Many know C.S. Lewis for his Chronicles of Narnia series or Mere Christianity, but few realize how much he discussed things like freedom and democracy.

From his book, Present Concerns, Lewis wrote an essay concerning equality. The following is a segment from that essay that I came across via The Beacon blog:

A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. And whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure. I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people—all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumours. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

This introduces a view of equality rather different from that in which we have been trained. I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill, or clothes which are good because we are no longer innocent, I don’t think the old authority in kings, priests, husbands, or fathers, and the old obedience in subjects, laymen, wives, and sons, was in itself a degrading or evil thing at all. I think it was intrinsically as good and beautiful as the nakedness of Adam and Eve. It was rightly taken away because men became bad and abused it. . . .

But medicine is not good. There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. And that is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values: offers food to some need which we have starved.

When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget but as an ideal we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked.

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A couple weeks ago I finally got around to reading, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan after having it recommended to me by several people. I will never look at food the same way again.

I know people make flippant remarks like that all the time, coming out of “Super Size Me” exclaiming with enraged gusto, “I’ll never eat another Big Mac!” In fact, I’m almost hesitant to make a comment like the aforementioned lest it cheapen a shift in my thinking that is actually quite real and startling even to myself.  I’m being honest when I say that Pollan shook my worldview and forced me to confront an industrial food system of which I had been willfully ignorant, partaking in its cheap delicacies without understanding the repercussions. I mean, its just food right? Maybe not.

“Eating is an agricultural act,” as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world — and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them.  There are things in it that will ruin their appetites. But in the the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kinds of pleasure that are only deepened by knowing.

There was a ton of information packed away in the pages of this book, but I want to highlight two main points, discussed in the opening chapters of the book that really caused me to pause:

We are a nation of corn-eaters

“But I rarely eat corn!” you say.  Do you eat any of the following:

• steak (corn is what feeds the steer)
• chicken, pork, turkey, lamb (all corn-fed)
• catfish, tilapia, salmon (all increasingly trained to eat corn)
• eggs, milk, cheese yogurt (once came from dairy cows raised on grass, now Holsteins tethered to machines, eating corn)
• soda and many juices (high-fructose corn syrup)
• beer (alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn)
• any processed food with starch, glucose syrup, maltodextrin, crystalline fructose, absorbic acid, lecithin, dextrose, lactic acid and lystine, maltose, MSG, caramel color, xanthan gum (all corn)
• Cheez Whiz, frozen yogurt, canned fruit, ketchup, frozen waffles, syrups, mayonnaise, mustard, hot dogs, salad dressing

As Pollan explains, “…the food industry has done a good job of persuading us that the forty-five throusand different items of SKUs…in the supermarket…represent genuine variety rather than so many clever rearrangements of molecules extracted from the same plant.”

So, you and I eat a lot of corn without even realizing it, but why?  Because its cheap.  And why is it cheap?  Because the U.S. government heavily subsidizes the corn industry.  As Pollan explains,

America’s farm policy was forged during the Depression not, as many people seem to think, to encourage farmers to produce more food for a hungry nation, but to rescue farmers from the disastrous effects of growing too much food – far more than Americans could afford to buy.

This system changed, however with the 1973 farm bill which replaced,

…the New Deal system of supporting prices through loans, government grain purchases, and land idling with a new system of direct payment to farmers…Instead of keeping corn out of a falling market, as the old loan programs and federal granary had done, the new subsidies encouraged farmers to sell their corn at any proice, since the government would make up the difference.

The history of American farm policy is vital in understanding our country’s food culture.  While the free market advocate in me has always abhorred the idea of agricultural subsidies, the discussion presented by Pollan shows the various factors which make the debate more than just a black and white issue.  However, regardless of the economic implications of paying our farmers to produce mountains of cheap corn, the fact is we end up subsidizing the most unhealthy calories in the supermarket.

Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.

For one of the fattest nations on earth, this isn’t welcome news.

We also eat a lot of oil

For some, the idea that we end up indirectly eating gallons of oil each year may be an even bigger leap than acknowledging the prominence of corn in our diets, but the unsettling truth is that we’ve built our modern-industrial food system on a foundation of cheap oil. From the chemical fertilizers that cause many of the crops to grow quicker and bigger, to the pesticides that keep insects away, to the gasoline used by tractors to harvest the crops and trucks to transport them thousands of miles across the country and finally to the packaging used to keep the food from spoiling — each link in the chain requires us to further rely on non-renewable resource.

How much oil is used? 50 gallons of oil per acre of corn, 1/3 gallon per bushel. “Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food…”

These costs are largely hidden to the consumer, but they remain nonetheless. What makes this scary is what will happen when a barrel of oil goes back to costing $150 or more and doesn’t mercifully come back down as it did a couple years ago. For a food system that relies on large amounts of oil to produce and transport its products, this spells huge increases in the price of food.  Unless we choose to opt out, which of course is what a large section of the book is devoted to teaching the reader how to do.

Pollan goes much deeper into the food system than just corn and oil.  He looks at the repercussions of feeding animals food they weren’t naturally made to eat, the treatment and quality of life of those animals, the somewhat disappointing realities of the big organic movement and why Whole Foods isn’t necessarily the answer, the vegetarian debate, the history of the modern food industry and even the challenges and unexpected pleasures of hunting and foraging for food in the modern world.

It would be hard to do this book justice without going on for another few thousand words.  So I won’t.  Instead, read this book and really chew it over (no pun intended…ok, maybe it was).  You, like me, may end up surprised at how much your answer changes regarding the question of, “what’s for dinner?”

“We’ve become a culture of technicians.  We’re all into the how of it and nobody’s stepping back and saying ‘But Why?’.”  – Joel Salatin, Farmer (my new hero)

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Retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, a West Point Graduate who went on to earn a PhD from Princeton and later taught as a professor at West Point and Johns Hopkins before joining the faculty at Boston University, is the author of one of the best books I’ve read in several years, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. A conservative historian, Bacevich expresses his “dismay at the direction of the U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.” Mainly, the excessive use of military force as an instrument to remake the world in the way we see fit.

The interview is a bit dated (Aug 2008) so forgive the election year discussions…and the obnoxious commercial break in the middle of the interview, but the main thrust of his message remains important, maybe even more so on the eve of 30,000 additional troops making their way to Afghanistan, the “Graveyard of Empires.”

I welcome your comments on what may prove to be some more controversial talking points.  Enjoy the interview and sound off below!

Popularity: 2% [?]

The following is an e-mail written recently by my friend’s dad, a university professor and respected author.  He is not a liberal, in fact he is quite conservative.  After discussing the following with him over pumpkin carving and wine the other night, it became apparent that he wrote this as a response to some of the ridiculous e-mail forwards he had been receiving as of late from his conservative bretheren. 

He, like many of us, has been the recipient of numerous emotionally-charged forwards blasting President Obama, librerals, environmentalists and various other groups perceived by some on the right to be the primary cause of all ills infecting our country.  You know the kind of e-mail, the ones that equate Obama with Hitler, scream of the impending moral destruction of our country at the hands of the left and warn that we’ll all turn into socialists/aetheists/communists at the stroke of midnight if we don’t forward the message to 10 people in the next hour.

It’s not that rigorous debate over issues should be stifled in any way, however, as a country we’ve begun to lose the ability to argue in a logical, civilized manner.  If you can’t at least imagine that those in disagreement with you 1) may have a reasonable position 2) are not the scum of the earth, than your voice in the discussion will soon become no more than a clanging gong with no value other than increased volume and noise.

I share the following e-mail simply because I believe in its underlying message.  We don’t have to all agree with each other, nor should we, but peddling half-truths and fear-based hype as something resembling reason is not what the country needs and something we should strive to do better than.

The following is fairly long, but well worth the read.  Print it off, take it with you and read it on the subway, airplane or by the fire as you enjoy a good glass of wine.

On rumored proposals to “tax the wealthy out of prosperity.”

I’ve been mulling over this quote ever since you sent it and would agree that taking something from the “haves” is a poor incentive to generate additional resources for rich or poor. However, it also strikes me that Mr. Rogers is speaking to something of a straw man argument here in the sense that for years our federal taxes hardly go to support the lazy poor relative to other government priorities–which are not by any stretch of the imagination set by low income people.

You know the federal budget better than me, but for twenty years or more the three major ticket items have been defense, social security, and Medicare, which together represent at least 60% of all monies spent. Other sizable chunks go to interest on our every growing national debt, veterans’ and federal employee benefits, etc. As far as I can tell, Medicaid and safety net programs for low income kids, foster care, food stamps, and supplements for the elderly make up at most 18%. If these groups are what Mr. Rogers means by those “receiving without working,” then I’m not sure what he wants a civilized country to do with our mentally retarded, aged, and dispossessed minors. I have seen first-hand in several countries in Eastern Europe and Asia what happens to individuals in these groups when public officials turn a blind eye to their needs and cannot fathom that happening in any nation that considers itself civilized.

Philosophers and politicians throughout the last century have variously and eloquently verbalized the ethic of a civilization’s moral value determined by how it treats its most unfortunate, but it seems to me this is also a fundamental spiritual value. Our Sunday School lesson this week was about the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and I confess that my mind drifted for a time to the matter of whether such responsibilities should be matters of personal or collective public responsibility. I concluded that to the man in the ditch, whom I take to be the focus of the story, it didn’t really matter as long as he got some help. You have probably heard me tell stories about my mother’s mother, our dear Grandma Peterson, whom we all thought somewhat strange as children. I don’t think she ever passed a hitchhiker that she didn’t insist be given a ride, and she regularly packed lunches for them whenever traveling to the city. Our family tales of her peculiar ways are legion, but she was never preachy about her various private ministries; it was simply a matter of cheerfully following our Lord’s example in spite of sorrowful circumstances. I can’t say how cheerfully she paid her taxes, but if it meant helping those in need I have little doubt it would have ranked at the top of most public priorities.

The thrust of Rogers’ argument seems to be that that taxing rich people at a rate higher than others is unfair. I think I probably agree with this, but fair doesn’t mean equal in all kinds of settings from school to business. Whatever lobbyists the poor and elderly can afford to press for their needs likely get drowned out by those of the well-heeled; thus all kinds of special interest tax breaks and benefits exist ranging from large commodity price supports to federal guarantees of excessive cost overruns by defense contractors. Of the remaining federal budget categories–scientific and medical research, international commitments, and the like, I don’t see any of that directly benefiting those who don’t work for one reason or another. We probably could have gilded the door knobs of every poor person in America for what the Iraq diversion is costing and we still haven’t accomplished the original mission in Afghanistan.

The alternative to taxes, of course, it to continue to spending mindlessly and increase the national debt as has been happening for years under both Republicans and Democrats. I realize there are all kinds of valid emendations and interpretations in matters this large, but these broad strokes occur to me.

On the matter of Obama directly addressing students in school.

You are absolutely right that “federal involvement in education is extra-Constitutional” as it has been essentially a matter for state and local governance since the inception of the Republic. However, by no stretch of the imagination  does Obama’s interest in sending a message to American students about topics related to personal responsibility approach a totalitarian effort akin to pre-war Germany. To argue otherwise seems to me to be a highly misguided interpretation of history and government policy. In the first place, our federal executive branch has no authority to compel any teacher in the country to watch or listen to anything. In American public schools, that is explicitly the final authority of a district school board of locally elected citizens. Of course most lay board members can’t be expected to know everything that might be studied by teachers and students in the course of a school year, so virtually every district has adopted board policies that outline for principals and teachers what they are authorized to view, read, discuss, etc. Even state “mandated” curriculum, like the recent HIV/AIDS education guidelines, cannot be unilaterally forced upon a local district; a school board can only be encouraged to adopt it. (To be sure, there are federal requirements attached to what we call compensatory programs like special education, but these are programs funded by the federal government which is a relatively small though important portion of any district’s total budget.)

Students at the secondary level far and wide have for years routinely watched excerpts from the presidential State of the Union addresses and related political discussions, though such audiences are not primarily students of course. If Obama’s intentions imply that he thinks all K-12 kids are “his children” as you assert, of course this would be blasphemous as you point out, and I confess that you may be more well-informed regarding his intentions than me. I had several reasons to hope John McCain would have been elected, but we all know that didn’t happen. However, the few references I’ve seen to the theme of his intended remarks relates to affirming for young people values like personal responsibility. I tend to be suspicious of most politicians so perhaps there are more sinister motives, and if this presentation takes place I guess we can analyze his remarks. However, there’s scarcely a school district in any American city that isn’t at its wit’s end trying to figure out what to do about problems like the high school drop-out rate. (The few times I’ve heard or read Obama on issues in education his remarks have tended to be in this direction.)

The national drop-out rate is presently around 33%, which means there must be lots of places in this country where it is far above that. The impact of legions of young people whose employment prospects are significantly diminished because they never finished school is an impending national disaster for reasons that also relate to other matters than just earning a living wage (like what they do when they don’t earn a wage, but that’s another story). If the president or anybody else can get even 1% of urban youth to reconsider dropping out by a twenty minute pep-talk, frankly I’m all for it, though I’m not getting my hopes up.

Whatever this upcoming address represents, it is difficult for me to reconcile any association with the Ziemer book and its context. Germany’s National Socialist agenda was rooted in militaristic racism. Hitler’s chief interest in economics was in finding ways to nationalize the war machine industry so he could annihilate Europe’s democracies and non-Aryan peoples. We know now from recent historical scholarship that he was seriously eyeing a second crusade against the United States once his plans for continental domination were to be accomplished. From my limited perch, if I see anything in the policies of the new administration, on the international front it is to be more focused, i.e., limited, in foreign obligations, and to promote greater diversity in the domestic realm.

The hands-down single greatest effort to increase state and federal authority in the public schools against local control took place ironically during the Reagan administration. He had campaigned against Carter for months with recurrent accusations that American public schools were falling behind the rest of the world, and used “The Nation at Risk” report to fuel a major effort to raise standardized test scores especially in mathematics and science. The array of “accountability” terms and acronyms in public education like No Child Left Behind (Inside?)–a well-intentioned bipartisan effort, EALR, and WASL, are direct descendants of this initiative. The story of the origin of this report and the nature of its statistical comparisons has an extensive and controversial history, but anybody who wandered around a typical American high school in the 1980s and a college-prep one in Japan or Germany could tell you that ours weren’t up to snuff. Of course American public schools have a statutory obligation to accept every child from every home—and those who don’t even have homes, rather unlike those in many European and Asian nations where students are tracked from their early teens. So when I was in Cashmere or St. John-Endicott, we routinely worked with kids whose parents had tattoos up to their neckline and whose home methinks promoted rather different values than my folks did back on the farm.

This takes us back to possible motives for the president’s upcoming remarks. Responsibility means dealing with the prospect of all these millions of future drop-outs and marginally educated citizens in this country whose home life does not especially promote their moral well-being. (NB: The two factors most influencing student academic success have nothing to do with school: 1. availability of an enriched and supportive reading environment at home, and 2. restricted access to television and electronic media.) We can ignore these kids to our peril, which many people do until their house gets robbed or next welfare budget is published, or we can hope the private schools will accept them–but the vast majority don’t (nor would most charters though I wish Washington State would permit them), or we can kick them in the rear verbally (in the case of my own I was open to other more physical means) and tell them that even if they don’t have the best home life, and the unemployment rate is 10%, and we’re fighting two wars, and on and on, they still need to buck up, work hard, and start living responsibly, because nobody else is going to do it for them.

If he says just this much to them, Obama will have my gratitude. But where he and I part ways is the apparent implicit understanding that if people don’t live responsibly, Uncle Sam will bail them out, as we have now done to the extent of many trillions of dollars for all those who needed federal stimulus monies to salvage bad investments or upside-down home mortgages. But I am also aware that for years under both Republican and Democratic administrations, by far the lion’s share of the federal budget goes to a bloated defense department (even when the Secretary of Defense pleads to cut certain programs), interest on the ever increasing national debt, entitlement programs like Medicare to the elderly, etc.

As a percentage of the entire budget, the amount that goes to social welfare programs is relatively modest, and less than virtually all democratic nations of Europe and Asia. Obama had an opportunity when he took office after the economy went south under Bush to affirm the time-honored (and I believe biblical) values of thrift, self-reliance, and hard work. Instead, he told people to go out and spend money to invigorate the economy, get a new car, buy furniture with tax rebates, etc., etc. Bush and Cheney also spent mindlessly but many of their chief beneficiaries were in the military-industrial and extra-military complex (e.g., Halliburton, Blackwater). If I wanted to give myself a headache I could probably do a little research and find out how much was spent this direction during the last administration; but I may not be able to comprehend the more disturbing value in loss of life of our valiant American soldiers or Iraqi civilians, though I read the latter is conservatively estimated to be 40,000 and many sources cite something closer to 100,000.

At some point when we have spent and shot ourselves into oblivion, both Democrats and Republicans might dust off a copy of E. F. Schumacher’s book from a generation ago, “Small is Beautiful”, or occasionally read an essay by Wendell Berry like “What are People For?”. They’ll find out we have no divine obligation to be the world’s policeman, to dam up every river for our inexhaustible appetite for energy, or to bankroll a military-intelligence-industrial complex that five-star general, supreme WWII commander, and president Dwight Eisenhower presciently warned us about. (If anything, I think a case could be made that we have an obligation not to do these things, but that would be another essay.) I say this as a proud Vietnam-era veteran and the father of an Air Force Academy graduate soon headed to Iraq where a nephew is presently serving. But my children have also heard that there is no pride in policies that spend more in two weeks on military adventurism abroad than the annual national budget for dispossessed or underprivileged children at home. You probably know that one of my sisters is a school nurse and a while back I asked for unrelated reasons about changes in the WIC program that provides nutrition and medical services to at-risk children and their mothers. She told me it had been discontinued for more than a year. I’m all for saving a buck, but it was enough to make your blood boil when not long afterward I read how a number of congressmen were strongly lobbying on behalf of a series of multi-zillion dollar defense projects Secretary of Defense Gates told both Bush and Obama were not needed.

I fear my response here may have exceeded what was invited or anticipated, friend, so thanks for your indulgence.

On the matter of global warming.

I am not a scientist but I can see. I have also been sent several email attachments lately questioning a recent National Academy of Sciences report that global warming has been taking place for some decades. This is in spite of general historic trends of temperature oscillations lasting several centuries that should have the earth presently in a cooling mode. Although a consensus of the professional scientific community has endorsed reports coming from the NAS and similar international organizations, the credentials of those who represent dissenting viewpoints seems impressive enough to elicit my confession that I can only offer a layman’s commentary on the matter, but one that has attempted to somewhat keep abreast of the issues by reading conflicting viewpoints in such venues as The National Review (conservative), Atlantic and The Economist (centrist), and Harper’s (liberal). (I also like reading Scientific American but come away from most issues feeling like I understood about 10% of what was written.)

While my limitations in understanding the matter of global warming are manifold, I can offer that our family was blessed by the presence of a scientist of some note whose work had special relevance to this topic. Willis M. Johns, my mom’s brother, served for many years as chief geologist for the Montana Bureau of Mines, professor of economic geology at Montana Tech, and surveyor for the US Geological Survey’s Northern Rockies district. Uncle Willis was also very conservative in his politics and generally suspicious of most things emanating from Washington, DC. But Willis knew intimately the Northern Rockies from living in the field for weeks on end in order to conduct USGS mapping and explorations for various mining interests.

Through Willis I was introduced to the grandeur of Glacier National Park in the 1960s and traveled through it one summer when he lived in nearby Kalispel. I remember marveling at the high peaks draped in the enormous gray-white formations for which the place is known, and journeyed through the park again via its famed Highway to the Sun in the early 1980s. I last visited Glacier two weeks ago with my 85-year-old mother with whom, incidentally, I had been on that first trip there nearly five decades ago. Our first impression upon approaching the park last month was the stunned response to each other, “So where are all the glaciers?” Of course there are still a number of glaciers girding the higher peaks and numerous snowfields, but even to amateur climatologist eyes like ours, it was clear that something significant had changed the landscape since our previous visits.

In the absence of Willis, who passed away in 1989, I made inquiry locally among other relatives who had long lived in the area and learned that it is common knowledge there that at the present melt rate, “Glacier” Park is no longer expected to have any by 2030. Of the 150 glaciers large enough to be named in the nineteenth century, only 26 exist today which explains why the summer landscape looks so different from what I observed those many years ago. The chief cause is not attributed to the lack of annual snowfall, but to a rise in daily minimum temperature that has accelerated in the last fifty years. But the most peculiar observation for me was the evidence from ice core studies reported there that the pattern of fluctuations in glacier advance and recession over millennia has been reversed for over a century. The terrestrial climate of cold and warm trends over time that continues to be the subject of so much research seems to be related to variations in Earth’s orbit around the sun.

That the evidence should suggest the planet be in a cooling trend now when temperatures are actually increasing leaves one to theorize about what variable or variables have been introduced since the 1800s to cause this change. I’m entirely open to other hypotheses regarding factors that may have interrupted the general cycle over the past century and a half. But it strikes me as eminently reasonable that nothing has been proposed that can even slightly compare to the effects of hundreds of billions of greenhouse gases and related emissions/pollutants introduced into the environment as a result of the Industrial Revolution. The benefits to humanity, of course, have been rather substantial, and I greatly enjoy traveling by car and air and using all manner of oil-based products and by-products. But to deny this has had a detrimental impact on the environment that will only get worse without forthright intervention from the lowest (household) to the highest (international) levels seems akin to infantile “me-ism”, a term used by Georgie Ann Geyer has used to characterize the attitude about life being all about self.

Many of the recent emails I have received on climate change fall into two categories: The first continue to question whether or not global warming is actually taking place. To these authors I honestly suggest a trip to someplace like northwest Montana or an examination of glacier ice core reports from there or most any other high mountain range in the world. I gather the Inuit people probably know ice better than most scientists or politicians so gleaning their perspectives might also be more useful than that of someone representing special interests in our nation’s capital. But another body of rhetoric related to this topic involves the matter of cause, and dismisses the notion that global warming is related in any significant way to mankind’s effect on the environment. What folks in this camp do see is a sophisticated ploy by a coalition of environmentalists and Third World plaintiffs seeking financial remuneration through groups like the UN for damages from industrialized countries. The implication, of course, is since humanity is not responsible for global warming; we are not accountable for its consequences, or for moderating its effects through cap and trades or other proposed interventions.

I’m not sure exactly what, if anything, I might owe the citizens of the Maldives Islands, Bangladesh, or anywhere else threatened with rising sea levels because I have and am using fossil fuels as my ancestors have since the 1800s. But it seems to me that ignoring the obvious, or at least forthrightly addressing valid differences of opinion,  is irresponsible citizenship, and arrogantly risks the wellbeing of the next generation and God’s creation for which we are to be stewards.

I suppose many people who knew Uncle Willis would have said he was not an especially religious person. He didn’t often attend church and believed the earth and solar system to have been formed through natural processes over billions of years. But I came to understand that he did not believe faith, reason, and observation to offer irreconcilable conclusions about the nature of spiritual or biological life. Rather, like John Wesley, he thought these ways of knowing all attested to the same unified truth. Willis’s far ranging interests led him to investigate truth about many different subjects, and following his retirement our uncle devoted considerable attention to biblical archaeology. He traveled to the Middle East to investigate recent discoveries of Hittite culture that he thought shed light on Old Testament history he more fully sought to understand. I’m grateful for what his honesty taught me about rocks and glaciers, truth and responsibility.

Richard Scheuerman

Popularity: 4% [?]

An article in this morning’s Washington Post points out that many top employees of financial firms being targeted for pay cuts by the government have already left or are on their way.

“There’s no question people have left because of uncertainty of our ability to pay,” said an executive at one of the affected firms. “It’s a highly competitive market out there.”

I understand that people are frustrated with the economy, but it is foolish to think that cutting the pay of people within the financial industry will turn out well. Compensation is a drop in the bucket compared to the host of other problems plaguing our economy.

This is going to backfire and the evidence above shows that it already is. If you are an executive in a multi-billion dollar financial firm chances are strong to very strong that 1) You are highly skilled and educated and know how to create value in an organization  2) You can find another high-paying job at the drop of a hat, or the ring of a phone.

The people working at firms that the Pay Czar is going after are already leaving and those who haven’t yet, soon will. As Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution commented the other day (emphasis mine),

There is no way this will work as advertised. If the administration actually follows through, most of these executives will quit and get higher paying jobs elsewhere. Executives not directly affected by the pay cuts will also quit when they see their prospects for future salary gains have been cut. Chaos will be created at these firms as top people leave in droves. Will the administration then order people back to work?

Ayn Rand fans are chuckling right now asking themselves, “Who is John Galt?”

Popularity: 3% [?]

Economist Robert Higgs on Americans’ unrealistic expectations of their government (hat tip Marginal Revolution):

Until more people come to a more realistic, fact-based understanding of the government and the economy, little hope exists of tearing them away from their quasi-religious attachment to a government they view with misplaced reverence and unrealistic hopes. Lacking a true religious faith yet craving one, many Americans have turned to the state as a substitute god, endowed with the divine omnipotence required to shower the public with something for nothing in every department – free health care, free retirement security, free protection from hazardous consumer products and workplace accidents, free protection from the Islamic maniacs the U.S. government stirs up with its misadventures in the Muslim world, and so forth. If you take the government to be Santa Claus, you naturally want every day to be Christmas; and the bigger the Santa, the bigger his sack of goodies.

Popularity: 3% [?]

In case you were wondering if China has any interest in what goes on in Afghanistan, here you go:

1) They share a border via the Wakhan Corridor

2) They want access to Afghanistan’s copper reserves and bid $3.5 billion to get it.

3) They built the Gwadar Port in Pakistan (opened in 2007) with hopes of one day connecting the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline

Robert Kaplan lays it out,

In Afghanistan, American and Chinese interests converge. By exploiting Afghanistan’s metal and mineral reserves, China can provide thousands of Afghans with jobs, thus generating tax revenues to help stabilize a tottering Kabul government. Just as America has a vision of a modestly stable Afghanistan that will no longer be a haven for extremists, China has a vision of Afghanistan as a secure conduit for roads and energy pipelines that will bring natural resources from the Indian Ocean and elsewhere. So if America defeats Al Qaeda and the irreconcilable elements of the Taliban, China’s geopolitical position will be enhanced.

Popularity: 2% [?]

If you follow the constant chatter of proponents for increased presence in Afghanistan, you will often hear cited the denial of Al-Qaeda safe havens as a primary reason to stay in the fight. It sounds logical at face value, but when put to close scrutiny it begins to show signs of weakness. Paul Pillar, deputy chief of the counterterrorist center at the CIA from 1997 to 1999, wrote the following in a Washington Post op-ed yesterday (emphasis mine),

How much does a haven affect the danger of terrorist attacks against U.S. interests, especially the U.S. homeland? The answer to the second question is: not nearly as much as unstated assumptions underlying the current debate seem to suppose. When a group has a haven, it will use it for such purposes as basic training of recruits. But the operations most important to future terrorist attacks do not need such a home, and few recruits are required for even very deadly terrorism. Consider: The preparations most important to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks took place not in training camps in Afghanistan but, rather, in apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain and flight schools in the United States.

In the past couple of decades, international terrorist groups have thrived by exploiting globalization and information technology, which has lessened their dependence on physical havens.

By utilizing networks such as the Internet, terrorists’ organizations have become more network-like, not beholden to any one headquarters. A significant jihadist terrorist threat to the United States persists, but that does not mean it will consist of attacks instigated and commanded from a South Asian haven, or that it will require a haven at all. Al-Qaeda’s role in that threat is now less one of commander than of ideological lodestar, and for that role a haven is almost meaningless.

On top of the fact that Al-Qaeda doesn’t need a physical piece of land to attack America, the safe haven argument is weak because many, if not most, of the insurgents we’re fighting in Afghanistan 1) are not Al-Qaeda 2) are more focused on local control than attacking the U.S. or leading a global jihad. As Harvard professor and Foreign Policy contributor, Stephen M. Walt pointed out last month,

…the Taliban itself is more of a loose coalition of different groups than a tightly unified and hierarchical organization, which is why some experts believe we ought to be doing more to divide the movement and “flip” the moderate elements to our side. Unfortunately, the “safe haven” argument wrongly suggests that the Taliban care as much about attacking America as bin Laden does.

There is no doubt that an unstable Afghanistan lends itself to exploitation by groups like Al-Qaeda, but so do Somalia and Sudan (raise your hand if you want to send thousands of troops to those two gems tomorrow….Bueller…Bueller?). If this really is, as President Obama has stated, “a war of necessity” then the American people deserve a better rationale than “denying Al-Qaeda safe havens” for adding to the $200 billion already spent in Afghanistan in the past 8 years.

As Pillar points concludes in his Washington Post piece, the issue is not whether or not Al-Qaeda would exploit an unstable Afghanistan – they would.

…the issue is whether preventing such a haven would reduce the terrorist threat to the United States enough from what it otherwise would be to offset the required expenditure of blood and treasure and the barriers to success in Afghanistan, including an ineffective regime and sagging support from the population. Thwarting the creation of a physical haven also would have to offset any boost to anti-U.S. terrorism stemming from perceptions that the United States had become an occupier rather than a defender of Afghanistan.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Just got back from a long trip overseas and saw the following media clips in my reader via Ben Casnocha’s blog.  It comes as no surprise that many Americans are illiterate in the areas of politics, economics, etc.  (Jay Leno shows this every week on his Jaywalking segments), but this video raises an intriguing question, “Would our country be better off if some people did not vote?”

In, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies,” author Bryan Caplan claims that democracy, as it is practiced now, cannot continue on its present course because it allows the uninformed populace to make decisions that harm the majority of the country.  It is essentially, the anti-”wisdom of the crowds” argument that shows how the ignorance of many voters hurts us all.  It makes sense, but is it wrong to limit voting rights?  Is it un-American?

Perhaps the founding father’s were much more attune to the reality of irrational voters when they limited voting rights to land owner’s (I realize it was white land owner’s which is obviously wrong, so no need to throw out any snarky comments about that).  Maybe in limiting voting rights to those who the biggest stake (land) in how the country was run they helped ensure more rational policies would be pursued by our leaders.  Then again, maybe it was a way to keep the same guys in power without threat of “outsiders” voting them out.  Obviously a debatable question.

What do you think?  Have voting rights been extended too far?  Is it actually harmful to allow certain members of the population to vote? What is the alternative to our current system?

Below are two clips that Casnocha highlighted which paint a startling picture about the state of many American voters.

First, a humorous MP3 clip from the Howard Stern Show where a reporter goes to Harlem to ask Obama supporters why they support him for President. He then proceeds to attribute McCain’s views and policies to Obama and ask whether they agree with it. For example, “Do you agree with Obama’s view on keeping the troops in Iraq to finish the war?” “Do you support Obama’s decision to pick Sarah Palin as a running mate?” The answers will amaze you.

Second, a 20/20 clip where John Stossel asks people off the street some simple questions about government and politics and finds the idea of the rational voter just might be a big myth.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Election time always brings out the best and the worst in Americans. It’s easy to evade responsibility with a quick, “I hate politics,” statement and a lack of actual study of each candidate’s positions, but that simply isn’t the best way for a country to operate. Informed voters make the best decisions and our country needs more of them. But, who has the time?

Since we all live busy lives I offer you a few short readings from the insightful intelligence service, Stratfor (hat tip to my dear friend Austin Skelley for introducing me to Stratfor’s weekly e-mail updates which you can sign up for here). The following is a four-part report from Stratfor founder and Chief Intelligence Officer, George Friedman, on the United States Presidential Debate on Foreign Policy.

Part I – The New President and the Global Landscape
Part II – Obama’s Foreign Policy Stance
Part III – McCain’s Foreign Policy Stance
Part IV – George Friedman on the Debate

Some quick highlights regarding each candidate:

On Obama:

The make-or-break moment for Obama will come early, when he confronts the Europeans. If he can persuade them to take concerted action, including increased defense spending, then much of his foreign policy rapidly falls into place, even if it is at the price of increasing U.S. defense spending. If the Europeans cannot come together (or be brought together) decisively, however, then he will have to improvise.

On McCain:

While McCain would need to define the mix of moralism and realism in his foreign policy, he made his evaluation of NATO’s weakness clear in 1999. Insofar as he believes this evaluation still holds true, he would not have to face the first issue that Barack Obama likely would — namely, what to do when the Europeans fail to cooperate. McCain already believes that they will not (or cannot).

Instead, McCain would have to answer another question, which ultimately is the same as Obama’s question: Where will the resources come from to keep forces in Iraq, manage the war in Afghanistan, involve Pakistanis in that conflict and contain Russia? In some sense, McCain has created a tougher political position for himself by casting all these issues in a moral light. But, in the Reagan tradition, a moral position has value only if it can be pursued, and pursuing those actions requires both moral commitment and Machiavellian virtue.

Popularity: 1% [?]