A Swimmer in the Sky

Those pithy Brits

Here's a nominee for quote of the week, from an article in the Telegraph about President Obama's disconnectedness, and in particular his "mechanical" response to the Fort Hood massacre:

Completely missing was the eloquence that Mr. Obama employs when talking about himself.

The debt of the living

I'm impatient with video essays.  I'd rather read what the author has to say:  I can read faster than he or she talks, or I can stop and think about what's been said, or I can look something up and come back with a better appreciation of the author's accuracy.  Yet I just linked to a video, and now I'm about to do it again.  This one is 17 minutes long (yow!), but, as Glenn Reynolds said about it, "...Bill Whittle’s evisceration of the Truman 'war criminal' accusers is truly a must-see.  Give it a few minutes of your time—you won’t be sorry."

It seems that on a recent television show, comedian Jon Stewart accused Harry Truman of having been a war criminal for authorizing the use of atomic weapons against Japan in World War II.  I might have been susceptible to Stewart's reasoning had I not read Flags of Our Fathers, by James Bradley—which convinced me not only that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of American marines, soldiers, and sailors, but that it saved millions of Japanese as well.  There is no question in my mind.

It's a serious matter when an influential American accuses a former president of war crimes.  "From the moment I saw that clip," says Whittle (Forty-Second Boyd and the Big Picture, among others), "I have dropped everything I was doing in order to research, write, shoot, edit and post a response."  I haven't figured out how to embed it, so I'll just urge you to follow the link.

George Santayana famously observed, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  Anybody here care to repeat the twentieth century?

A clear and present danger

Steven den Beste once wrote, of the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, that "it is, in my opinion, the single most important sentence ever written in the English language":  "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

I used to think that this was something of a grab bag, with a bunch of different things all thrown together that were only distantly related.  I now know different.  This is all of a piece.  Every part of it serves the single purpose of sanctifying freedom of thought.

The prohibition of establishment of a religion is there because a state-mandated religion could potentially try to use the power of law to enforce its own religious orthodoxy even on unbelievers, as has happened many times in many other places, and thus preventing those unbelievers from making their own decisions.  The "free exercise" clause helps by stating that each of us gets to make our own decision in this regard; otherwise the government could effectively enforce orthodoxy by outlawing everything else.

Freedom of speech and the press are obviously important, but there are two sides to each.  We generally think of freedom of speech as the right to say what we want, but it also means that we have the right to listen to what we want.  Equally, freedom of the press gives us the right to read what we want.  What these do is to guarantee to us the widest possible access to information on as many topics as possible, since you can't hear what isn't spoken nor read what has never been printed.

And the right of free assembly gives us the right to meet with others who agree with us, and the right of petition means we can try to actively promote our beliefs and try to influence how government acts.

This is the fundamental philosophy behind our entire system in the US:  the belief that our government will serve us best if we as citizens have full access to information, unrestricted right to form opinions about what we learn, and full ability to communicate what we've concluded to others and to try to influence our government.  Nothing remotely like this had ever been tried before.

It bears repeating:  "This is the fundamental philosophy behind our entire system in the US."

Maybe you've run across the work of someone whose mere byline will cause you to immediately read what he's written, regardless of its title or subject matter.  For me, these guys include—among a very few others—Mark Steyn, Richard Fernandez, Victor Davis Hanson, Christopher Hitchens (doesn't mean I agree with him, necessarily), Charles Krauthammer (or him), and Thomas Sowell.  Ever since I watched this interview on Uncommon Knowledge, Andrew Klavan has been among them.  He's an original thinker, with a discerning wit (early in the Uncommon Knowledge interview, when explaining why he chose a certain character for his protagonist in a novel, he says, "The whole thing about building a story like this, is, 'what character do you put in the story to make it come to life?'  If you...if you put Othello in 'Hamlet', the play is over in two minutes—if you put Hamlet in 'Othello' the play never ends."). 

If you'd like to hear more from this entertaining and thought-provoking character, here he is doing a stand-up analysis of a persistent and intensifying threat to the fundamental philosophy behind our entire system in the US:

The United States is strong enough to recover from almost anything—except the loss of our freedom of thought.  Think about it.

(Hat tip:  Slublog.)

The Kuznets Curve

From John Tierney, a reminder of something that should be obvious but somehow isn't:

...among researchers who analyze environmental data, a lot has changed since the 1970s.  With the benefit of their hindsight and improved equations, I’ll make a couple of predictions:

1. There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else.  No leader or law or treaty will radically change the energy sources for people and industries in the United States or other countries.  No recession or depression will make a lasting change in consumers’ passions to use energy, make money and buy new technology — and that, believe it or not, is good news, because...

2. The richer everyone gets, the greener the planet will be in the long run.

Unrepentant killers

John Primmer, in a comment to this post by Stephen Green:

Look, it’s this simple.  Those of us around in the 60s and 70s took sides.  One side (too few) supported the war, either by fighting in it or, in what, today, would be called a chickenhawk approach, supporting it on geo-political lines.  Others opposed it, marched against it and even incurred personal risk (e.g., MLK defying Hoover, Muhammed Ali forfeiting his world title, or thousands of young men defying their draft boards).

For nearly 40 years now, we have recognized that both sides acted in reasonably good faith, and we have not questioned their patriotism.  We elected a draft dodger in 1992, and we defeated a fabulist in 2000 and a bi-polar warrior in 2004 in favor of a Texas Air National Guard jet pilot.

But 2008 will be the first time, post Vietnam, that we have paid attention to the tiny splinter of opponents who were neither patriots nor good faith political opponents of our anti-communist policies.  These people, William Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, et al, were, and continue to be, blatantly pro-marxist, anti-democracy zealots. And on top of that, they are unrepentant killers—domestic terrorists.

"But," you say, "they never killed anyone!"  True enough, but it wasn't for lack of trying.

Do facts matter?

Thomas Sowell in the National Review:

Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”

Unfortunately, the future of this country, as well as the fate of the Western world, depends on how many people can be fooled on Election Day, just a few weeks from now.

Right now, the polls indicate that a whole lot of the people are being fooled a whole lot of the time.

The current financial bailout crisis has propelled Barack Obama back into a substantial lead over John McCain — which is astonishing in view of which man and which party has had the most to do with bringing on this crisis.

...

Vigilance?

Slub on the media:

The watchdogs have become lapdogs.

Reform

From a comment by Vinny Vidivici at this post at the Belmont Club:

That Americans could, once upon a time, largely ignore what went on in Washington was a ‘feature’ of the American experiment, not the ‘bug’ of apathy and indifference bemoaned by folks who spent Sunday mornings buried in the Times.  That’s because government was, at one time, not the central feature of national life it has become.

The so-called "bailout"

Dafydd ab Hugh has written an explanation of the Paulson-Bernanke emergency rescue plan that even I can understand.  He says, in response to a reader's request for links to his sources,

I'd say about 80% of my information on it came from oral interviews I heard on the radio or saw on the telly.  I've heard perhaps eight people talking about it, and the bits I put here are those pieces on which they all more or less agreed.

My problem with other explanations is that there's always someone who knows more than I do who disagrees.  Dafydd's sifting the points of agreement out of the bickering has been, I think, a public service.

He goes on:

Oh, boy!

Wow, this sounds like a great opportunity:

Circulating on Wall Street:
SUBJECT: REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

DEAR AMERICAN:

I NEED TO ASK YOU TO SUPPORT AN URGENT SECRET BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP WITH A TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF GREAT MAGNITUDE.

I AM MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY OF THE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA.  MY COUNTRY HAS HAD CRISIS THAT HAS CAUSED THE NEED FOR LARGE TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF 800 BILLION DOLLARS US.  IF YOU WOULD ASSIST ME IN THIS TRANSFER, IT WOULD BE MOST PROFITABLE TO YOU.