RUTHFULLY YOURS

Why the American spirit of innovation is in trouble, and what culture has to do with it.
Some years ago, I conducted an ambitious research project to document and explain patterns of human accomplishment across time and cultures. My research took me from 800 BCE, when Homo sapiens’ first great surviving works of thought appeared, to 1950, my cut-off date for assessing lasting influence. I assembled world-wide inventories of achievements in physics, biology, chemistry, geology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and technology, plus separate inventories of Western, Chinese, and Indian philosophy; Western, Chinese, and Japanese art; Western, Arabic, Chinese, Indian, and Japanese literature; and Western music. These inventories were analyzed using quantitative techniques alongside standard qualitative historical analysis. The result was Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences (2003).

My study confirmed important patterns. Foremost among them is that human achievement has clustered at particular times and places, including Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Sung China, and Western Europe of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. But why? What was special about those times and places? In the book’s final chapters, I laid out my best understanding of the environment within which great accomplishment occurs.

In what follows, I want to conduct an inquiry into the ways in which the environment of achievement in early 21st-century America corresponds or fails to correspond to the patterns of the past. As against pivotal moments in the story of human accomplishment, does today’s America, for instance, look more like Britain blooming at the end of the 18th century or like France fading at the end of the 19th century? If the latter, are there idiosyncratic features of the American situation that can override what seem to be longer-run tendencies?

To guide the discussion, I’ll provide a running synopsis, in language drawn from Human Accomplishment, of the core conditions that prevailed during the glorious periods of past achievement. I’ll focus in particular on science and technology, since these are the fields that preoccupy our contemporary debates over the present course and future prospects of American innovation.

The Jerusalem question: Will a U.S. court case trigger WWIII? If the U.S. decides to list ‘Israel’ as the country of birth of an American born in Jerusalem, the consequences are potentially huge.

The decision of the U.S. Supreme Court Monday to give another hearing to one of the most explosive cases before it in years – the so-called Jerusalem question – certainly sets the stage for some high court drama in the Middle East. It concerns whether Secretary of State John Kerry will have to bow to Congress and state in Menachem Binyamin Zivotofsky’s U.S. passport that he was born in Israel.

The law that requires Kerry to do this – for Zivotofsky, or any other American born in Jerusalem who wants Israel listed as his place of birth – was passed in 2002 by an almost unanimous House and a unanimous Senate. The Jerusalem requirement was part of a larger bill funding the State Department. It was signed by one of America’s most pro-Israel presidents, George W. Bush. But Bush issued a signing statement saying the requirement to issue consular documents listing Jerusalem as part of Israel infringed on his executive powers.

He may have promised to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, but he defaulted on that. He also refused to yield to Congress on the passport question. President Barack Obama took the same position, as did secretaries of state Colin Powell, Hillary Clinton and now Kerry. Clinton and Kerry balked, even though they’d been in the Senate that passed the law unanimously. They all tried to dodge it by saying that the question of Jerusalem was the president’s to decide and, in any event, was a political matter beyond the ken of the courts.

All the liberal commentators and the anti-Israel left were certain Master Zivotofsky was going to lose. And he was losing, until it reached the Supreme Court the first time. Then, in March 2012, the Supreme Court stunned the foreign policy bar by casting aside Secretary of State Clinton’s pettifogging. It did so by a vote of 8-1, in a stern opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, who told the lower court in no uncertain terms that it would have to step up and decide the matter.

Roberts made clear that the courts weren’t being asked to decide whether Jerusalem was part of Israel. That is a political question. They were being asked to decide whether Congress has the authority, under the Constitution, to decide the political question. “This is what courts do,” Roberts wrote. “The political question doctrine poses no bar to judicial review of this case.” So, the matter went back to the second most powerful bench: the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

THIS IS A BIGGIE IN THE NOVEMBER CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS….AND A HOT BUTTON ISSUE AMONG INCUMBENTS AND CHALLENGERS IN ALMOST EVERY STATE….AND THE DEMS ARE GETTING FRIED ON IT BECAUSE ONLY ABOUT 20 VOTED FOR CONSTRUCTION OF THE PIPELINE WITHOUT LIMITING AMENDMENTS….RSK

In a transparent political sop aimed at radical environmentalists and their big-buck donors, the Obama administration announced it is indefinitely extending the review period for the Keystone XL pipeline. The delay, announced in a Good Friday news dump, will likely push the final decision on the project past the November mid-term elections.

Republicans, red-state Democrats and a top labor union official hammered the move.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, characterized the delay as “nothing short of a stunning act of political cowardice.” Rep. Lee Terry (R-NB) contended it was “shameful,” further explaining that another spring construction season will be lost as result. They were joined by Democrats such as Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AK), who contended “there’s no excuse for another delay,” and Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) who was “frankly appalled at the continued foot-dragging by this administration on the Keystone project.”

Terry O’Sullivan, general president of the Laborers International Union of America (LIUNA) was equally appalled, calling the decision “politics at its worst,” further noting that it represents “another low blow to the working men and women of our country for whom the Keystone XL Pipeline is a lifeline to good jobs and energy security.”

The Obama administration was in the midst of a 90-day review period, during which federal agencies were examining an environmental study provided by the State Department when the delay was announced. That would be the latest study. The State Department has been studying the potential impact of the pipeline for the last six years.

According to Sham Times and other Arabic websites, jihadi social media networks posted the above picture of a child sitting on the ground while surrounded by armed men pointing their rifles at him. The caption appearing with the picture, purportedly posted by a supporter of the Free Syrian Army, is “Our youngest hostage from among the hostile sects of Kessab.”

Kessab is a predominantly Christian Armenian village in Syria near the Turkish border. Earlier it was invaded by jihadis, who terrorized, pillaged churches, and prompted some 2000 residents to flee. Initial reports had stated that about a dozen families remained as hostages.

Since the picture appeared on Arabic social media, many have expressed shock and outrage, condemning the Syrian “rebels,” while others cast doubt on the authenticity of the picture.

Of course, those wondering what the jihadis have to gain from taking such a picture and making it public would do well to remember that these are the same “rebels” who decapitate people and wave their severed and bloodied heads in front of cameras while smiling; these are the same “freedom fighters” who literally eat their victims on camera.

President Obama has described Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas as “somebody who has consistently renounced violence.” Just the opposite was on full display once again last week. An Israeli father was killed and his pregnant wife and child were injured in a Palestinian terrorist shooting attack, as the family members were on their way to a Passover Seder on April 14th. At first, Abbas was silent, as were President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. Then, after reports surfaced that Abbas had belatedly condemned the attack, his office went out of its way to deny the reports, although the Palestinian minister of religious affairs did manage to say that the killing was “painful.” For Obama’s ears no doubt, the minister added the lie that Palestinians “condemn the death of every human being” and believe that “killing and violence is completely unacceptable,” ignoring praise for the shooting by Hamas’s leader Ismail Haniyeh and the incitement to violence by the Palestinian Authority itself.

Israel took a major chance for peace when it released from prison hardened terrorists with blood on their hands. Israel did so in order to jump start direct peace negotiations with the Palestinians under terms worked out by Kerry. What did Abbas do upon their release? He lit a torch to welcome them home and held celebrations to honor them as heroes. For example, on October 30, 2013, Abbas congratulated 21 terrorists from the West Bank after their release from prison and heralded them on official Palestinian Authority TV as “our heroic brothers.” In December 2013, following a Palestinian Authority-sponsored children’s play in which the children acted out the killing of Israelis and a Palestinian “spy,” Palestinian Authority Minister of Culture Anwar Abu Aisha invited real-life terrorists released by Israel onto the stage and awarded them plaques of honor.

Not surprisingly, these murderers have shown no remorse. One of them, for example, said: “Through the great PA TV, I say to the Israelis: There is no Palestinian who did something for the homeland and his nation who will regret it. We don’t regret what we did and we will not regret what we did.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/islams-religious-war-with-everyone/print/

Few divides are as impossible to bridge as those of religion. You either believe or you don’t.

When it comes to Islam, non-Muslims are expected to take its goodwill on faith. If you believe your eyes and ears, Islam and violence go together like peanut butter and jelly. But if you believe Muslims and their spin doctors with academic degrees, Muslims are the victims of other religions.

If Muslims fighting Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists are the victims of non-Muslims, what are we to make of Muslims fighting other Muslims in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq? Religious civil wars make it hard to believe that Muslims are the victims of other religions instead of the authors of their own violence.

Religions have a long history of not getting along with one another, but there is only one religion that has never gotten along with any other religion, is engaging in a religious war with every religion that exists, with atheists who have no religion, and even with its own co-religionists.

Is all this violence someone else’s fault? Or is it Islam’s fault?

Muslim hostility to Christians and Jews is not a phenomenon that began with the modern State of Israel or American foreign policy.

Muslims have warred with Christians and Jews as minorities and persecuted them as majorities. Academic apologists claim that Muslim hostility toward Christians derived from an ongoing conflict, but at no time during the history of Islam until the twentieth century did the Jews have a functioning state.

Israel has conveniently become the focus and explanation for Muslim hostility toward Jews, but that fails to explain over a thousand years of Muslim hatred and persecution … long before Herzl or the IDF.

Why did Muslims persecute and kill Jews long before Zionism was even a word? For the same reason that they killed Christians.

Islam hated Judaism and Christianity from the start. The Koran urges Muslims not to befriend Jews or Christians (Koran 5:51) speaks of “enmity and hatred” with Christians (Koran 5:15) and the Jews (Koran 5:65) who are also to be cursed. The Jews are accused of “creating disorder” (Koran 5:65) and Christians are accused of worshiping their priests (Koran 9:31). The Jews and Christians believe in evil things (Koran 4:52) and Allah’s curse will be upon them (Koran 9:30).

Muslims don’t hate and kill Jews because of Israel. They hate Israel because it is Jewish.

This morning, Instapundit [1] dipped its cup into the growing current of stories about the lies and lawlessness that have characterized the Obama administration. One story, “Barack Obama and the Politics of Lies,” is from the Washington Examiner and it ought to give anyone, Democrat or Republican, pause. Citing the president’s recent “victory dance” over the (distinctly suspect) statistic that eight million people have signed up for Obamacare, the Examiner noted with some asperity that “a president who is viewed by most Americans as less than honest [2] has no business crowing about a victory that remains anything but obvious.” Moreover, the Examiner continued, the president “certainly should not heap insults on people who for four years have profoundly disagreed with him on the wisdom of Obamacare”: [3]

To put this as “less than honest” is to be charitable. What Fox News found in its most recent public opinion survey [4] was that 61 percent of Americans believe Obama “lies” about important public issues either “most of the time” or “some of the time.” No other president in living memory has conducted himself in a manner that warranted even asking if such a description was appropriate.

“No other President in living memory,” indeed. I suspect that the flapping sound that’s emanating in ever more exigent waves from the corridors of power in and around the richest spot in the country — viz Washington, D.C. — is the sound of chickens flying home to roost. The Examiner notes that the president’s defenders have gone into attack mode about that Fox News survey. But consider this:

It was the president, not Fox News, who repeatedly and knowingly misled the American people with two infamous Obamacare lies: “You can keep your health insurance if you like it. Period. You can keep your doctor. Period.” For better or worse, Obama will forever be known as the president who chose repeatedly to propagate two falsehoods. Those two lies were profoundly significant because they were designed to hide the truth about how Obamacare would affect the daily lives and health of hundreds of millions of Americans.

And that, it almost goes without saying, is the very tip of the proverbial iceberg. Barack Obama has been lying — lying, not “mis-stating,” not somehow getting it wrong because he was misinformed, ill-advised, out to lunch — no, he has been lying to the American public since 2009. Here is a little recap of 36 times [5] he promised that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan, period.” It’s less than 3 minutes long. Watch it a couple of times. Then ask yourself — especially if you voted for Barack Obama — ask yourself, was he telling the truth?

Attorney General Eric Holder announced today that dozens of lawyers will be reassigned to the Justice Department’s pardon office in anticipation of a surge of applications from drug offenders for reductions in their sentences — applications the Obama administration has signaled it would look upon favorably. This exercise is another transparent usurpation of legislative power by the president. The pardon power is just the camouflage for it.

The pardon power exists so that the president can act in individual cases to correct excesses and injustices. It is not supposed to be a vehicle by which presidents rewrite congressional statutes that they disagree with philosophically (just as “prosecutorial discretion,” another doctrine the Obama administration has abused, is not supposed to be a vehicle by which the president substitutes his policies for duly enacted federal law).

The Obama administration is philosophically opposed to mandatory minimums in the federal penal law, especially in the narcotics area. The Justice Department is filled with racialist ideologues and pro-criminal rights ideologues (they tend to be the same people) who have long contended that the drug laws are racist. This is another of those absurd arguments that finds racism based on unintended consequences rather than racist designs.

The mandatory minimums for crack (“cocaine base”) crimes are more severe than for powder cocaine (which was called “cocaine hydrochloride” back when I was a federal prosecutor). Many crack distributors are black and Hispanic, while many powder cocaine distributors are white — although there are plenty of whites in the former category and minority dealers in the latter. Thus, it is contended, the mandatory minimums are racist in effect.

It has been argued for decades that this disparity is unjust. As a matter of racism, this claim is frivolous. As a matter of logic, it is not: crack is rightly punished more severely because it is more addictive and ruinous. For a long time, though, crack was punished at a 100:1 ratio to powder coke (e.g., the 10-year mandatory minimum kicked in at 5,000 grams, or 5 kilos, of powder coke but only 50 grams of crack). It is perfectly constitutional for Congress to do this, but it is not sensible — crack may be worse than powder coke, but not a hundred times worse.

Solar’s getting cheaper, but it can never be a big reducer of carbon emissions.

Solar energy can solve global warming. That’s what Paul Krugman claims in his April 18 column in the New York Times, “Salvation Gets Cheap.”

Krugman extolled “the incredible recent decline in the cost of renewable energy, solar power in particular.” He used to dismiss the claim that renewable energy would be a major source of global energy “as hippie-dippy wishful thinking.” But now, he says, thanks to the falling price of renewable energy, the process of decarbonization can be accelerated and “drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are now within fairly easy reach.”

Solar is getting cheaper. And solar capacity is growing rapidly. But Krugman is still wrong. Solar won’t result in “drastic cuts” in greenhouse-gas emissions for two simple reasons: scale and cost.

Before going further, let me be clear: I’m bullish on solar. I’ve invested in solar. A decade ago, I paid to have 3,200 watts of solar panels installed on my roof. Why? Simple: I got a big subsidy. Austin Energy paid two-thirds of the cost of my $23,000 system, and those panels now provide about 30 percent of the electricity my family and I consume.

I will also gladly stipulate that Krugman is right about the plummeting cost of solar. In 1980, the average global cost of a solar photovoltaic module (which converts sunlight into electricity) was about $23 per watt. Today, it’s less than $1 per watt. Those falling costs are helping accelerate solar deployment. Between 2007 and 2012, according to BP, global solar capacity grew ten-fold and now stands at about 100,000 megawatts.

But that torrid growth doesn’t spell the end of hydrocarbons. Even if we forget the incurable intermittency of solar energy — which requires grid operators to have stand-by conventional generation capacity (from natural gas, coal, or nuclear) available for periods when the sun isn’t shining — the reason why cheaper solar panels won’t lead to major cuts in global carbon dioxide emissions is that solar’s contribution remains infinitesimally small.

Why do our well-meaning elites so often worry about humanity in the abstract rather than the real effects of their cosmic ideologies on the majority? The dream of universal health coverage trumped the nightmare of millions of lives disrupted by the implementation of it. Noble lies, with emphatics like “Period!” were necessary to sell something that would hurt precisely those who were told that this was going to be good for them. A myriad of green mandates has led to California’s having the highest-priced gasoline and electricity in the continental United States, a fact that delights utopians in San Francisco and in the long run might help the rest of us, butrace right now ensures that the poor of the state’s vast, hot interior can scarcely afford to cool their homes or drive to work. Fresno on August 1, after all, is a bit warmer than Berkeley or Menlo Park.

In a word, liberal ideology so often proves more important than people. Noble theories about saving humanity offer exemption from worry about the immediate consequences for individual humans. In a personal sense, those who embrace progressive ideas expect to be excused from the ramifications of their schemes. For the elite who send their kids to prep schools and private academies, public charter schools for the poor are bad, given that they undermine the dream of progressive, union-run education that has turned into a nightmare for those forced to enroll in it.

Recently, pundit Margaret Carlson wrote an op-ed lamenting the fall of Lois Lerner, as if her decline were due to a McCarthyesque hit. But Lerner staged her own dishonest disclosure of impropriety. She set up a phony, preplanned question that might offer her a platform to contextualize her unethical behavior. Despite her protestations that the IRS’s violations all emanated from a rogue office in Ohio, Lerner or her colleagues were in contact with Democratic enablers at the House Oversight Committee and the Department of Justice to find ways to thwart conservative tax-exempt organizations before the 2012 election.

Lerner has sought to obfuscate her improper role at the IRS, pled the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination, and done a great deal of damage to the American notion that government agencies, especially in election years, must remain impartial. It is hard to think of anything that she has testified about that has proved accurate. In addition, Lerner caused hundreds of legitimate members of tax-exempt organizations misery by violating the rules of her own agency. In short, there is no scandal victim less sympathetic than the now-well-retired Lois Lerner, even if the damage she did to innocent others does not register on the liberal scale of sympathy. Apparently, since her politics of wishing to shut down right-wing groups is correct, her morality need not be. Had Carlson been the director of a liberal green group, and had it been denied tax-exempt status by a high-ranking conservative IRS bureaucrat right before the reelection of George W. Bush, and had that functionary been exposed as an ideologue who harmed the reputation of the IRS and took the Fifth Amendment, I doubt that Carlson would now be writing to express worry over his mounting legal fees.

Recently, Senator Elizabeth Warren was quoted to the effect that she was upset when critics pounced on her erroneous claim that she was Native American and asserted that she had used that supposed background to enhance her career. Oddly, Warren thought her attackers were off base while she was stoically above the fray. Indeed, she doubled down with the absurd postmodern claim, “I never questioned my family’s stories or asked my parents for proof or documentation. What kid would? . . . Knowing who you are is one thing, and proving who you are is another.”

You think?