Another brilliant post from Richard Fernandez, with an outstanding bit in the comments about the importance of religion and the dangers of materialism:

Like Voltaire and perhaps Pascal, I think it is always in a man’s personal interest to claim he is something more than an animal or the equivalent of a barrel of chemicals. There are enough forces out there trying to enslave and kill you without volunteering the proposition that we’re all just jumped up monkeys. You must at least allow for the remote possibility that we truly are sacred; and that not a sparrow falls to earth without a heavenly Father taking note. If a man won’t argue his cause, if a man can’t at least hope that his “individual act of love” will last or try to last forever, then nobody else will. Because sure as heck the bearded prophets of Marxism would like nothing better than to assign, or better yet tattoo a serial number on you with an expiration date and a recycling destination. I would almost say that to believe in God, or at least to allow for the possibility of His existence is the most fundamental act of rebellion possible. You defy the universe and certainly the State to extinguish you….

The most subversive sentences of the Declaration are all to do with the legitimacy of the pursuit of happiness; and the celebration of our dangerously impertinent desire to look up at the skies and call each star by its name.

There’s increasing puzzlement about Obama’s foreign policy.  A variety of voices are wondering what vision lies behind a series of seemingly inexplicable actions.  It’s beginning to dawn on people that, as Glenn Reynolds puts it, a replay of the Carter administration is the best case scenario.  For example:

I have suggested, in connection with President Obama’s dealings with Russia, that to call him a fool is to give him the benefit of the doubt. For Obama’s hat-in-hand approach to Russia assumes that the thuggish, autocratic, expansionist Russian regime is more sinned against than sinning in its relations with the U.S. If Obama believes this, he is anti-American; If he doesn’t believe this but elects to act as if it were so, then he is a fool.

Now, it may be starting to dawn on the more perceptive members of the MSM that portraying Obama as a fool — or, more kindly, as naive — puts him in the best plausible light. This desire to offer an innocent (in two senses of the word) explanation for Obama’s foreign policy may well explain today’s front page Washington Post story regarding the alleged origins of Obama’s approach to foreign policy.

Liberals are starting to notice that supporting Zelaya in Honduras, canceling missile defenses in Eastern Europe, treating Britain, France, and Germany with disrespect, and joining Islamic nations in advocating restrictions on free speech is, to put it mildly, doing absolutely nothing to advance the interests of the United States.

Here’s a hint.  He’s not seeking to advance the interests of the United States.

Add this to his long associations with Reverend Wright (recently taped advocating Marxism) and Bill Ayers, the Communist affiliations and attitudes of White House officials such as Van Jones and Anita Dunn, and the radicalism of his most frequent visitor, Andy Stern, head of the SEIU.  It isn’t hard to draw the conclusion around which Glenn Beck has been dancing for some time without actually stating:

PRESIDENT OBAMA IS A MARXIST.

This has been obvious to me since early in 2008.  The environs of academia he called home are overwhelmingly Marxist.  He wrote of his seeking out the most radical people he could find, and going to Marxist talks to soothe himself and ease his rage.  His “community organizer” (i.e., “radical troublemaker”) past, his fondness for Reverend Wright, his association with Ayers, his “blank slate” voting record, and his vacuous, cliche-riddled, but supposedly inspiring speeches all pointed to a radical in vague, mirrored clothing that would enable each person to look at Obama and see his own image reflected back.  Who wears a mirrored costume, but someone who needs to hide his true self?

William Voegeli compares California’s left-wing, high-tax/high-benefits model with Texas’s right-wing, moderate-tax/moderate-benefits model. People are leaving high-tax states for low-tax states:

One way to assess how Americans feel about the different tax and benefit packages the states offer is by examining internal U.S. migration patterns. Between April 1, 2000, and June 30, 2007, an average of 3,247 more people moved out of California than into it every week, according to the Census Bureau. Over the same period, Texas had a net weekly population increase of 1,544 as a result of people moving in from other states. During these years, more generally, 16 of the 17 states with the lowest tax levels had positive “net internal migration,” in the Census Bureau’s language, while 14 of the 17 states with the highest taxes had negative net internal migration.

Why are they leaving?  They aren’t getting their money’s worth.  Texas schools are now better than California’s; the average Texas student is two-and-a-half years ahead of the average California student.  Berkeley is still the finest public university in the country, but the University of Texas at Austin is in the top five.  Texas roads are better than California roads, and are also much less crowded.  The regulatory climate for business is much better in Texas.

John Hinderaker extends the point:

Texas, increasingly, is the economic and intellectual leader of the U.S. During the last 18 months before the current recession took hold, while the country as a whole was still creating jobs, more than half of those jobs were created in a single state: Texas.

The public sector unions have managed to use government revenues to enrich themselves without providing commensurate benefits for taxpayers.  Maybe a high-tax/high-benefit model can succeed—but only if institutional structures limit public employees’ success at rent-seeking.

Observed at First Presbyterian Church this morning:

Don’t miss Richard Fernandez’s brilliant reflections on truth, civilization, and perception:

In recent years management literature has talked extensively about the “servitization of the products” The modern economy no longer produces “things”. It produces intangibles called services. Insurance, banking, government, tourism, retail, education, social services, franchising, news media, hospitality, consulting, law, health care, environmental services, real estate and personal services now dominate the activity of the Western world. We produce satisfaction. Perhaps the key difference between an economy based on things relative to that based on services is that the “truth” of things is self-evident while the value of services is often based on perception. Perception is often the proxy for value in a service economy. Indeed it often comprises the value itself, at least in the entertainment industry and possibly in news. It immediately follows that in a huge market for intangibles where “children’s programs”, sporting events, entertainment, academic degrees, derivatives, mortgages, ‘health care’, news and environmental indulgences are traded for vast sums telling the unflattering truth can be extremely costly. Stay away from the truth unless you absolutely positively have to.

There’s a temptation to think that perception is everything; that value is the same as perceptions of value; and that the people who create perceptions are thereby creating value.  These propositions are especially attractive to those in advertising, marketing, entertainment, news, politics, and other fields in which perception looms large and objective sources of value are in dispute.  Perception is extraordinarily powerful.  But it isn’t everything.  No ad campaign could convince people that Microsoft Vista was an excellent product.

The problem is that we can never be wholly free of the truth.

The words “and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” are often used in a moral sense. But they can be used in the entirely secular meaning of the need to be free of bad information. Bad information destroys. We need to be free of bad information. Perhaps the underlying reason for the large and seemingly growing crisis in the Western World is that its truth reserves — the percentage of its information store that actually corresponds to reality — have fallen below a critical level and its institutions are attempting to cover the deficit by frantically printing more lies. Maybe the reason why finance, politics, news, real estate and environmental services are in dire such straits is that they among the service industries have the biggest portfolio of defective information. And it’s killing them. While there may be a tendency in the service economy to increase the amount of spin for short term gain in the long run survival depends on its minimization. We have to know where we are, if we are to avoid getting lost.

This is what lies behind the collapse of the mainstream media, and it can’t be solved by any marketing campaign.  Nor is it an inevitable consequence of technological changes.  There’s simply too much bad information.  Those who devote much time to the mainstream media—the involved, responsible, “informed” liberals who watch PBS and CNN and read The New York Times—are drowning in a sea of falsehood.  Those who don’t are often astounded at how intelligent people can reach conclusions that so plainly violate common sense.  But accept the premise that the media communicate the central truths and those conclusions follow.  What is surprising is that people apply modus ponens rather than the modus tollens.  Faced with the absurd consequences, why not abandon the premise?  The divergence from common sense is actually part of the attraction.  It’s what lends the air of sophistication; it’s the ground for feelings of superiority.

What drives that sense is the same reason behind the apparent wholesomeness of grassroots political movements and untutored pundits like Joe the Plumber in contrast to the artificiality of the MSM. The outsiders have not yet been firewalled from reality in the way that the mandarins of the BBC and the politicians in Washington have been. The Tea Party world is still that of genuinely funny things — not the sour mordancy of Letterman; it is still one of basic fears and simple joys, of aching feet and a welcome ice-cream soda at the end of the day. Some people spend their whole lives trying to get away from it; to forget the memory of people sitting around a sunny porch eating peanuts, to try with various expensive unguents to wash the smell of new-mown grass and two stroke gasoline fumes from their hair. That is what “success” all too often means in certain circles.

As often happens, Fernandez gets to the heart of the matter in the comments:

I think the key idea behind civilization, and indeed all progress, is that there is something out there that represents the truth. It exists independently of us. We cannot simply make it up. Once that is grasped, all else is detail….

Although I may be stretching meanings, I think the most critical part of political theory lies in acknowledging that human institutions are not the ultimate sources of authority. They live within the world of the unread book.

This is a deep philosophical insight, I think.  A proper political theory rests on realism, the thesis that there are truths that are truly “out there,” existing independently of us, no matter what we think or want.  Give that up, as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and their postmodern progeny have done, and everything is permitted; all roads lead to tyranny.

Let’s say you have a good idea for serving new customers, or old customers more effectively.  In a private setting, that’s great.  You benefit your customers, and you make money doing it.  There’s every incentive to develop your idea and implement it.

In a government setting, however, that’s not true at all.  Customers don’t make you money; they cost you money.  You have no incentive at all to serve new customers.  And you have an incentive to serve existing customers more effectively only to the extent that doing so saves you time, effort, or money.  If doing so costs you money, you have an incentive not to do it, even if the value created for your customer far outstrips the cost.

That’s why my university, for example, does virtually nothing to serve adults in its community who would love to take additional classes and pursue additional degrees; why it makes it difficult, if not impossible, to be a part-time student; and why new ideas are evaluated solely on the basis of padding CVs or bringing in private donations.  We lose money on every student.  There’s no incentive to bring in more of them.

What will this mean for government-run health care?  There will be incentives to cut costs, but not to improve services, and not to reach additional people.  The system will lose money on every customer.  So, there will be incentives not to serve customers—that is, not to treat patients.  That’s you.

The truth is out.  The British Labour party has intentionally permitted—indeed, encouraged—very high levels of immigration to ensure itself a permanent electoral majority and to undermine the “British” character of British society.  Melanie Phillips:

So now the cat is well and truly out of the bag. For years, as the number of immigrants to Britain shot up apparently uncontrollably, the question was how exactly this had happened.

Was it through a fit of absent-mindedness or gross incompetence? Or was it not inadvertent at all, but deliberate?

The latter explanation seemed just too outrageous. After all, a deliberate policy of mass immigration would have amounted to nothing less than an attempt to change the very make-up of this country without telling the electorate.

There could not have been a more grave abuse of the entire democratic process. Now, however, we learn that this is exactly what did happen. The Labour government has been engaged upon a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage….

It was therefore a politically motivated attempt by ministers to transform the fundamental make-up and identity of this country. It was done to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a common history, religion, law, language and traditions.

It was done to destroy for ever what it means to be culturally British and to put another ‘multicultural’ identity in its place. And it was done without telling or asking the British people whether they wanted their country and their culture to be transformed in this way.

Thomas Sowell notes that the Obama administration seems intent on “dismantling America.”  There are many forms of national cultural sabotage, which is not solely a British phenomenon.

First President Obama gives up missile defenses in Poland the Czech Republic in exchange for. . . well, evidently, nothing.  Now, it turns out he declined to press Iran’s leadership on its phony election because he had a deal in the works—a deal on which he’s now been double-crossed.  What ever possessed him to think that he would engage in smarter diplomacy than the Bush administration?  Why, for that matter, did anyone believe him?  The Illinois state legislature is not known for producing people skilled in foreign diplomacy.

Then again, I’m not convinced that the President is as naive as these incidents make him appear.  There’s another possibility: that he’s accomplished exactly what he wanted, namely, shifting power away from the United States and its allies and toward Russia and Iran.  He gives every appearance of wanting a weaker United States.

Okay, enough already.  You can go around carrying pictures of Chairman Mao; you can offer to help establish houses of underage prostitution; you can make up quotations and attribute them to Rush Limbaugh; but when you make up quotations and attribute them to Aristotle, I get mad.  Aristotle is supposed to have said,

If we believe men have any personal rights at all, then they must have an absolute moral right to such a measure of good health as society can provide.

Now it’s obvious that he said no such thing.  No one had any concept of rights until the seventeenth century, much less personal rights, which would have to contrast with collective rights, an incoherent invention of the nineteenth century.  There’s no word in ancient Greek that would be appropriately translated right.  And what’s this absolute?  That too is anachronistic.  Society providing health, or anything else, for that matter?  That too is completely foreign to Aristotle.

This is not to say, however, that Aristotle said nothing relevant to evaluating Obamacare.  He would plainly have been appalled at the idea:

Further, private education has an advantage over public, as private medical treatment has; for while in general rest and abstinence from food are good for a man in a fever, for a particular man they may not be; and a boxer does not prescribe the same style of fighting to all his pupils.  It would seem, then, that the detail is worked out with more precision if the control is private; for each person is more likely to get what suits his case. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, X, 9)

Aristotle here gives voice to one of the classic objections to government regulation and provision of services of all kinds.  Government of necessity applies universal rules, which frequently produce the wrong results in individual cases—even if, as is all too often not the case, they are the best possible universal rules one could adopt.

Here’s a story that came out more than two weeks ago but has received little attention.  The data underlying the global warming hypothesis turns out to have been cooked.  Richard Fernandez explains:

The most amazing part of this story from my point of view was the way in which a dogged Canadian mathematician, acting practically alone with the help of his trusty readers, forced the establishment back step by step to explain where the conclusions upon which a trillion dollar public policy came from and insisted on reproducing the results. If ever there was a tale of triumph over dauntless odds — almost to the point of comparing it to breaking the bank  — this is it.

Steve McIntyre is the Canadian mathematician who spent years in quest of the data underlying the famous “hockey stick” graph.  Finally, after the Royal Society joined him in the quest, he got access to the data.  It turns out the global warming graph that led to Al Gore’s Nobel Prize, the cap-and-trade bill, and widespread hysteria is based on analysis of the rings of twelve trees.  Twelve!  Wait—it gets worse.  Those twelve were cherry-picked from a group of 252 to yield the conclusion that the past century has been the warmest on record.  Analyzing the full set of data doesn’t yield that conclusion at all.

From this we know that the Yamal data set uses just 12 trees from a larger set to produce its dramatic recent trend. Yet many more were cored, and a larger data set (of 34) from the vicinity shows no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages.

In all there are 252 cores in the CRU Yamal data set, of which ten were alive 1990. All 12 cores selected show strong growth since the mid-19th century. The implication is clear: the dozen were cherry-picked.

Bishop Hill has the full narrative.  You have to read it to believe it.  Historians of science are going to have a field day, maybe sooner than later, since this year’s unseasonably chilly temperatures are puncturing the global warming myth day by day.  (See, for example, John Hinderaker: “It is quite remarkable that liberals continue to sell their global warming/government takeover program, when any damn fool can see that the globe isn’t warming.”)