health research in the WSJ

I didn't know they provided this feature on a regular basis, so I'm blogging about that-- as well as the particulars of this report...

Migraines and Breast Cancer: Women with a history of migraines were 74% as likely to have had breast cancer as women who reported no migraines...The reduced risk was similar among both pre- and postmenopausal women, and even for women who drank alcohol or smoked tobacco. The association between migraines and breast cancer is of particular interest because both diseases are influenced by hormonal changes... (Read more.)

Mental Health: People who were married or lived with a partner around age 50 retained much more cognitive function two decades later than people who at midlife were single, divorced or widowed...subjects who were widowed around age 50 and continued to live without a partner were nearly eight times as likely to develop Alzheimer’s... (Read more.)

Smoking On Screen: Adolescents who see larger numbers of movies in which a main character smokes are more likely to try smoking regardless of whether that character is a “good guy” or a “bad guy”... (Read more.)

Stress and Risk: Stress increases the difference in risk-taking behavior between the sexes, causing men to take even more risks and women to take even fewer... (Read more.)

Epilepsy: Two types of cells that act as part of the brain’s immune-system response to help heal brain injury and infection may also cause chronic epileptic seizures by overexciting nearby neurons... (Read more.)

increase the minimum wage to drive up (minority) teen and head-of-household unemployment

More details on the higher minimum wage (after my recent posts on this-- here and here)-- and in particular, its adverse impact on teen and minority teen employment-- from the editorialists in the WSJ...

Here's some economic logic to ponder. The unemployment rate in June for American teenagers was 24%, for black teens it was 38%, and even White House economists are predicting more job losses. So how about raising the cost of that teenage labor?

Sorry to say, but that's precisely what will happen on July 24, when the minimum wage will increase to $7.25 an hour from $6.55. The national wage floor will have increased 41% since the three-step hike was approved by the Democratic Congress in May 2007. Then the economy was humming, with an overall jobless rate of 4.5% and many entry-level jobs paying more than the minimum. That's a hard case to make now, with a 9.5% national jobless rate and thousands of employers facing razor-thin profit margins....

Keep in mind the Earned Income Tax Credit already exists to help low-wage workers and has been greatly expanded in recent years. The EITC also spreads the cost of the wage supplement to all Americans, not merely to employers, so it doesn't raise the cost of hiring low-wage workers....But that single mom can't collect those checks if she doesn't have a job, and the tragedy of a higher minimum wage is that it will prevent thousands of working moms striving to pull their families out of poverty from being hired in the first place.

If Congress were wise and compassionate, it would at least suspend the wage hike for one or two years until the job market recovers. We know this Congress won't do that, but someone has to speak up for the poorest, least skilled Americans.

*Democratic* Catholics are OK: another double standard on Sotomayor

Given the pro-choice position of most Democrats, Democratic Catholic is either an oxymoron or must refer to a cultural/cafeteria Catholicism. But that's a topic for another day...

Here, William McGurn points to a double standard on Sotomayor's nomination in the WSJ-- the acceptance of her Catholicism when the Catholicism of Roberts and Alito was supposedly cause for concern. So much for liberal tolerance and political consistency.

Of course, this follows the double standards of Sotomayor and her most fervent supporters on the matter of her (in)famous remarks about race and judicial ability.

In opening yesterday's Judiciary Committee hearings on Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court, Chairman Pat Leahy (D., Vt.) alluded to the religious prejudice that has too often intruded on the process.

The first Jewish nominee, he noted, had to answer "questions about the Jewish mind and how its operations are complicated by altruism." The first Catholic nominee, he added, "had to overcome the argument that, as a Catholic, he'd be dominated by the pope."

"We are," Sen. Leahy declared, "in a different era."

Maybe. It's true that if Ms. Sotomayor is confirmed there will be six Catholics on the Court -- a higher percentage than almost any Notre Dame starting lineup of the past three decades. It's also true that notwithstanding a few scattered references to this fact, for the most part the judge's religion has been greeted, as a USA Today headline put it, with a "yawn."

How different from just a few years ago. Back when the nominee was Sam Alito, talk was about the "fifth Catholic" on the bench. Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority, complained that "with Alito, the majority of the Court would be Roman Catholics."

Before that it was John Roberts....And let's not forget Bill Pryor, whose Catholicism came into question when he was nominated for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2003. Back then, Mr. Leahy's colleague, Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.), put his worries about Mr. Pryor's faith this way: "His beliefs are so well known, so deeply held, that it's very hard to believe -- very hard to believe -- that they're not going to deeply influence the way he comes about saying, 'I will follow the law.'"....

...the relatively soft reaction to Ms. Sotomayor's Catholicism is because of a calculation that when it comes to hot-button issues such as abortion or gay marriage, she doesn't really believe what her church teaches....

why not try health care reform at the state level first?

If we're going to try a given experiment (e.g., "the public option"), why not start with a few states to see if it will work?

The potential answers: stupidity, hubris, or it's not really about trying to improve health care.

the new health care plan for those in Congress?

HR 615 proposes that those in Congress should have the same health care plan that they pass for us (hat tip: FortWayneNews.com)-- instead of having an exemption.

Sounds like a nice piece of accountability....

"the U.S. temperature record is unreliable"

From meteorologist Anthony Watts' research...

The official record of temperatures in the continental United States comes from a network of 1,221 climate-monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service, a department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Until now, no one had ever conducted a comprehensive review of the quality of the measurement environment of those stations.

During the past few years I recruited a team of more than 650 volunteers to visually inspect and photographically document more than 860 of these temperature stations....

We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.

In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source. In other words, 9 of every 10 stations are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited.

It gets worse. We observed that changes in the technology of temperature stations over time also has caused them to report a false warming trend. We found major gaps in the data record that were filled in with data from nearby sites, a practice that propagates and compounds errors. We found that adjustments to the data by both NOAA and another government agency, NASA, cause recent temperatures to look even higher.

The conclusion is inescapable: The U.S. temperature record is unreliable.

The errors in the record exceed by a wide margin the purported rise in temperature of 0.7º C (about 1.2º F) during the twentieth century. Consequently, this record should not be cited as evidence of any trend in temperature that may have occurred across the U.S. during the past century. Since the U.S. record is thought to be “the best in the world,” it follows that the global database is likely similarly compromised and unreliable.

This report presents actual photos of more than 100 temperature stations in the U.S., many of them demonstrating vividly the siting issues we found to be rampant in the network. Photographs of all 865 stations that have been surveyed so far can be found at www.surfacestations.org, where station photos can be browsed by state or searched for by name.


UPDATE: Here's the NOAA/NCDC's response (hat tip: Kyle Forinash)-- and then a reply from Watts' crew to blow that up. Hey, it's fun to see science, "science", politics, and religious fundamentalism in one dog's breakfast.

here's one place where France has us beat!

From Eduardo Cue in USN&WR...

Across the French countryside, within sight of villages and towns, thick clouds of steam rise from giant cooling towers at 58 nuclear energy plants that provide more than three quarters of the nation's electricity. In this, France far outpaces other countries, with Japan second at about 34 percent of its electricity. Nuclear power supplies about 20 percent of the electricity in the United States, where public anxieties and high costs have prevented construction of new reactors since 1979.

This reliance has made France something of a poster child for nuclear power. Now, around the world, nuclear power is getting a fresh look as an alternative to using oil, natural gas, and coal...

the reliability of govt statistics on energy??

From Kent Garber in USN&WR...

...the country's urgent debates over alternative energy, and the answers are being shaped by statistics that come almost exclusively from the Energy Information Administration....

there are growing concerns that the agency's statistics are incomplete, outdated, or, in some cases, inaccurate. Budget shortfalls, large staff cuts, and neglect under past administrations, observers say, are compromising both the quality and quantity of EIA's data, leaving the agency frustratingly handcuffed as energy markets are moving faster and becoming increasingly complex....

Reason's "guide to alternative energies"

I don't know jack about such things, but Ronald Bailey in Reason seems to provide a useful guide to alternative energies...

For the following examples: supercritical pulverized coal, “clean coal”, combustion turbine combined cycle, nuclear power, wind turbines, biomass, solar thermal, silicon solar photovoltaic, and thin-film solar photovoltaic...

he provides the following information: description, invention, federal research dollars since 1976, carbon emitted, cost per plant with and without carbon capture, production cost of a kilowatt-hour with and without carbon capture, waste, key advantage, key disadvantage, and a representative example.

corporations, (some) enviros, farmers and govt vs. the general public: the case of ethanol

From the editorialists of the WSJ...

The Obama Administration is pushing a big expansion in ethanol, including a mandate to increase the share of the corn-based fuel required in gasoline to 15% from 10%. Apparently no one in the Administration has read a pair of new studies, one from its own EPA, that expose ethanol as a bad deal for consumers with little environmental benefit.

The biofuels industry already receives a 45 cent tax credit for every gallon of ethanol produced, or about $3 billion a year. Meanwhile, import tariffs of 54 cents a gallon and an ad valorem tariff of four to seven cents a gallon keep out sugar-based ethanol from Brazil and the Caribbean....

The Congressional Budget Office reported last month that Americans pay another surcharge for ethanol in higher food prices....in 2007 the ethanol subsidy cost families between $5.5 billion and $8.8 billion in higher grocery bills [a regressive tax, costing between $75-125 for the average family of four]....

A second study -- by the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Transportation and Air Quality -- explains that the reduction in CO2 emissions from burning ethanol are minimal and maybe negative....

corporations, enviros, and govt vs. the general public

From Bjorn Lomborg in the WSJ...

Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.

The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the "military-industrial complex," cautioning that "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." He worried that "there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."

This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a "climate-industrial complex" is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain....

Lomborg then moves from theory to practice and practical examples...

banning the performance enhancing drug of Hollywood

Rachel Weisz makes a great point (hat tip: C-J):

Botox should be banned for actors, as steroids are for sportsmen...

Our outrage over such things is quite selective.

I'm not saying I'd ban either, but can you have one without the other?

squaring "pro-life" with "pro-animal"

Excerpts from a provocative and beautifully-written piece by Mary Eberhardt in First Things...

Why aren't vegetarians and pro-lifers more closely aligned? After all, the best writing about ethical vegetarianism—the moral case for refusing meat, as opposed to the more self-interested arguments from health or finance—is good enough to provoke serious reflection, even among nonvegetarians....

Though admirable is not the first word that leaps to mind when facing some of the practical consequences, [Princeton ethicist Peter] Singer's theory does have the virtue of a ruthless consistency....Perhaps most infamously, he has argued that, since a newborn infant lacks self-consciousness, autonomy, and rationality, "killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living."...

Consider the work of Carol J. Adams, whose 1990 book The Sexual Politics of Meat was widely hailed even outside academia...the notion that the so-called objectification of animals in a carnivorous society and the so-called objectification of women in a patriarchal society are somehow linked....

I had that book for awhile and used it as a crank gift!

Eberstadt then points to a common "blindness to any moral connection between prerational human life and nonrational animal life"-- and quotes an example: "...we are still confronted by the question as to who is the appropriate moral agent to resolve any potential conflict between the primary rightholder (the woman) and the subservient rightholder (the fetus)."

Interestingly, the pro-choicer "objectifies" the fetus/baby and reaches a perverse/incoherent conclusion.

Eberstadt then returns to one of her theses here-- that "contrary to what the utilitarians and feminists working this terrain wish, the dots between sympathy for animals and sympathy for unborn humans are in fact quite easy to connect—so easy, you might say, that a child could do it."

Then, Eberstadt comments on RJN's writing in this area:

No less an authority than Richard John Neuhaus gently reprimanded readers a few years ago after receiving letters unhappy with the respectful review he had given to the book Dominion, Matthew Scully's evangelical case for vegetarianism. "Some readers," Fr. Neuhaus wrote, "think vegetarianism is so manifestly and self-evidently wrongheaded that, after rejecting it on first encounter, one would be a moral idiot to give it a second thought."

Much of that conservative dismissal, of course, is not about vegetarianism as such but about the baggage that has come to be associated with it....

Yet leaving those historical accidents aside, what is there intrinsically about vegetarian practice for a moral traditionalist to object to? As a matter of history, over the centuries a number of serious Christians have spied a connection between vegetarianism and religious belief—a history that is somewhat at odds with the frequent conflation by conservatives of vegetarians with tree-hugging pagans....

She provides an array of individual and communal examples, before concluding:

In short, vegetarianism is not easily dismissed either morally or intellectually, despite the fact that some traditionalists have relished doing just that for several decades now. Like the boutique academic theorists speaking in vegetarianism's name, these traditionalists seem to have missed the moral forest for its more superficial trees.

My purpose in untangling these distinctions is not to put anyone in the moral dock, whether vegetarian or carnivore. It is rather to point out something easily overlooked—that there is more common moral ground between vegetarians and people concerned with the life issues than either side seems to realize.

Most people who adopt a vegetarian or cruelty-free diet do not do so on the basis of the antihumanist, anti-life ideas that prevail in academic thought....[they are instead] acknowledging and acting on a moral intuition....Consider, for example, the explanation most commonly offered for vegetarianism...."concern for animal suffering"...what they believe to be an intuitively appealing moral principle....

In 2002, Richard John Neuhaus, though no vegetarian, affirmed this same point...he went on to suggest a limited defense of meat eating and a call to regulatory intervention into the crueler factory farming practices. Even so, he cautioned readers against dismissing in principle the budding moral sentiments of our twelve-year-old selves....

For a great many other people, too, as one hears often at pro-life rallies, moral intuition about abortion was sparked by quotidian events—that first picture of an aborted fetus, the birth of their own first child, and the first moment of watching a fetus move on a sonogram. As with the vegetarians, once such an insight is digested and acted on, few people turn back to where they were before—a fact that speaks as no other could to the transformative power of the insight in question....

...the line connecting the dots between "we should respect animal life" and "we should respect human life" is far straighter than the line connecting vegetarianism to antilife feminism or antihumanist utilitarianism. Any moral intuition powerful enough to cause second thoughts about a widely accepted practice—and to re-shape personal behavior accordingly—is an intuition that religious believers ordinarily take seriously indeed....

Vegetarians and pro-lifers are strangers to one another for reasons of accident rather than essence, and they also, furthermore, have a natural bond in moral intuitionism that should make them allies.

The work of developing that bond could be done, and the benefit might be immense for both sides—like finding a few million friends that you never knew you had.

Michael Vick vs. "what's on your plate?"

I waited too long to provide a link for it, but I was impressed by Abby Pollard's letter to the editor of the C-J on animal rights and (somewhat) selective outrage against Michael Vick for his dog-fighting antics.

She opens with the question: "What's on your plate?" before "moving in for the (over)kill"...

If you're enjoying meat, you're paying people to torture and kill helpless animals for you....Many people's defense...is that dogs are special....What narcissism-- just because you personally have never formed a close bond with a cow, pig, or chicken (though some folks certainly have) means their suffering is less significant?...If Vick infuriates you, and McDonald's doesn't, your self-proclaimed love of animals rings hollow.

She overstates her case in that not nearly all animals are mistreated. But she's spot on in skewering many of the (selective) arguments against Vick. One option is to ignore Vick and Pollard's complaint, but this is not tenable-- at least in a Christian worldview. Another viable option is to respect all animal life and avoid both. Is there a middle ground?

choice (and tolerance) for me, but not for thee

Here's a recent essay by Amy Henry in World-- on the topic of legal conscience protections for pharmacists and the probable attack on those by President Obama and his Congress.

I don't know why I hadn't seen this before, but the proposed legislation is ironically titled the "Freedom of Choice Act"-- pointing to the choice of the woman to have an abortion, rather than the choice of the pharmacist or, of course, the baby.

This is "choice" to liberals-- much as they see "tolerance". The choice and tolerance only extend so far-- coincidentally, as far as they want to exercise choice and tolerance. Classy!

pro-life vs. gender-bending: will the real "avant-garde" please stand up?

From an essay by Micah Mattix-- about two events that occurred within a week of each other at UNC where he is a lecturer in English-- as it appeared in Touchstone...

Mattix overstates his case a bit, given the recent gains on the abortion issue-- especially among the young-- a near no-brainer given the related science. But, he's correct in pressing this comparison to great effect!

The first event was a new play put on by the local performing arts group. The play, which was based on Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), was billed as a “gender-bending” play that would push the limits of experimental drama in its exploration of human sexuality....a story in the student newspaper...was careful to note that students were not...shocked by the play’s content...

The executive director of the theater himself was not worried that the play would somehow be too shocking. “One of the great hallmarks of our audience,” he claimed, “is that they are risk-takers.”

That appetite for risk, however, disappeared two days later. The Carolina Students for Life erected several large Justice for All placards on campus, which contained pictures of unborn children being aborted. In striking contrast to how the play was received, the response generated by this display was overwhelmingly negative.

Unaware of any inherent contradiction in their reactions, many pro-choice students complained in the student newspaper...

In theory, at least, one of the goals of the avant-garde has been to attack the tastes and moral sensibilities of the bourgeois. It has thus presented works containing subject matter that was indeed considered shocking at the time...

The avant-garde theater at Chapel Hill, however, no longer attacks the sensibilities of the students, but rather provides them with the sort of work they want to see in the first place—work that does not challenge their moral paradigm, but confirms it...What is really avant-garde today, in the original, combative sense of the term, is to stand for life, for beauty, and for truth. Nothing shocks us more.

saving every life possible from the Holocaust

From Marvin Olasky in World...

[Tovah] Feldshuh plays...a young Polish woman who sees Jews in her town massacred by machine gun and vows that she'll try to save every life she can from then on. Working as a housekeeper to a German commandant, she hides 12 Jews for years in the cellar of his home...it's [a true story] as attested to by those she saved. A memorial to the young woman now stands in Jerusalem next to that of Oskar Schindler of Schindler's List fame.

And saving every life means saving every life. When one of the women Irena is hiding becomes pregnant, the hiders vote that she should have an abortion and that Irena should smuggle to them drugs for the killing. Irena says no—every life should be saved....Irena finally gives in but by then her preaching has changed hearts: No abortion. The baby lives.

This play reportedly is on its way to becoming a movie, and with a bigger canvas it may reach its ultimate dramatic potential: Irena's Vow on stage sometimes has too much telling and not enough showing...

if they can make you get an abortion, what's the big deal about making you smoke?

From World...

Authorities in the central province of Hubei [China] had an unusual mandate for local government ­employees: Smoke or get fined....local government workers had to drag their way through about 230,000 packs of Hubei-produced ­cigarettes in the next year in order to account for over­production and to avoid fines....

They soon/later reversed the (unpopular) edict!

"sexting" can really mess you up (legally) for the rest of your life

The thesis of Nancy Rommelmann's piece on the theory vs. practice of child pornography laws-- as applied to teenage "sexting"-- in Reason...

This practice might be considered relatively harmless, the 21st-century version of “you show me yours, I’ll show you mine,” if it weren’t for federal and state laws that deal harshly with those who traffic in child pornography. The federal statute criminalizes the production, distribution, and possession of images depicting underage subjects engaged in sexually explicit conduct; depending on the charges, it mandates sentences of five to 30 years in prison. Because the technology that allows sexting is new, age-appropriate punishments have yet to be hammered out. Instead, laws designed to thwart middle-aged people who prey on children are being applied to the children themselves.

Congressional twit tweets

From Susan Olasky in World...

If you want to keep tabs on a U.S. senator or Congressman's votes, tweets, or YouTube posts, a convenient website—Legistalker.org—tracks them all, with updates every 20 seconds. The site, which came in second in the Sunlight Foundation's Apps for America contest...

Muslims don't like being "ruled by Western-supported secular despots"....hmm, I wonder if that should matter to us?

In the most recent issue of Christianity Today, Dinesh D'Souza has an essay called "The Clash of Stereotypes" (not available on-line)...

Much of the essay is a response to survey data about the political, social, and religious beliefs of Muslims. Most notably, D'Souza reports that:

"Most Muslims support democracy and freedom. Indeed, many Muslims complain that they are ruled by Western-supported secular despots who deny people their right to self-government...At the same time, there are anomalies..."

Then, as D'Souza notes, "The implications are profound." But his list of implications misses the most obvious one-- a point I've made here often, related to Robert Pape's work on the causes of suicide terrorism. (Hint: religion is only a secondary cause.)

Read above what D'Souza writes again. What sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb? Muslims don't like us meddling with our foreign policy into their affairs-- particularly when it is to establish "secular despots". You can't blame them for that! Pape would add that we are perceived (by at least some-- most notably, terrorists) as "occupying" their land.

I like D'Souza a lot. But he's stuck in a rut in his foreign policy views and blind to the most pressing implication.

"War on Drugs" turns 40

It's over-the-hill and picking up "speed"...

July 14th is the 40th anniversary of Nixon coining that phrase in a special speech to Congress and the inauguration of aggressive foreign and domestic anti-drug initiatives (hat tip: World).

Obama's office of National Drug Control Policy has officially moved away from using this term, but at least so far, little has changed in terms on the ground.

Aside from being unconstitutional, unethical (especially in the costs imposed on innocents), counter to what the Founding Fathers would have wanted, and impractical-- it's been a wonderful policy!

MMA and dead race-horses

The growth of MMA in past few years has been impressive.

I've enjoyed watching it a handful of times. And although it can certainly move from very physical to bloody to brutal, the proportion of bloody fights is surprisingly low. The proportion of brutal fights (from a beatdown to someone getting hit while unconscious or when he cannot defend himself) has been kept to a minimum by competent match-making and refereeing. That said, some brutality is unavoidable-- by the nature of the way in which MMA is done (currently).

I think MMA will continue to grow for the forseeable future. It is, for most people, far more entertaining than boxing. It has a lot more creativity and strategy-- with matches that differ greatly depending on the match-up.

All that said, I had an epiphany today about the potential downfall or down-trend in MMA. If someone dies in the ring because of brutality, that could be a watershed moment for the sport.

In this sense, it is akin to the potential troubles of horse-racing-- when horses die on the track from injuries sustained while racing. That sport is already struggling a bit. And a few more deaths like Barbaro and Eight Belles-- and it could be a footnote to sports.

higher minimum wages in a deep recession

There were a lot of boneheaded policies that deepened and extended the Great Depression. Most notably, FDR imposed policies that increased the price/cost of labor. It doesn't take a PhD in Econ to figure out that making labor more expensive is not helpful in encouraging firms to hire more of that labor's services!

Obama is working to make business activity more painful through an assortment of policies. But a policy passed by his predecessor-- in tandem with the Democratic Congress-- has been giving the economy a kick in the shorts: the increase in the minimum wage last July from $5.15 to $5.85 in July 2007, to $6.55 in July 2008 and soon, to $7.25 in July 2009.

The minimum wage was mostly irrelevant in 2007-- a low amount in a vibrant economy. Two years later, it's been increased by about 40%-- to a significant amount in a sour economy.

The bad news: one more reason why the economy will struggle to recover over the coming months. The good news: Obama is less likely to be able to take (false) credit for a recovering economy.

honest atheists will be haunted by ghosts

This connects very nicely to Kyle's sermon on Sunday-- about the evidence of God's presence in the universe.

From Robert Velarde in the Christian Research Journal-- as first published in an edited form on his blog...


Many years ago I came across a phrase in an article by Dallas Willard. In part he wrote, "we now have an ontologically haunted universe. It is haunted by unnerving possibilities."...

In a general sense, as I use it, the phrase "haunted universe" means that apologetic arguments by Christians can cause intellectual tensions for atheists. These tensions can fester, bothering the atheist because their worldview becomes haunted by ideas that favor the existence of God.

What "ghosts" or arguments can Christian apologists provide to "haunt" the universe of the atheist? There are many, but I will briefly present six.

Ghost #1: Cosmology...what caused the universe?...the Big Bang, if accepted, is an event. But what caused the event?

Ghost #2: Design...Is the universe fine-tuned? Is it designed?...

Ghost #3: Morality. Do moral standards exist? If so, where do they come from? If they are mere inventions of beings who themselves are the result of time and chance then there are no real standards of right and wrong....

Ghost #4: Evil and Suffering. Atheists often appeal to the reality of evil and suffering as an argument against God....[But] where does the atheist get the idea of evil?...

Ghost #5: The Intelligent Christian. Another "ghost" that may haunt the universe of the atheist is that of the intelligent Christian.... When I was an atheist...I was haunted by a dilemma: How could seemingly intelligent people embrace Christianity?

Ghost #6: Atheism as Nihilism. As I have argued elsewhere...followed logically, atheism ultimately leads to the despair of nihilism....This is why traditionally it is Christians who help the needy, establish hospitals, care for the hurting...

In the CRJ article, he adds four more:

-Reason and Intelligibility: Why do we have the reason-- or think that we do?

-Pascal's Anthropological Argument: Christianity as the best explanation for both greatness and great wretchedness in people

-Explaining Christ: Lord, Liar, Lunatic in interpreting His place in History

-Christianity's (tremendous net) Positive Influence

Judaism, Christianity, Islam-- and Israel

An excerpt from a mostly helpful/useful piece by Daniel Goldman in First Things...

Today, evangelical Christians form the strongest base of support for the State of Israel in America, stronger in some respects than the support of the left-leaning American Jewish community. Jews often misread Christian motivation for supporting Jewish survival. When Christian theology declares that the New Testament fulfills the Old, they mean in effect that the history of Israel is a map to the inner life of every Christian. And this history is not simply a record interred in a book. The history of the Jewish people is manifest in the life of the Jewish people, for we are our history: Every one of us stood with Moses to receive the Torah at Mount Sinai, and all who clung to YHWH are alive today, as we pray before reading the Torah in public. We, the living people of Israel, are a flesh-and-blood map to the salvation of every Christian....

In Christian theology, Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross is a new Passover, in which Jesus is the Lamb, while his Resurrection is a new Exodus from Egypt in which all humanity may join, and the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles at Pentecost is a new giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.

For Christians, it is not merely that God’s earthly incarnation was as a Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, or that God’s promise to the Jews stands surety for what Christians believe to be his promise to them. The Christian’s rebirth to citizenship in Israel demands an inner transformation. When Christians say that Jesus fulfills the Torah...

For that reason Abraham Joshua Heschel averred without a hint of exaggeration that the wise old men who lead the Catholic Church know that Israel is so holy that our disappearance would endanger the existence of the Church....

Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, and therefore himself, was the foundation of God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendants. God’s love removes us from the altar; a ram substitutes for Isaac so that Abraham may live, and, in Christian doctrine, Jesus of Nazareth sacrifices himself for all of mankind so that mankind may live and be free from sin and death. To be a Jew is to continue the life of Abraham; to be a Christian is to be reborn in the spirit into the life of Abraham....

And then a comparison of Islam and Christianity in their relation to Judaism:

The gentiles recall the election of Israel in a benign way when Christians look to the living people Israel as a map of their own path to salvation. In a malignant way, it occurs when other nations, coveting election, seek to arrogate election unto themselves. This is most obvious in Islam, which insists that the Jews, like all other peoples, received the true revelation from Allah but intentionally perverted it. The Muslims claim to be in possession of the corrected, purified, and final revelation, of which the Torah is a fraudulent version. As long as Jews walk the earth, Muslims never can be quite comfortable in their proprietorship of the final revelation, and a Jewish commonwealth with its capital in Jerusalem constitutes a perpetual affront against the authority of Islam as the final revelation.

science and religion/Christianity

Stephen Barr in First Things on the passing of Stanley Jaki and Peter Hodgson-- two key players in the intersection between science and religion...

The conversation between science and religion has suffered two sad losses recently, with the deaths of Peter E. Hodgson, the English physicist, on December 8, and Fr. Stanley L. Jaki, the historian and philosopher of science, on April 7....

In the writings of Jaki and Hodgson, however, readers saw a different attitude. They held fast to the truths both of science and revelation, without feeling the need “to cut and pare at the facts” (to borrow a phrase from Maxwell). They believed in the strict lawfulness of nature, without denying either God’s ­freedom or human freedom. They had faith in the competence of physics to explain the physical, while recognizing that there is reality beyond the physical. They accepted evolutionary biology as the great and fruitful branch of science it is, while rejecting the dreary materialist philosophies that have grown on it like fungi. Jaki and Hodgson were among the first of a new wave—a wave that has now grown to include many scientists of international reputation who also defend their robust Christian faith: John C. Polkinghorne, for example, and Owen Gingerich, Micha Heller, Kenneth Miller, and Francis S. Collins....

Some excerpts from Barr on Jaki:

Jaki argued, the doctrine of Christ as the “only begotten” forestalled any conception of the universe as itself a necessary and eternal emanation of the divine. In creation ex nihilo, with a creator who is good, the universe itself must be good and therefore worth investigating. As the creator is the logos, the universe is intelligible and therefore capable of being investigated—and human beings, made in the image of the creator, are intelligent and capable of investigating it. As the creator created freely, the universe is contingent and therefore can be investigated only empirically, rather than by speculative or a priori methods. It was not Christianity that held back modern science, Jaki noted, but the organismic and cyclic universe of ­Aristotle, which the Christian imagination ultimately burst like an old wineskin.

As Christianity helped to provide a sound metaphysical foundation for science, so, argued Jaki, bad metaphysics has led repeatedly to bad science. He traced in rich historical detail how apriorism, whether in its Aristotelian, Cartesian, or German Idealist forms, always gives rise to wildly erroneous scientific speculations. At the other extreme, crude empiricisms, such as those of Hume, Mill, Comte, and Mach, prove equally incompetent...

These repeated embarrassing failures of philosophers to come to grips with science engendered a powerful anti-philosophical prejudice among scientists that continues to this day. Ironically, the naive attempt to do without philosophy produces simpleminded philosophical assumptions all the more dangerous for being unexamined. In particular, it leads to the idea that science consists of nothing but observations (conceived of as sensory input) and logical or mathematical deductions from them. This dovetails with an ontology that has room only for physical entities and mathematical laws...Along with this comes a contempt for all knowledge claims that cannot be subjected to scientific tests....

Finally, Barr's conclusion on Jaki & Hodgson's failure to embrace quantum mechanics:

The fear of subjectivism led both Jaki and Hodgson to a vehement rejection of the traditional understanding of quantum mechanics, against which they inveighed constantly. They hoped that physics would eventually return to a more Newtonian framework, despite the fact that this would entail a return also to the mechanistic and deterministic cosmos from which quantum mechanics had once delivered physics—a deliverance that Jaki celebrated in many passages. In any event, such a return is highly unlikely. In my view, they despaired far too quickly of the possibility of reconciling the traditional understanding of quantum mechanics with a sound metaphysics, challenging though that task may be....

the political implications of cafeteria Catholicism

From Charles Chaput in First Things-- on "Catholic" response to social issues and [national Democratic] politics...

In a word, the political implications of fans vs. followers in the Catholic Church-- the massive presence of cafeteria/cultural Catholicism-- and what to do about it...

Some Catholics in both political parties are deeply troubled by these issues, but too many Catholics don’t really care. That’s the truth of it: If they cared, our political environment would be different. If 65 million Catholics really cared about their faith and cared about what it teaches, neither political party could ignore what we believe about justice for the poor, or the homeless, or immigrants, or the unborn. If 65 million American Catholics really understood their faith, we wouldn’t need to waste one another’s time arguing whether the legalized killing of an unborn child is somehow balanced out or excused by other social policies.

If we learn nothing else from last November, it should be this: We need to stop over-counting our numbers, our influence, our institutions, and our resources, because they are not real. We cannot talk about following St. Paul and converting our culture until we sober up and admit what we’ve allowed ourselves to become. We need to stop lying to each other, to ourselves, and to God by claiming to oppose personally some homicidal evil—and allowing it to be legal at the same time.

We’ve forgotten how to think, especially how to think as Catholics. We have to make ourselves stupid to believe some of the things American Catholics are now expected to accept. There is nothing more empty-headed in a pluralist democracy than telling citizens to keep quiet about their beliefs. A healthy democracy requires exactly the opposite. Democracy requires a vigorous public struggle of convictions and ideas. And the convictions of some people always get imposed on everybody else. That’s the nature of a democracy....

People who openly reject God or dismiss Christianity as obsolete are sometimes more honest and less discouraging than Catholics who claim to be faithful to the Church but directly reject her guidance by their words and actions....

Here is a practical lesson to draw from Paul about how to engage the culture today: We need to master the language of popular culture. Paul knew he was addressing a mostly urban culture. Most of his examples, unlike the ones used by Jesus, are culled from urban life. He speaks about sports—racing, boxing, the stadium, the awards. He mentions the commerce of purchasing, saving, and cost-benefit ratios. He employs military metaphors of wars, battles, shields, and swords. He names the urban landmarks of theater, temples, and tribunals.

Paul is very creative in his use of images, examples, and metaphors. But his power isn’t limited to an ingenious taste for vocabulary. He used every technical resource, tool, and environment at his disposal—as we must....

Today’s so-called post-Christian world is really nothing of the sort. There’s nothing after Jesus Christ except apostasy. The ancient world had the excuse of ignorance. Our world does not....

John Paul II declared in Redemptoris Missio: “Our times are both momentous and fascinating. While on the one hand people seem to be pursuing material prosperity and to be sinking ever deeper into consumerism and materialism, on the other hand we are witnessing a desperate search for meaning, the need for an inner life.” Indeed, he added, “In secularized societies, the spiritual dimension of life is being sought after as an antidote to dehumanization. . . . The Church has an immense spiritual patrimony to offer humankind, a heritage in Christ, who called himself ‘the way, and the truth, and the life.’ . . . Here too there is an Areopagus to be evangelized.”

the gap or chasm between Heaven and Earth

A big part of Randy Alcorn's Heaven (the similarities between Earth and the New Earth), a prominent theme in Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy (the Kingdom is now and near), and something explored by C.S. Lewis as well...

From Richard Mouw in First Things...

In his Letters to Malcolm, C.S. Lewis reminds his fictitious friend about an argument the two of them once had in Edinburgh—an encounter, Lewis remembers, where “we nearly came to blows.” Their heated argument was about the relation between our ordinary experiences of pleasure and the kind of glory we will experience in heaven. And although the two of them have cooled off quite a bit since then, says Lewis, their basic disagreement has not been resolved: Lewis wants to insist that the mundane delight that we take in things like dancing and playing games anticipates the kind of joy that awaits us in the afterlife, while Malcolm thinks that it is preposterous to compare such frivolous things to the glory that we will experience in the heavenly realms.

What Malcolm fails to understand, Lewis claims, is that even the most frivolous sorts of pleasures can function as “shafts of the glory” that awaits us in the end time....

Lewis' thoughts are similar to those that Fr. Andrew Greeley...[who says that we should] “find our world haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of grace.”...

Lewis and Greeley make their cases in different ways. Lewis talks about how ordinary experiences, particularly pleasures, are anticipations of the future glory, while Greeley points to the ways in which ordinary things contain hints of the nature of God. But they share the same larger view of reality—one that sees the visible world, including the full range of our ordinary human experiences in that world, as pointing beyond itself to what is for us presently the realm of the invisible.

As it happens, I like this way of viewing things. Indeed, I find it quite compelling. This may not seem like a dramatic confession, so I have to add that I make this confession as a convinced Calvinist. And the fact is that both Lewis and Greeley go out of their way to single out Calvinism as especially hostile to their case....

I know that we Calvinists have gone out of our way to emphasize the desperate nature of our sinful condition....

From there, Mouw continues by making his case-- interesting but long and beyond where I want to go with this...

Dante on (true vs. faux) freedom

Speaking of The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, here's Anthony Esolen (of Touchstone) in First Things on the freedom of Hell and Heaven...

...in the West have inherited this ­suspicion of heritage. We share the assumption that ­freedom must mean freedom from—freedom from the limitations imposed on us by the old institutions: church, community, family. It seems not to matter that such freedom presupposes our alienation from one another. Existential alienation is a small price to pay for enlightenment, the fulfillment of the progressive movement, or the satisfaction of appetites.

It is hard to recall the medieval definition of freedom, which was not the political license to follow our bellies or the philosophical encouragement to send our elders packing. Freedom was understood, rather, as a growing into the habits, the virtues, that allow us to fulfill our end as human beings without the impediments of vice.

In the Divine Comedy, the pilgrim Dante, having climbed the mountain of Purgatory and scoured away the effects of habitual sin, hears Virgil say that the fruit of joy once lost in Eden is now near. And so he fairly rushes into the freedom of being what he has been created to be: Will above will now surged in such delight / to climb the top, that with each step I took / I felt my feathers growing for the flight.

Dante's callow soul will soon be welcomed into the community of the blessed saints, for whom freedom means the grace-filled incapacity to will anything but the good for themselves and for one another. Thomas Aquinas steps forth from the constellation of the wise to express this freedom as the now utterly natural and supernatural virtue of love. Says he to Dante, who has been too stunned with wonder to ask his name:

When the radiance
of the Lord's grace, which lights the flames of true
love and by love still grows in eminence,
With such multiplication shines in you
it leads you up these stairs no man may take
descending, without climbing up anew,
He who'd deny his flask of wine to slake
your thirst would not be free, would have such power
as rivers not returning to the sea!

Thomas cannot do other than love. In that very propensity, as of a rushing river, consists his freedom.

In his way, Dante has foreseen our modern notion of freedom...and he has rejected it. That is not because such false freedom is often directed toward evil, as when it becomes the license to snuff out the life of an unborn child. It is, rather, because any freedom that severs us from one another, from our memories of those who came before us, is built on a lie about being. It is a misunderstanding of that Being whose essence is to exist. It is autonomy collapsing into antinomy, the denial of law itself and of our created being. Dante knows both that there is an autonomy in accord with the structure of created existence, which is truly free, and that there is an autonomy that violates it, caught by its own snare....

strangely dim (or amazingly clear) in the light of His glorious grace

In the most recent issue of CT, Philip Yancey has a nice essay on the potential of (and problems with) Christian isolation. I recommend the entire thing, but want to reproduce his report of this observation:

Church historian Mark Noll remarks that the song "Turn Your Eyes upon Jesus" plainly errs when it says, "And the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace." No, he says, the rest of the world grows clearer, not dimmer, in the light of Christ. God created matter; in Jesus, God joined it.

I love that line in that classic hymn-- and there is a profound sense in which it is true.

But Noll makes a good point here. Along the lines of the world painted by C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, the world never seems more real and alive-- than when we see it in and through Christ.

the Church as hooker

I've blogged quite a bit lately on fans vs. followers of Jesus Christ-- the latter as those who seem Him as Lord vs. merely Savior or some cultural icon.

Here's another angle-- a critique of the church and one aspect of its immersion in American culture: a provocative (apocryphal?) little story through the email, attributed to Dr. David Ryser (hat tip: Sandy Baker)...

A number of years ago, I had the privilege of teaching at a school of ministry....I came across a quote attributed most often to Rev. Sam Pascoe. It is a short version of the history of Christianity, and it goes like this:

Christianity started in Palestine as a fellowship;

it moved to Greece and became a philosophy;

it moved to Italy and became an institution;
it moved to Europe and became a culture;

it came to America and became an enterprise.

Some of the students were only 18 or 19 years old--barely out of diapers--and I wanted them to understand and appreciate the import of the last line, so I clarified it by adding, "An enterprise. That's a business."

After a few moments Martha...raised her hand. I could not imagine what her question might be. I thought the little vignette was self-explanatory, and that I had performed it brilliantly. Nevertheless, I acknowledged Martha's raised hand, "Yes, Martha."

She asked such a simple question, "A business But isn't it supposed to be a body?"

I could not envision where this line of questioning was going, and the only response I could think of was, "Yes."

She continued, "But when a body becomes a business, isn't that a prostitute?"

This language seems harsh, but finds a strong parallel in the Old Testament-- with its equivalence of idolatry and spiritual adultery, as Israel whores after other gods. The entire book of Hosea speaks to this sobering parallel.

the cross at the center of our galaxy

One of the highlights of today's sermon by Kyle...

A photo from the Hubble Telescope of (the black hole at?) the center of our universe-- filled with a cross...

C.S. Lewis quote-of-the-week

“If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next…Aim at heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’; aim at earth and you will get neither.”

-- Mere Christianity, book 3, ch. 10

if the states can't do it well, why do you think the feds can?

Health care, that is...

Here are the editorialists of the WSJ with the latest assessment of the health care reforms in Massachusetts...

In a rational world, the prognosis for ObamaCare would wait on the evidence in Massachusetts, given that the commonwealth's 2006 program closely resembles what Democrats are trying to do in Washington. If the results were widely known, it might be dead on arrival....

The Massachusetts law, which was championed by former GOP Governor Mitt Romney, imposed an individual mandate, requiring nearly all residents to buy health insurance or else pay a penalty. (The exceptions are those who qualify for the state's public program.) This was supposed to cover everybody and save money too. We've written before about how costs have exploded...

For 15 years Massachusetts has also imposed mandates known as guaranteed issue and community rating -- meaning that insurers must cover anyone who applies, regardless of health or pre-existing conditions, and also charge everyone the same premium (or close to it). Yet these mandates allow people to wait until they're sick, or just before they're about to incur major medical expenses, to buy insurance. This drives up costs for everyone else, which helps explain why small-group coverage in Massachusetts is so much more expensive than in most of the country. Mr. Romney argued -- as Democrats are arguing now -- that the individual mandate would make that problem disappear, since everyone is always supposed to be covered....

Harvard-Pilgrim estimates that between April 2008 and March 2009, about 40% of its new enrollees stayed with it for fewer than five months and on average incurred about $2,400 per person in monthly medical expenses. That's about 600% higher than Harvard-Pilgrim would have otherwise expected....

The individual mandate penalty for not having coverage is only about $900, so people seem to be gaming the Massachusetts system....

Obama smoking cigs vs. crack on health care

A nice effort from Steve Breen of the San Diego Union-Tribune (hat tip: World)...

"rubber rooms": teachers' unions "at work"

From World...

Where can a person get paid $70,000 or more per year to play Scrabble, write a novel, or surf the internet? How about New York City's public schools where 700 suspended teachers have waited as long as six years for disciplinary hearings. Thanks to tough union laws, these suspended teachers—accused of such acts as insubordination, lying, or cheating—receive full pay and holidays while barred from classrooms at an annual cost of $65 million...

go directly to jail: school choice as the new civil rights

From Brendan Miniter in the WSJ...

Getting arrested doesn't normally bolster a politician's credibility. But when South Carolina state Sen. Robert Ford told me recently that he saw the inside of a jail cell 73 times, he did so to make a point. As a youth, Mr. Ford cut his political teeth in tumultuous 1960s civil-rights protests.

Today this black Democrat says the new civil-rights struggle is about the quality of instruction in public schools, and that to receive a decent education African-Americans need school choice....

Mr. Ford was once like many Democrats on education -- a reliable vote against reforms that would upend the system. But over the past three and a half years he's studied how school choice works and he's now advocating tax credits and scholarships that parents can spend on public or private schools.

He's not alone. Three other prominent black Democrats in South Carolina have publicly challenged party orthodoxy....

The danger for Democrats still opposed to school choice is that Mr. Ford represents widespread frustration among black voters who see Mr. Obama in the White House and now expect real change to occur in their communities. Black voters could come to support conservative education policies (if not GOP candidates)....

a clunker policy-- this time, for clunkers!

This is a version of Bastiat and Hazlitt's "broken window" fallacy-- that breaking a window will be good for an economy, since the window-maker will have a job as a result.

From Jere Downs in the C-J...

It is happening already. Customers are asking new-car dealers about getting as much as $4,500 for their old gas-guzzlers.

The new incentive, popularly known as "Cash for Clunkers," took effect Wednesday.

But it will be weeks before anyone knows the fine print of the federal program, such as how dealers register with the government for reimbursement of the rebates, or when and how salvage yards should process old vehicles into scrap.

To get the credit, the gas-guzzler has to be taken off the road and either destroyed or broken up for parts....

When drivers give up certain older vehicles, dealers can directly credit $3,500 or $4,500 against the cost of a new vehicle. The credit replaces any trade-in value of the vehicle, which can't be resold.

You must have owned and insured the trade-in vehicle for at least a year. That vehicle must be in driveable condition, and the model has to be rated by the Environmental Protection Agency with combined city and highway fuel mileage of less than 18 miles per gallon. Some large work trucks and vans have different rules.

The offer runs through Nov. 1....

Of course, car dealers know that you're getting the rebate, so they won't allow you to bargain nearly as hard for that new car. The upshot: destructive redistribution from taxpayers to beater-owners, dealers, and car manufacturers.

Bush and now Obama reduce illegal immigration by trashing the economy

I knew they were working on the problem...

From Patrick Barta and Joel Millman in the WSJ...

The developed world, which for decades has offered a difficult but promising path to upward mobility, appears to be losing its allure. Unemployment is rising, and backlashes against foreign workers are mounting. The result is potentially the biggest turnaround in migration flows since the Great Depression, economists say.

Full migration numbers for most countries are only available after a long lag, and so don't yet capture all the effects of today's economic crisis. But anecdotal reports and data from government ministries and outside organizations indicate that the flow of immigrants from poor to wealthier countries is slowing significantly for the first time in decades while more people are returning home....

Such migratory shifts could have profound consequences for developed nations, especially in places where domestic populations aren't growing fast enough to fill jobs or pay for social needs....

Some analysts question whether the latest migration reversal will outlast the current recession, or turn out to be as big as migration experts predict. Many immigrants have worked hard to establish themselves in their adopted countries and will be unwilling to leave, even if jobs disappear. Others say the trend could be more long-lasting, especially if returning workers help give developing economies a boost or if rich-world economies take many years to recover....

California's taxpayer revolt and what it means for us AND amazing statism and elitism in California's media

From Matt Welch in Reason on the California politics, economics, and some amazing examples of the elitism and statism of the dominant media...

On May 19, California voters went to the polls to decide whether to pass a package of six tax-and-gimmick ballot propositions....

Those who believe that either money or the media determine political outcomes should pay close heed to what happened next: Although opponents were outspent by more than 7 to 1, they trounced the state’s political class, rejecting five of the six measures by an average of 30 percentage points. The only proposition to pass was an anger-driven new law that limits elected officials’ salaries.

Faced with such thorough repudiation, California’s best and brightest then did a telling thing. They lashed right back.

The Los Angeles Times headlined its morning-after news analysis, “California Voters Exercise Their Power—and That’s the Problem."...Business columnist Michael Hiltzik averred that “far more blame for the deficit belongs to California voters” because “year in, year out, they enact spending mandates at the polls, often without endowing a revenue source.” Missing from any of these critiques was the fact that the Times’ own editorial board endorsed more than 90 percent of the very same ballot-box bond measures during the last decade....

“Good morning, California voters,” The Sacramento Bee’s post-election editorial began. “Do you feel better, now that you’ve gotten that out of your system?” The Bee, which (like the Times) had endorsed four of the five losing measures, came under immediate attack for its heavy-handed, citizen-blaming sarcasm....Then another funny thing happened: The Bee scrubbed the editorial off its website, replacing it with a much more conciliatory piece, addressed this time to legislators. The original editorial had been posted in “error,” the paper explained, and the new piece was the one that appeared in the print edition....

Rarely has the chasm between elite political discourse and grubby popular opinion been displayed in such sharp relief. The implications of this citizen revolt—and the hostile reactions to it—stretch far beyond Nevada’s western border. California is the Ghost of Federal Government Future.

During the last two decades, the Golden State has been transformed from what was once known as the nation’s most anti-labor outpost to a state essentially run by public-sector unions....

...another interpretation of California’s rebellion, one with far sunnier implications for those of us who prefer our governments constrained. Faced with a political class that ignored bureaucratic inefficiency, that demanded higher taxes, that filled the newspapers with scare stories about people who will literally die as a result of budget cuts, the citizens of one of the bluest states in the nation collectively said we just don’t believe you anymore. If even California’s famous fruits and nuts can call the statists’ bluff, there may be hope for the rest of the country.

Keynes and his contemporary followers don't understand the economy

From Mark Thornton of the Mises Institute on "the upside-down world of John Maynard Keynes"... (A free, audio version of this is available by clicking here.)

John Maynard Keynes often employed flowery language like "animal spirits" and "liquidity trap" to describe things he did not understand. He was, after all, more of a bureaucrat than an economist. In fact, he would best be described as an anti-economist because he eschewed things like supply and demand and held the opinion that government could run the economy.

So, for example, he could not understand why people would invest resources in risky adventures that helped keep the economy growing at full employment. He therefore substituted "animal spirits" for the profit motive. These spirits allow entrepreneurs to proceed with a naïve confidence and to set aside concerns over losses. Similarly, the failure to invest was also a psychological problem that he dubbed the "liquidity trap." This trap occurs when investors seek liquidity in cash and when monetary policy — in terms of cutting interest rates — no longer produces an increase in investment.

The problem with Keynes is that he thought that if entrepreneurs lose their collective nerve, the government should socialize investment, prop up demand and employment, and provide assurances to drive the economy back to full employment. He did not understand how the economy works so he could not understand how the economy corrects itself once a contraction occurs.

The problem for us is that Bush, Obama, Geithner, and Summers are all following the Keynesian playbook, with Nobel laureate Paul Krugman serving as head cheerleader. If instead we just allowed the free-market process to work, the economy would likely have already bottomed; companies like AIG would be emerging from bankruptcy and the unemployment rate would be dropping instead of continuing to rise.

The market process was curtailed just a few months into this contraction and — over the last 15 months — has been almost wholly replaced with government intervention....

This slew of interventions has been disorderly....Ironically, by adopting the Keynesian position that we have lost our "animal spirits" and are suffering from a psychological problem of fear, the government has undertaken extreme policy changes that greatly undermine the profit motive. Entrepreneurs are no longer looking for new profit opportunities in the economy. Instead, they are more likely either trying to preserve their capital or lining up for a government bailout....

Because they do not understand how the market works, Keynesians think [the self-correctingof the market] is a fantasy. But if you follow the Austrian recipe of allowing liquidation of bankrupt firms and debt, allowing prices to fall without monetary inflation, not propping up employment or subsidizing unemployment, and not discouraging hoarding, you will end up with the quickest possible recovery and minimize the magnitude of economic pain.

Krugman's passion for a housing bubble in 2002

From Krugman's 2002 NYT piece (hat tip: World)...

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

Judging by Mr. Greenspan's remarkably cheerful recent testimony, he still thinks he can pull that off. But the Fed chairman's crystal ball has been cloudy lately; remember how he urged Congress to cut taxes to head off the risk of excessive budget surpluses? And a sober look at recent data is not encouraging.

Thanks Paul!

Coloradans pay to have Jeffersonville's fuel tanks removed...

From Grace Schneider in the C-J...

For decades, Jeffersonville city leaders have known that one of the community's main entrances — 10th and Spring streets — has several underground fuel tanks that would need to be dug up and hauled away some day....

On Tuesday, city officials and state Rep. Steve Stemler, a Jeffersonville Democrat who operates a plumbing and sprinkler contracting business just blocks from the intersection, announced that the city would get a $158,500 federal stimulus grant to remove several of the underground tanks and clean up contaminated soil.

It's much easier to spend $158K of other people's money than our own money to clean up a local mess. The benefits are concentrated; the costs are diffused. The problem is that people in Jeff are also helping to pay for thousands of similar projects across the country.

The money is coming from the Indiana Finance Authority, which recently received $4 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to assist with a limited list of Hoosier brownfields projects....

Local monies sent to the federal government, most of which is sent to a bureaucracy in Indiana which sends most of it out to local entities. How about we just keep all of the money here and make our own decisions without state and federal oversight?

The city has steadily begun to clean up the area of 10th and Spring. Eventually, Urban said, they'd like to create a master plan for 10th Street.

I would guess that there master plan includes hopes and strategies to get other people to pay for that too.

Max Lucado at Southeast

Max has preached four other times at Southeast-- and the times I've heard him, it's been good/solid. The best-selling Christian author of all time, he's a great story-teller, but his preaching didn't match that level of excellence. (The books I've read of his are light devotions/reflections with a heavy emphasis on stories-- good stuff for the moment, but little that seems to stick with me.)

Last Sunday's sermon was easily the best I've heard from him. Interestingly, he seemed to speak as if he was writing. Since he is gifted/skilled with words-- and even though the effect is obviously different when delivered verbally-- it was still a pleasure to listen to and quite insightful.

The topic? Fear...

Highlights:
-the opening reference to 173 people dying of fear during a single event in WW II
-the tension between fear as helpful vs. paralyzing, between its presence vs. its potential pervasiveness within our lives, fear vs. a "spirit of fear/timidity"
-the three-fold reference to "seismos" in Matthew (8:24, 27:51, 28:2)-- the defeat of fear, sin and death
-the idea that "what frightened them was an occasion for sleep for Christ"-- and it resulted in assumptions and accusations about God's character, His love, knowledge and power (vs. questions/requests to God)
-I knew that "fear not" is the most frequent command in the Bible, but did not know that it was Christ's most frequent command as well.
-the closing anecdote/analogy to the Wolfman and how his father handled it

how midwesterners see the U.S.

From GraphJam...

True or False? ;-)

stats on obesity and a likely candidate for health care rationing

Along the lines of what I wrote in a recent essay on health care costs and potential reforms...

Health care rationing is most likely to start with expensive, end-of-life care-- given reasonable considerations about cost, a reductionistic focus on its limited utilitarian benefit, and an overall cultural devaluation of life (albeit with important advances in this realm on abortion).

Another reasonable consideration is who should pay. To note, if it's private insurance, then it's mutually beneficial trade-- when you pay premiums and they pay out benefits. But if the government pays, then we're taking money from some people to keep other people alive. When is that kosher?

Another likely candidate for rationing is "lifestyle choices" such as smoking and obesity. Again, a large part of this is quite reasonable, given that one might give the power to government to make such choices and coercive taxation will fund its choices. And various taxes against lifestyle choices are more politically popular, given an unsavory menu of tax increases and other rationing options.

Here's Lauran Neergaard in the C-J on the latest obesity stats...

Mississippi's still king of cellulite, but an ominous tide is rolling toward the Medicare doctors in neighboring Alabama: obese baby boomers. It's time for the nation's annual obesity rankings and...there's little good news. In 31 states, more than one in four adults are obese, says a new report from the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

And obesity rates among adults rose in 23 states over the past year, and no state experienced a significant decline....

Health economists once made the harsh financial calculation that the obese would save money by dying sooner. But more recent research instead suggests that better treatments are keeping them alive nearly as long -- but they're much sicker for longer, requiring such costly interventions as knee replacements and diabetes care and dialysis. Medicare spends anywhere from $1,400 to $6,000 more annually on health care for an obese senior than for the non-obese, Levi said....

-Mississippi had the highest rate of adult obesity, 32.5 percent, for the fifth year in a row. Three additional states now have adult obesity rates above 30 percent, including Alabama, 31.2 percent; West Virginia, 31.1 percent; and Tennessee, 30.2 percent.

-In 1991, no state had more than a 20 percent obesity rate. Today, the only state that doesn't is Colorado, at 18.9 percent.

-Mississippi also had the highest rate of overweight and obese children, at 44.4 percent in total. It's followed by Arkansas, 37.5 percent; and Georgia, 37.3 percent.

the promises and pitfalls of health care reform

The second of my two essays on health care (click here for part 1), published in newspapers across Indiana-- e.g, here, in the Jeff/NA News-Tribune...
___________________

What should we do with the incredibly important issue of health care? Will additional government involvement improve its availability, cost and quality? And which proposal is optimal? Since the Democrats control the national political process and favor increased government intervention, we’ll stick to analyzing those options.

Let’s start by noting that the proposed reforms largely assume rather than explain how they would increase efficiency. Part of this is reasonable and expected but still frightening: We don’t really know what we’ll get when we embrace grand changes in policy.

In addition, there is often a considerable gap between the theory and practice of government. Politicians often overestimate benefits and underestimate the costs of their policies.

Will special interest groups have more or less influence than under the status quo? In his movie "Sicko," Michael Moore expresses admiration for single-payer health-care systems in other countries. But it’s interesting that he is not at all optimistic about it working here, given the power of special interests in our democracy.

The current mix of government and markets in health care certainly has an amazing amount of inefficiency. But will bureaucracy and red tape be reduced or enhanced with more government?

It’s difficult to imagine much if any gain. Thus, extending health-care availability will probably involve higher costs or reduced access in other contexts (rationing).

Higher costs are possible, but congress and the president are limited by the recent, stunning increases in spending and debt by George Bush, Barack Obama and their congresses.

Considerable rationing is quite likely. It may be necessitated by cost constraints. And we’ve seen rationing with Medicare and in countries whose governments are heavily involved in health care. The first major uses of rationing would most likely be to restrict expensive “end-of-life” treatments and health care attached to unhealthy “lifestyle choices.”

Let’s get more specific now: One current proposal would outlaw all private health-care spending and cap public health-care spending and growth. But it’s difficult to imagine people giving up so much of their freedom. Although the explicit rationing is amazingly bold, it is politically difficult.

In 1994, the effort to regulate health care was centered on a mandate that businesses would provide health coverage for their workers. But this would make it more expensive for firms to hire workers, resulting in lower wages or fewer jobs.

Another option is the U.S. House proposal to mandate that individuals get health insurance, subsidizing those with lower incomes. (The current proposal would subsidize those who earn less than four times the “poverty” level — $43,200 for an individual and $88,200 for family of four.) This would resemble our current approach to auto insurance mandates. But given the subsidies, it would be quite expensive.

Barack Obama’s proposal is to subsidize public insurance that would “compete” with private insurance. By definition, subsidized insurance would undermine private insurance to some extent — somewhere between attracting people at the margin and entirely destroying the industry. It would depend on the extent of the subsidy.

Consider two examples. Public education is highly subsidized, so its private competition is marginal. The U.S. Post Office has been granted a monopoly and often receives direct subsidies, but it still faces rigorous competition because of technological advance.

Beyond the short-term policy decision, a public-private insurance market could be altered in the future through changes in the subsidy or regulations impacting private insurers. We have reason for concern here, since such subsidies and regulations can be quite subtle.

Economists are fond of the phrase “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Well, there’s no such thing as free health care either. All of these proposals are likely to increase costs, decrease overall access or both. In all of this, perhaps we should also keep a medical phrase in mind — from the Hippocratic Oath: “Above all, do no harm.”

One last thought: It’s interesting that we’ve become so fixated on a federal approach to this problem. Why not allow the 50 states to try 50 different experiments rather than betting everything on one grand, federal experiment that would be difficult if not impossible to reverse?

Can we really afford to take such a chance?

Click here for part 1...

comparing apples and rocks in health care-- and the cause of our health care/insurance woes

The first of my two essays on health care, published in newspapers across Indiana-- e.g, here, in the Jeff/NA News-Tribune...
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We’re often told that the United States compares poorly to other countries in terms of infant mortality — especially since we’re a developed country that devotes so many resources to health care.

This is the first myth of health-care reform. Those statistics are skewed by differences in how countries deal with “premature births.” It may be politically useful but it’s not intellectually honest to compare apples and rocks.

We also hear assertions that various forms of government involvement in health care are likely to be effective in the U.S. because they work well in other countries. Aside from whether this is true, it should be noted that these other countries have lower populations and, typically, far less diversity in their populations. So these comparisons are somewhere between somewhat helpful and useless. One of the ironies of the health-care debate is that such comparisons should encourage us to consider state-based reforms (instead of a single, grand federal experiment), since the population and diversity of our states is similar to other countries.

A second myth is far more important: We’re often told that our current health-care system is “free-market.” This is akin to blaming the Great Depression on markets — while ignoring the four tax increases of Hoover and FDR, massive trade protectionism, restrictive monetary policy, laws that artificially increased prices and wages and so on. In both cases, the extent to which we should blame the government is an open question. But ignoring its role in either mess is neither legitimate nor useful.

With health care, there is already massive government intervention. The most obvious example is the double debut of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s. In addition, there is a wide array of relatively minor but still significant issues: various labor market restrictions (e.g., you and I are not allowed to receive medical services from professionals who provide the same services to our armed forces), mandated insurance benefits (for everything from in-vitro fertilization to hair transplants), the explosion of medical malpractice awards (and thus, malpractice insurance rates) and so on.

But the most important public policy in this realm? The subsidy of health insurance acquired by workers through the firm. It is a subsidy because wages are taxed and fringe benefits are not. Thus, fringe benefits are a subsidized form of compensation.

Subsidies encourage the subsidized behavior and provide an incentive for people to do “too much” of that behavior. Here, the subsidy encourages workers in firms to have “too much” insurance — low deductibles, low co-pays and expansive coverage. This, in turn, drives up costs. The subsidy also links our health insurance to our jobs, creating problems with “portability” and trying to get new insurance when I have a pre-existing condition and want to change jobs.

Think about how insurance typically operates. It covers rare, catastrophic events such as car accidents and house fires. In contrast, health-care insurance covers everything from allergy shots to cancer treatments. By way of analogy, car insurance of this type would cover everything from door dings and oil changes to severe car accidents. What would happen to the cost of oil changes, the paperwork associated with oil changes, etc.? In a nutshell, the market for car maintenance and repair would be as messed up as our market for health care.

What to do? On its own, through increasingly painful health-insurance premiums, the market is moving us back toward catastrophic health care coverage.

Or we could remove the subsidy and the crux of the problem. Interestingly, the proposals by McCain and now Obama — to tax health-insurance benefits — address this issue. But it is unlikely that this proposal will be politically popular, even if it is offset by a revenue-neutral tax decrease on wages.

More likely, we’ll no nothing — or we’ll embrace some sort of band-aid or magic potion that will likely do more harm than good. We’ll take a look at those band-aids and potions in the next part.

Click here for part 2...

C-J confusion or deception on charter schools

From the C-J editorialists, in the midst of a critique of the recently-passed Indiana budget...

It's understandable that Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels wants to sell his special legislative session's outcome as a victory for education, but the truth is that what the General Assembly did, and what the Governor approved, is a setback for public schools in both urban and rural areas. The big losers are districts in Indianapolis and Gary....

Two thoughts here:

-Given their statist ideology, "it's understandable that" the C-J "wants to sell" all of these things, "but the truth is..."

-Gary and Indy already spend the most money per student. How are their educational outcomes (something the C-J claims to be concerned about later in this essay)? Why should they get even more money?

The Governor took a cheap shot at critics who predicted "the end of public education as we know it." He quipped, "I say thank goodness."...

Sounds like a reasonably hyperbolic and humorous response to a "cheap shot" by the critics. "The end of public education as we know it"?! C'mon...

Lawmakers also encouraged the creation of charter schools, by declining to put a cap on the number that can be approved. — this despite national research that shows very mixed results for such experiments. They did this in order to qualify for more federal stimulus money, but the sad truth is that charters are most popular in the Indianapolis and Gary areas, where new funding cutbacks likely will throw public school districts into an ever-deepening spiral...

"Very mixed results" is in terms of quality. I don't know of any research which indicates a decline in quality-- and some indicates an increase. In any case, charter schools are less expensive and provide more choice. Even with the same quality, more choice at a lower cost is a good deal (for non-statists), right?

Here's the C-J confusion (about a basic point) or its attempt to deceive: Charter schools increase rather than decrease per-student funding to the other public schools. Charters don't get all of the money that's associated with per-student spending, so the remaining students receive services attached with more money per-student.

An "ever-deepening spiral"? I thought they were already in a spiral. Look at the data: the spiral is not related to funding. If anything, the spiral is correlated with more funding!

It's not a major issue in this newspaper's immediate circulation area, where only one charter school exists, nor is this a major Hoosier phenomenon, since there are only 49 charter schools statewide. But it's a disturbing harbinger....

The story behind this story is sad as well.

First, it's pathetic that Kentucky does not allow charter schools-- an indicator of past and future backwardness.

Second, only Schools of Education are allowed to sponsor a charter school (where a School of Business could be equally effective) and only Ball State has had the courage to step up. As a result, I'm told that some school systems across the state have discriminated against Ball State's education graduates because of this. If true, thankfully, there's a special place in Hell for the unredeemed doing that sort of thing.