer’s entire M.O. as senator is to wield liberal ethnic or gender groups as a bat to bludgeon any criticism to her agenda. That’s not debating, that’s bullying. That’s not respecting racial diversity. It’s using racial groups as a weapon.

Follow the second link for an interesting history of the phrase, "Truth to Power"and Boxer's dismissing of Secretary Condoleeza Rice's positions because Rice didn't have children. The last link concerns Dick Durbin's bigotry - some people are just genetically incapable of understanding others.

I'm looking forward to the time when legislators can get down to the business before them without diverting attention to unrelated race and gender sensitivities and assumptions. And when they actually pay attention to their constituents instead of their desire to increase their own power. Time for some new faces in Washington and some new political tactics in Sacramento.

Who thinks about the Constitution anymore?

Here's a video from PJTV with a catchy title asking if President Obama has a different copy of the constitution than everyone else does. The initial reference is to a piece by President Obama in the Washington Post. But as the three talking heads get going, it's clear that the responsibility for upholding the Constitution in the USA belongs to the voters. One point which is briefly mentioned is the abdication of power to regulate and set laws to unelected ageencies. This is one area where voters have really lost control over their government. In the recent Cap and Trade discussions in Congress, one representative stated that it was important for Congress to act so that the EPA did not enact its own draconian measures.

Meanwhile, Victor Davis Hanson identifies a number of reasons why our latest presidents don't seem to measure up to earlier ones. He compares our presidents to Roman emperors, ending with the fall of Rome - several emperors after the emperors took over the Bread and Circuses gig - when Bread and Circuses became the preoccupations of the citizenry. In our day, people want more government service without higher taxes. So we defer payment to the future while saying that "the rich" should bear the primary costs of government. (Somehow, the richest of "the rich" currently seem to profit greatly from their connections in government). It's ominous to remember a similar lack of a sense of seriousness and individual responsibility at the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Dark Ages.

In our celebrity-crazed society, it is easy to put most of our political focus on one "star", the President, Everything seems to rise and fall with the popularity of one person. He's so much more interesting than words on some old "constitution" written long ago. He sometimes seems to be able to personally solve all our problems. Why not give him and his agencies the power and the money to do it? People don't even stop to consider what will happen when that money and power is in the hands of a president they really don't like.

Why worry about separation of powers? It's not so glamorous to think about who our local, state and congressional representatives are and to actually interact with them. But that's where the real political action should be. Finally, it's extremely unfortunate when our elected representatives turn the power to set laws and regulations over to unelected bureaucracies or to the courts because they don't have the courage to face the voters. It's up to us to turn this around, if we can.

Update: PJTV FOMENTING INSURRECTION

The Glorious Revolution - More than 300 Years Ago

How much do you know about England's Glorious Revolution, with its precursor to our Bill of Rights? Here's you chance to learn. Follow the links if you want to know the details. Let's not be to quick to give up rights won from governments over the centuries.

Update: Interesting idea - Liberal democracy in England was grounded in culture, while that in Europe was grounded in ideology. Because liberal democracy was not at war with the traditional culture, it tended to be more stable than Continental democracy. Things don't seem to be going quite as well in the UK now, however.

4th of July plus One Week

With the fireworks over, the dogs calm and bureaucracy's effects on our personal lives in perspective, I have a chance to look over some of the posts other people had put up about this important holiday. Some holidays are worth reflection during the following week, I think.

Here's Cassandra's beautifully written piece comparing then and now. She quotes James Madison, Henning W. Prentis, "The Second Bill of Rights" (written 65 years ago) and President Obama, among others. I appreciate her clear perspective on prominent ideas in America over the years concerning the role of government and the role of the military. Highly recommended for your consideration.

Mark Steyn: A fascinating history of "America the Beautiful"

Sometimes Americans are sweet. National Anthem at Fenway Park - Everybody join in!

Dr. Sanity posted the text of the Declaration of Independence. She's not going to blog for a while. Concentrating more on real life. The posts she considers her best are on the left sidebar.

Pej puts the Declaration up in a little more artful style. 1776 The Musical - for the history, not musical brilliance. What the Declaration is not.

Other notable events connected with the 4th of July

More history: Letter from Valley Forge. And the Constitution's final edit. Rediscovering Frederick Douglass in the Age of Obama.

Looking toward the future, where will a new generation of leaders come from?