Francis Beckwith (and Martin Luther King, Jr.) on Obama at Notre Dame

Francis Beckwith points to Martin Luther King Jr. in his piece today about Notre Dame's controversial award of an honorary degree to Barack Obama at On the Square:

So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent—and often even vocal—sanction of things as they are.

Read it here.

Freeman Dyson: Global Warming Heretic

Freeman Dyson, the famed physicist, knows dogmatism when he sees it:

Dyson is well aware that “most consider me wrong about global warming.” That educated Americans tend to agree with the conclusion about global warming reached earlier this month at the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen (“inaction is inexcusable”) only increases Dyson’s resistance. Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus.

Read the rest here.

Does Obama have an economic exit strategy?

The Bush administration failed for lack of an exit strategy from Iraq.  Will the Obama administration fail for lack of an exit strategy from the Economic Stimulus?

Phoenix bishop calls Notre Dame's Obama invite "public act of disobedience" to U. S. Bishops

The Catholic furor over Notre Dame's invitation of the pro-abortion Barack Obama to give the university's commencement address and its award of an honorary degree to the President just got hotter. Bishop Olmstead of Phoenix has charged Fr. Jenkins, Notre Dame's president, with a "public act of disobedience" to the U. S. Catholic Bishops:

The grounds for the bishop’s charge are found in a 2004 statement from the U.S. bishops which calls on the Catholic community and Catholic institutions not to "honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions."

Stay tuned...

HT: Carl Olsen

The Page One Temperance Union

Well, they're all aflutter over at the offices of Page One Kentucky over news of scandalous behavior among state political leaders. Turns out there's been drinkin' going on at the Capitol.

Just when we thought that Jake would be celebrating his victories over the forces of Truth and Decency this last legislative session, all of a sudden he goes all moralistic on us. So he has pulled his hair back in a bun, put on his black dress and gloves, grabbed his hatchet, and headed for Frankfort to break up the legislative speakeasies he thinks are operating in the Democratic leadership offices of the State Capitol:

Kelly Flood, of course, Larry Clark, Bob Damron, John Will Stacy, Rocky Adkins, Greg Stumbo, Jeff Greer, Martha Jane King, Rick Rand, Tonya Pullin, Rick Nelson, Leslie Combs and Derrick Graham all took part in a capitol party– in Clark’s office suite– that involved alcohol, which is illegal to have at the capitol. All during the session and when many legislators in attendance were supposed to be in committee meetings.

And, according the schoolmarmish Jake, this isn't the only offense involving the Devil Alcohol in our state's hallowed halls:

According to several legislators (and a non-legislator source who tipped us off), Dennis Keene maintains a liquor cabinet inside his office at the capitol annex. And we think somebody needs to pay him (and anyone else with the same) a visit to find out why he’s breaking the law.

So scandalized is Jake that he has called on the poh-leece to investigate the illicit behavior.

Donations for the crusade can be made out to the Page One Kentucky Temperance Union.

Should politicians be controlling the weather?

As if they don't have their hands full trying to run the economy, the feds now want to start running the weather system.

Here is Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post:

The Environmental Protection Agency’s new leadership, in a step toward confronting global warming, submitted a finding that will force the White House to decide whether to limit greenhouse gas emissions under the nearly 40-year-old Clean Air Act. Under that law, EPA’s conclusion — that such emissions are pollutants that endanger the public’s health and welfare — could trigger a broad regulatory process affecting much of the U.S. economy as well as the nation’s future environmental trajectory.

Not so fast, says Roger Pielke at Climate Science:

While the added greenhouse gas emissions (does the EPA also include water vapor?) are a climate forcing, the news article specifically refers to public health. This is an absurd claim, as none of the well-mixed greenhouse gases are threats to health at the concentrations that are in the atmosphere or will be in the atmosphere far into the future.

If the EPA wants to seek to regulate climate, let them be honest and discuss all of the human climate forcings, as discussed, for example, in

If you think energy prices are high now, just wait.

Congressional Bonuses: Are congressmen receiving campaign contributions from companies that have been taken over by the government?

From Newsweek Magazine, care of Amy Redinour at the National Center Blog:

A Newsweek review of recent filings with the Federal Election Commission found that the political action committees of five big TARP recipients doled out $85,300 to members in the first two months of this year—with most of the cash going to those who serves on committees who oversee the TARP program...

And we thought the bonuses themselves was bad...

The Trillion Dollar Question: Will protecting economic risk takers from themselves work as a national economic policy?

Will the federal government succeed in strengthening the economy by protecting risk takers? From the risk? They're taking? Martin Wolf, from The Financial Times, on the Obama administration's bank rescue efforts (a.k.a. bank nationalization):

[W]ill it work? That depends on what one means by “work”. This is not a true market mechanism, because the government is subsidising the risk-bearing. Prices may not prove low enough to entice buyers or high enough to satisfy sellers. Yet the scheme may improve the dire state of banks’ trading books. This cannot be a bad thing, can it? Well, yes, it can, if it gets in the way of more fundamental solutions, because almost nobody – certainly not the Treasury – thinks this scheme will end the chronic under-capitalisation of US finance.

HT: Calculated Risk

Charles Murray on what science will conclude about what we already know

If Charles Murray isn't careful, he may end up on our list of Modern Wise Men. The only thing keeping him off now is that he is a social scientist and social scientists are excluded from the list by the Modern Wise Man Bylaws ipso facto. But if he keeps saying things like this, we might just have to recategorize him as a social philosopher, in which case he could qualify.

Here he is prophesying in the Washington Post on what science will conclude about gender and the family in the near future. He basically argues that science will come to conclusions about the nature of men and women, and the nature of the family, that any rational person who isn't culturally brain dead should already know. But, hey, we're thankful for small things:

A tidal change in our scientific understanding of what makes humans tick is coming, and it will spill over into every crevice of political and cultural life. As Harvard's Edward O. Wilson argues in his book "Consilience," the social sciences are increasingly going to be shaped by the findings of science. It's already happening. Whether it's psychologists discovering how fetal testosterone affects sex differences in children's behavior or geneticists using haplotypes to differentiate the Dutch from the Italians, the hard sciences are encroaching on questions of race, class and gender that have been at the center of modern social science. And the tendency of the findings lets us predict with some confidence the broad outlines of what the future will bring.

Two premises about human beings are at the heart of the social democratic agenda: what I label "the equality premise" and "the New Man premise." The equality premise says that, in a fair society, different groups of people -- men and women, blacks and whites, straights and gays -- will naturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life -- the same mean income, the same mean educational attainment, the same proportions who become janitors and who become CEOs. When that doesn't happen, it is because of bad human behavior and an unfair society. Much of the Democratic Party's proposed domestic legislation assumes that this is true.

I'm confident that within a decade, the weight of the new scientific findings will force the left to abandon the equality premise. But if social policy cannot be built on the premise that group differences must be eliminated, what can it be built upon? It can be built upon the premise that used to be part of the warp and woof of American idealism: People must be treated as individuals. The success of social policy is to be measured not by equality of outcomes for groups, but by the freedom of individuals, acting upon their personal abilities, aspirations and values, to seek the kind of life that best suits them.

The second tendency of the new findings of biology will be to show that the New Man premise -- which says that human beings are malleable through the right government interventions -- is nonsense. Human nature tightly constrains what is politically or culturally possible. More than that, the new findings will confirm that human beings are pretty much the way that wise observers have thought for thousands of years.

The effects on the policy debate will be sweeping. Let me give you a specific example. For many years, I have been among those who argue that the growth in births to unmarried women has been a social catastrophe -- the single most important force behind the growth of the underclass. But while other scholars and I have been able to prove that other family structures have not worked as well as the traditional family, I cannot prove that alternatives could not work as well, and so the social democrats keep coming up with the next new program that will compensate for the absence of fathers.

Over the next few decades, advances in evolutionary psychology are going to be conjoined with advances in genetic understanding, and I predict that they will lead to a scientific consensus that goes something like this: There are genetic reasons why boys who grow up in neighborhoods without married fathers tend to reach adolescence unsocialized to norms of behavior that they will need to stay out of prison and hold jobs. We will still be able to acknowledge that many single women do a wonderful job of raising their children. But social democrats will have to acknowledge that the traditional family plays a special, indispensable role in human flourishing and that social policy must be based on that truth.

Role Reversal: U. S. bails out car makers while Sweden refuses to bail out Saab

The "capitalist" United States is bailing out car companies while the notoriously socialist Swedes are refusing to bail out Saab. The world is full of ironies.

Another good reason to bring back Latin

A New York teacher points out what I have always believed: that the real benefit of Latin instruction is its role in helping with critical thinking skills:

At the high school, Barbara Sugarman has taught the language for 20 years.

Translating sentences from Latin helps teach analytical skills, she said.

"That's the ultimate goal, to be able to think," she said. "Kids have a solid foundation between the classical world and our world today. The contributions made by the Romans are still part of our culture. The kids see it's not just a textbook course. It's a course that's very relevant to them."

Read more here.

Sex Education Follies

I've said it before: if schools do the same thing for sex that they've done for reading and writing, then the survival of the race may be in serious jeopardy. New evidence that that may very well be the case is a new article in Time Magazine, in which the sheer silliness of the whole sex education regime is shown in lights.

According to Amy Sullivan, who wonders what those crazy schools are thinking, teaching math and all:

The program that helped Jewels provided her with information about birth control and encouraged her to try abstinence. But more important, it didn't end after two weeks, giving her and other students a safe space to return to for answers and advice. It is a model of what can happen when a community decides that it's crazy to spend more time teaching kids about decimals and fractions than about dating and sex. [emphasis added]

And this is all happening, according to the story, in Anderson County, South Carolina, where the Cothrans hail from. We're beginning evacuation procedures now.

The article points out that there is a battle brewing over the fate of $176 million dollars in federal abstinence money that critics argue is ineffective, although, as the article points out, teen pregnancy has, in fact, declined in recent years:

But the U.S. numbers have dropped dramatically since the early 1990s. Over the past 15 years, teenagers have had less sex than previous generations had, and they have been more likely to use protection when they have had sex ... South Carolina has reflected the overall trend of falling teen-sex statistics: birthrates in the state fell 27% from 1991 to 2006.

Over the period of time that abstinence programs have been emphasized, teen pregnancy has gone down, therefore abstinence doesn't work. Follow the logic there?

So what, in fact, do comprehensive sex educators do when they throw out "decimals and fractions"?

In most middle and high schools around the country, sex education is handled by an athletic coach doubling as a health teacher or by a science instructor who drew the short straw. Kristen Jordan is not one of those teachers. Walk past her classroom on the first day of sixth grade and you'll hear her leading the students in an enthusiastic chorus of "Penis! Penis! Penis! Vagina! Vagina! Vagina!" "Until they can use the real names for their body parts without giggling," she explains, "you can't talk to them about anything serious."

Yes, that's what serious people do: chant the terms for genitalia enthusiastically. I think I have now determined the Sex Educator's real strategy: to make sex so trivial and silly that no one will want to bother with it anymore.

Silliness: the Ultimate Contraceptive.

Would that we were so lucky. Instead, all we're likely to do is destroy what is left of the discretion that once limited sexual behavior and the social stigma that once discouraged pregnant outside of marriage. These are the only thing that ever worked, and the Sex Educators are intent on eliminating them.

I remember talking to a rural Kentucky doctor who practices in a county with a high teen pregnancy rate. He said that every time he sees a young pregnant woman come in, he asks her if she knew about contraceptives. He said they always answer, "Yes." "Then why did you get pregnant?" he asks. "Because I wanted to have a baby." These programs have nothing to say to teenagers who think this way--well, nothing that makes any sense anyway.

The article features a picture of a young girl, sitting next to her sex education teacher with a doll in her arms. This is another popular feature of these programs: having students keep a doll which they have to feed and whose diapers they are responsible for changing. This is supposed to teach them how troublesome children are so they won't have them. Of course there will be a time when they will have them, but there are no programs then to teach them that children, although troublesome, are a precious gift.

Forgot about that, didn't they?

This idea does the same thing that programs now in many schools which provide in-school child care for the children of unwed teenagers: it implicitly says, "It's okay to have children, and there will be no social cost to your decision to do so."

Then, of course there is the pop psychology, practiced by people with a weekend's worth of training and practiced on a full class of children. Going under the label of "skill-building" and "role-playing," these are programs that have never demonstrated any success in doing anything other than wasting valuable class time, but they are remnants of the influence of psychologists Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, whose techniques (used in a clinical setting on individual patients and conducted by a professional with many years of training) made their way into schools in the 1960s, and, unlike Transcendental Meditation techniques, another time-wasting 60s education fad, has yet to be laughed out of schools.

But the program is apparently popular in Anderson County, and they want more of it.

The only thing stopping them is money. "For $2 million," says United Way's Burdette, "we could put a Kristen in every school in our county for five years. But we don't have $2 million."

Thank God.

There is simply no school program that will take the place of the moral authority of adults who are willing to use it. Unfortunately, the adults gave up on moral authority a long time ago. Now all they can do is complain about it.