Happy 4th of July!

Christopher Hitchens Has Cancer

It's esophageal cancer.   Hotair hunted down the info in the Merek handbook, and it shows survival rates don't look so hot:

Because esophageal cancer usually is not diagnosed until the disease has spread, the death rate is high. Fewer than 5% of people survive more than 5 years. Many die within a year of noticing the first symptoms. Because nearly all cases of esophageal cancer are fatal, the doctor’s main objective is to control symptoms, especially pain and the inability to swallow, which can be very frightening to the person and loved ones (see Death and Dying: Difficulty Swallowing).

Truly saddening news. Hitchens has a towering intellect, and personality to match.  I thoroughly enjoying reading his articles and watching his debates.  I sincerely hope he beats the odds. Here's a CNN video from last year where he displays his characteristic flair, where he defends free speech during the Danish Mohammad cartoon controversy.

Where's My Recovery?

Well there's not much economic good news for the Obama administration. The economic recovery seems to be fizzling. As the AP notes:  

Unemployment claims are up, home sales are plunging without government incentives and manufacturing growth is slowing.

No surprise there. As this WSJ oped points out, the market hates uncertainty. And with an exploding deficit, the expectation that Obamacare will cost much more than projected, the anticipation of tax hikes to deal with our entitlement binge, and the dangling of cap and tax legislation, there's much to be uncertain about if you are a small business owner.  And as such, consumer confidence has cratered.

The House, feeling the voter ire on government spending in the polls, has refused to pass a budget this year. Richard Rahn, economist and senior fellow at Cato, vents from the Washington Times on this:

"Irresponsible" refers to Congress and the Obama administration - and here's why. For thousands of years, businesses, organizations, governments and even individuals have relied on a basic tool to make sure they do not spend or borrow more than they can service - it is called a budget. Yet, for the first time since 1974, when the current rules were put into effect, the U.S. House of Representatives does not intend to pass a budget resolution. The main purpose of the budget resolution is to set discretionary spending caps for the coming fiscal year.

Without a budget resolution, members of Congress are, in essence, able to spend as much money as they wish, subject only to the limitation of getting half plus one of the other members to go along with the spending proposal. The budget procedure was put in place to make sure members of Congress would not spend money as irresponsibly as many teenagers might if they were given unlimited credit cards. If teenagers were in charge of the federal budget, we might end up with a $1.5 trillion deficit this year. Ah, but we are going to have a $1.5 trillion deficit this year - and who's in charge?

In the face of the unprecedented congressional spending binge, President Obama has been asking Congress to spend even more. Not content with actively promoting the eventual bankruptcy of the United States, Mr. Obama is urging foreign leaders also to increase their government spending - which is truly bizarre. Look at the facts. All of the major European countries have been increasing government spending and deficits at unsustainable rates. The talk for the past couple of months has been about which countries would follow Greece in going over the financial cliff. Responsible economists, financial leaders and, most important, the markets have been telling European leaders they must cut government spending. Over the past couple of weeks, a number of those leaders have responsibly and courageously come forth with real spending-reduction programs. Britain's new government, despite being a coalition government, has proposed a 25 percent cut in most government departments. Can you imagine the howls from Congress and the U.S. news media if a U.S. president proposed even a 5 percent cut, though a far larger one is needed?

Now that legislation extending unemployment benefits has failed to pass in the Senate, MaxedoutMama comments on the absurdity that passes for our politics:

Last but not quite least, the fruits of the housing tax credit (due to be extended by your witless Cr_tt_r any day now) are worth looking at. We paid a great deal to book a lot sales far more quickly than otherwise, but anyone who looks at the pending home sales report is going to realize that it was a very expensive (and elitist) exercise in "Let's Pretend". Nationally SA sales dropped 30% on the month and 15.9% on the year. The more money we spend to try to prop up home sales the worse it gets. We might as well quit and take our licking now.

The irony and the tragedy of yanking extended unemployment benefits with unemployment around 10% while giving thousand of dollars a pop to people who were either going to buy anyway or really can't afford to buy and will most likely default is beyond belief.

One of the reasons the average person doesn't want to hear "stimulus" any more is because stimulus has been very badly spent. The housing tax credit in particular is an exercise in witless, very expensive legislation. The results are as predictable as the results of cutting off benefits to unemployed.

I am beginning to feel like I got drunk and woke up in a S&M club. I want out. [emphasis added].

All I can say to that is, Amen.

Sunday Reflections

Aurora Borealis above Bear Lake,  Eileson Air Force Base, Alaska

United States Air Force photo by Senior Airman Joshua Strang

Regulating Economic Inactivity

In earlier posts, I discussed the problematic individual mandate with Obamacare. In a recent column, George Will illustrates the logical extension of that mandate if it's ruled constitutional.  He poses these questions to Elena Kagan for her Supreme Court confirmation:

So, instead answer this harmless hypothetical: If Congress decides interstate commerce is substantially affected by the costs of obesity, may Congress require obese people to purchase participation in programs such as Weight Watchers? If not, why not?

• The government having decided that Chrysler's survival is an urgent national necessity, could it decide Cash for Clunkers is too indirect a subsidy and instead mandate that people buy Chrysler products?

• If Congress concludes that ignorance has a substantial impact on interstate commerce, can it constitutionally require students to do three hours of homework nightly? If not, why not?

• Can you name a human endeavor that Congress cannot regulate on the pretense that the endeavor affects interstate commerce? If courts reflexively defer to that congressional pretense, in what sense do we have limited government?

 As stated earlier, the individual mandate changes the social contract between the individual and the government. If the government can regulate economic inactivity, there's nothing they can't regulate.

Can Athesists Be Moral?

The answer is yes, non-believers can act morally. However, Assistant Village Idiot points out that the morality of hard-core atheistic-Darwinists is not grounded in any foundation since according to this view, human beings exist due to accidental and fortuitous circumstances. Thus, our morality is a by-product of our imperative to survive:

Do you begin to see why the nonbeliever’s insistence that they can be just as moral as the next guy is true, but it is a truth with no value? It helps the group to survive, but really, why should we care? It helps us to survive individually, but why should we care about that, either? It’s an opposable thumb, the loss of a tail, a purple flower. ..

This morality protects its young, but what would be the objection the morality which ate its young? By habit and training that feels very wrong to us, and nonbelievers are as quick as anyone to say it is simply wrong. They don’t do those things, and it is moral that they don’t. They can avoid those things as well as believers.

Perhaps this whole picture is correct, and all of morality simply a dorsal fin. But if so, then everything is permitted, just as Dostoevsky said. That the current crop of nonbelievers don’t eat their children should be a matter of great rejoicing. But what if next year’s crop slips into some other odd branch of this survival tool we call morality and develops post hoc reasoning why eating Junior is okay? It’s no good to even comment on whether that would be moral or immoral. Everything is permitted.

The Christian answer, as I have suggested, may be no truer than the others. It may be just one more variation of photosynthesis. I offer here no defense of that. Perhaps there is some other explanation outside of mankind – no, it would have to be outside of life itself – no wait, it would have to be outside of this accidental planet and even the accidental universe – that would make something in morality real, and true, and valuable. But absent any such, there isn’t anything that qualifies as morality – and there is simply no meaning beyond the masturbatory for a nonbeliever to give himself any credit for having one equal to the believer’s.

In other words, why is survival in and of itself of the group or individual of the most paramount value if there's no meaning to our existence in the universe? If we're just the sum of our parts, a bag of cells with no soul, why does maximizing survival for all individuals matter? What is the foundation to the non-believer's morality? The answer is there can be none; the logical extension of atheism eventually leads to the rationalization of taboo cultural restrictions.

The Aftermath of McChrystal

Obama hasn't done a clean sweep on the civilian side of the house, despite some astute foreign policy pundits calling for it.  Who in the administration is in charge of Afghanistan political policy? Is it Clinton? Holbrooke? Eikenberry? Jones?  Hard to say.  McClatchy just noted last week we have no long term political strategy in Afghanistan which in turn is hurting the military effort:

The failure to articulate what a post-American Afghanistan should look like and devise a political path for achieving it is a major obstacle to success for the U.S. military-led counter-insurgency campaign that's underway, these officials and experts said.

The result is "strategic confusion," said Ronald E. Neumann, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005-07.

 
Peter Feaver at Shadow Gov't has some perceptive observations on the implications of the replacing McChrystal with Petraus:

If President Obama's only problem was how to deal with a great fighter who cultivated a poor command climate and was careless in his media relations, then the problem is solved - and deftly so.

But operationally, I fear Obama's problems are greater and that the Petraeus-for-McChrystal swap is an insufficient step. Operationally, the problem is that McChrystal's intemperate statements about his colleagues were impolitic but accurate. [emphasis added.]  The occasion called for a more extensive housecleaning than Obama performed.  Obama punished the one guy caught on tape, not the others on the team that were underperforming.

Yes, Obama in his statement reaffirmed the importance of unity of effort.  Yes, Obama said he "won't tolerate division."  But so far as we know, nothing else was done to fix the other problems.  Petraeus may well prove a more deft and diplomatic bureaucratic operator than McChrystal, but Obama did not set him up for success with the clean sweep that was warranted.

And strategically, I worry that Obama has robbed Peter to pay Paul -- increased the risks in Iraq and Iran in order to reduce the risks in Afghanistan. As CENTCOM Commander, Petraeus was the senior military officer watching Iraq. Given the administration's rush to declare mission accomplished there, one might say that Petraeus was the only senior member of the Obama national security team who seemed to understand just how fragile was the hard-won progress in that critical country. Likewise, Petraeus' reputation probably bought us a non-trivial margin of credibility on the pressure track with Iran. Weakening the pressure track weakens our diplomatic leverage and hastens the day we will confront an Iranian nuclear weapon. Viewed this way, the appointment of Petraeus may be less important than the appointment of Petraeus' successor.

When Obama replaced McChrystal with Petraus, he announced his Afghan strategy would not change. His SecDef keeps saying the timetable is not a timetable, we delayed the Kandahar offensive, the Taliban are still refusing to negotiate, and Obama doesn't think his strategy needs adjustment, or that maybe he's not receiving the best advice from the civilians?  What a way to stay the course--until 2011.

Obama is more interested in transforming America domestically than in dealing with foreign policy.  He's perceives he's got plenty of "brights" on the civilian side of the house to handle that portfolio. He views Afghanistan as a problem to solve. One senses little moral imperative or conviction in why we should stay in Afghanistan. He seems to have no guiding principles on foreign policy, except that it shouldn't detract from his transformation projection. So it's not too much of a surprise our policy in Afghanistan is in trouble, particularly when one's adversaries senses the US President does not really feel invested in it.