Tag: trainwreck

Mailvox: the return of Uber Dawks

Apparently not content with demonstrating his complete ignorance of American history and PZ Myers’s confirmed cowardice, Uber Dawks has returned as part of his quixotic crusade to demonstrate that militant atheists are every bit as smart and educated as they are socially adept and sane.

After mockingly laughing my way through the two days worth of posts to your site that were inspired by my email, I’ve come to the conclusion that you and your “ilk” may be even more delusional than I could have ever imagined. When they discuss you at Pharyngula, I would think to myself that no one could be that obtuse, delusional and falsely magnanimous. Turns out that you are all that and more.

PZ afraid to debate you? Why should he debate delusional fundies like you? You wanna know why he doesn’t have to? Courtier’s reply. All you Christards have to contribute is philosophical flatulation about your phony baloney sky daddy. You have no objective proof of god’s existence at all. I challenge anyone on your site to give me one thing — one tiny piece of objective evidence for god that cannot be better and more fully explained by natural science.

Oh, and all your posters whining about the Christards label…sorry for being honest with you, but you are mentally handicapped if you actually believe that some bearded Jew (who probably didn’t even actually exist) came back from the dead 2000 years ago. So I called you a bad name, boo-hoo. You use negative labels for atheists all the time on your site.

Are you just not smart enough to see your hypocrisy? For all the self-promoting about your IQ, you could not on your best day come up with a universal neutralizer and falsifier for atheism the way Myers has done for theism with his Courtier’s Reply. That’s why conservative sky bully worshippers like you and philosophical liars like William Layne Craig aren’t fit to be in the same conversation with PZ Myers or Richard Dawkins.

In reading the responses from those two other atheists (assuming those emails were real, which I doubt) I have only one thing to say to them. Grow some balls. Stop bowing to the tyranny of the religious majority. You Christians and Muslims are destroying this world with your religious nonsense and killing everyone else in the process. Sam Harris wrote about conversational intolerance and possible retributive violence against dangerous religious groups, and what he says is true. Atheists need to speak out and show that we will no longer tolerate your fairy tales and your killing in the name of them. All atheists need to join together and drag all of you kicking and screaming from the Dark Ages into the modern secular age, whether you like it or not.

Fact is this: Atheists are winning. Look at Denmark or France or the UK. Your sky fairy is about to go bye-bye.

That idiotic cartoon you posted shows that you are as clueless about atheists as you are science. Atheists do not look like that at all. George Clooney, Bill Maher, Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters are all atheists. Brad Pitt is functionally atheist. Joss Whedon is a feminist and an atheist and has stated that knowing there is no god is “a very important thing for you to learn.”

These guys are famous, they get women and are nothing like that idiotic cartoon. What should I expect though, Mariano from TrueFreeThinker is nearly as bad as you are. He spends his time tossing philosophical chum into the water to be decimated by atheist piranha.

The problem is that you people with your god-goggles on can’t see reality. This is why Darwinian Evolution deniers, Global Warming deniers and Christian fundies go hand in hand. All of you are in the same boat and most of you are the same guy.

Best of luck. When you die, you pass into nonexistence. That’s it. Get over your fairy tales now and do something worthwhile like help save the environment.

Let’s count the most conventional signs of atheist cluelessness:

1. Thinks The Courtier’s Reply is meaningful – check!
2. Thinks the Dark Ages existed – check!
3. Doesn’t know what “evidence” is – check!
4. Science fetish – check!
5. Thinks religion is a serious global threat – check!
6. Thinks atheists are winning in Europe – check!

I have to say that the appeal to Brad Pitt and Joss Whedon is a new one on me. Wow! I will really have to rethink all of my most fundamental conclusions about life, the universe and everything. What use is Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas when you’ve got Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters!

And since he brought it up….

Mailvox: homo inedicabilis

Although I am inclined to make heavy use of statistics-based probability in observing human behavior and find that it is a very useful tool in in explaining and predicting individual behavior, I never, ever forget that probability is not certainty and that even a powerful 97% statistical probability means that you can count on rolling boxcars sooner or later. Here are two examples of why I am always careful to distinguish between atheists who merely happen to lack god belief and militant/New atheists who can be expected to exhibit a predictable range of social disfunctionality and political ideology in addition to overt hostility towards that which they claim to be nonexistent.

M writes:

I love your blog. It really keeps me thinking every day. One of the most important things you have done for me is that, while not converting me from atheism, you have taught me that religious people can be just as skeptical and rational, if not more so (probably more so), than atheists. You have also really let me realize how irrational most atheists are. While I already knew most of the flaws, your retorts to their arguments are just so witty, concise, and overall entertaining…. I am a skeptic. I am skeptical of just about everything, from scientific claims to mystical claims to political claims. It’s no surprise that I would find myself loving the skeptics community, a world-wide network of people who embrace rational and critical thinking. Well, or so they claim.

Being a skeptic, I really wanted to go to the Amaz!ng Meeting 8 this weekend in Las Vegas. I forgot something, though. The skeptical community heavily overlaps with the new atheist movement, and they all seem to be, as you call them, “science fetishists”. There’s never enough skepticism about political issues. In fact, skeptics who don’t believe in global warming are quick to be called “climate change denialists.” I myself stay in the camp of “I don’t know, and I doubt you actually do either” but I don’t even say that, because I don’t want to deal with people about it.

It’s obvious that many of these people are irrational, even though they claim to embrace rational thinking. But what can we expect from a bunch of people who think Richard Dawkins has intelligent things to say? I love science. I love skepticism. I also love actually applying my rational thinking to the two. Thank you for writing a blog that actually uses critical thinking. I am glad that while I find one community is lacking, there is another community out there that has the right mindset.

Another atheist, S, writes in response to a previous atheist’s email:

I’m a big fan of your blog and although I don’t agree with everything you write, I think you’ve almost always got something interesting to say. I read your post regarding the comments by one “UberDawks”, and I have to say, I’m surprised that you were so easy on him. (I refer to Rule 1 of the blog- I thought that, given the guy’s total lack of reason or civility, you’d be a lot harsher, though the cartoon was an interesting touch.)

As an atheist, I have to say, I’m amazed at just how bad his “reasoning” really is. Unlike most atheists I find the notion of anthropogenic global warming to be deeply suspect, and I was not particularly surprised to find that the inquiries into Mann and Jones cleared the scientists involved of wrongdoing- despite clear evidence that both ignored FOI requests, deleted and manipulated data, and exercised academic privilege to quash dissenting views. One would think that any reasonably literate atheist would at least be able to read those CRU emails.

As for his comments about the Founding Fathers- I think of myself as a libertarian, and I’ve often wondered myself about the religious views of some of the Founders, but I’ve never doubted that the men who built this nation were for the most part Christian in their outlook. It seems to me as though UberDawks has never even read the Declaration- the document makes clear references to Divine Providence and “the Supreme Judge of the Universe” right there in the text. And to ignore the role that Christian theology played in creating the Constitution is to ignore all of the Constitution’s understanding, clearly articulated in the text, of Man’s fallen nature and of the need to protect free men from the depredations of over-powerful governments and less-than-moral men. In other words, one would have to ignore the very reason the Constitution was created in the first place. That’s precisely the kind of leap of faith that atheists are supposed to be above making.

Overall I find UberDawks and his ilk to be mildly worrying. It’s no wonder that atheists can’t be trusted with power- if his email to you is representative of the level of thinking that goes on within the atheist community, secular nations with atheist or humanist leadership are in really big trouble. I also think that the peculiar atheist faith in man-made global warming exists primarily to replace the human need for some kind of faith in something. That still doesn’t make it a good idea; not all faiths are productive, and that particular one is downright absurd (and for once, it’s possible to show this scientifically).

S is correct to be worried about the more rabid species of atheist; their science fetishism and political utopianism is every bit as dangerous to more reasonable atheists and agnostics as they are to Christians and other theists. Still, I didn’t really see any need to kick UberDawk’s teeth in despite his incivility since he was clearly just a drive-by critic and the unreason and ignorance revealed in his email tended to render it self-refuting. One thing that people like him who wrongly perceive me as being intrinsically “anti-atheist” fail to understand is the significance of the difference between one’s religion and one’s political ideology. While they are usually related, they are seldom identical. My religious faith certainly colors my ideology, which is why I describe myself as a Christian libertarian, but the fact remains that I would vastly prefer atheist libertarians with realistic views of human corruptibility in positions of political leadership to both Christian progressives attempting to bring about Heaven on Earth and Christian conservatives seeking to impose Biblical morality through legislative fiat.

Of course, in addition to being imperfectly predictable, Most People Are Idiots, as demonstrated by this commenter at the New York Times. If this isn’t enough to cure you of an instinctive democracy fetish, nothing will.

“I am dismayed that commentators and inquisitors like Chris Matthews let their “guests” get away with the lie that “small businesses, not government, creates jobs.” I can’t believe that these troglodytes get away with pushing such a patently false proposition. As you may guess, I’m a government employee, and my money spends just as well as a window clerk at McDonalds. Spending is spending; buying is buying. I eat food, buy housing and clothing, and pay my utility bills just like everyone else. So why doesn’t keeping my job count just as much as me opening a small business? Let’s stop the lying.”

Yes, let’s absolutely stop all this lying and simply have government hire everyone who is out of work to do… something. After all, since government creates jobs just like small businesses, then there is no reason for anyone to be unemployed ever again! Mises wept.

Cue Derbyshire

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the next revolution:

As grills across America fire up this weekend some Americans may want to crack open a history book instead of a cold beer. A Marist poll finds that 26 percent of Americans dont know whom the United States declared its independence from.

In fairness, there’s not much reason an immigrant from Honduras, Egypt, or Somalia should either know or care about who declared what regarding whom. And one can’t reasonably expect natural-born Americans to have time to learn anything about the Revolution of 1776 in only 12 years of public school when there is so much to learn about Sacajawea, Sojourner Truth, the Mayans, and all the other important figures of history who made America what it is today.

Ignorant and slackminded

I was not at all impressed by the lunatic defense of economic credentialism by an economist employed by the very institution that is most responsible for the incoming Great Depression 2.0. But then I read this astonishingly ignorant appeal to morality by Fred Clark and I had to admit that Kartik Athreya may have had a point in insisting that at least some bloggers shouldn’t write about economic matters:

I’m not an economist, but we’ve got five applicants for every single job opening. If you tell me that the best response to that situation is to lay off hundreds of thousands of teachers, I will not accept that this means that you’re smarter and more expert than I am. I will instead conclude — regardless of your prestige or position or years of study — that you’re a moral imbecile. And knowing what I know about your inability to make moral judgments I will have no reason to trust you to make complicated macroeconomic ones.

No, Fred, it’s perfectly clear that you’re not an economist and you don’t know a damn thing about economics. I’ve read a lot of nonsense since the credit crunch began in the summer of 2008, most of it written by economists, but this is remarkably stupid even by those standards. There is simply no defense for either the infantile moral posturing or the spectacular ignorance revealed by it. The misplaced Keynesian faith in animal spirits notwithstanding, economics is not magic. It is complicated, yes, and there are a few special exceptions to the law of supply and demand, but that law is not significantly more flexible than the laws of physics. What the clueless Clark doesn’t recognize is that the federal government has massively and permanently distorted the signals of the labor market for a long period of time, leading to an incredible malinvestment of human capital into various industries, including the education industry. Now that the artificially extended limits of demand have been reached in that and many other industries, the education bubble is in the process of popping precisely as Austrian theory predicts, leaving hundreds of thousands of teachers, (or more accurately, hundreds of thousands of non-teaching admininstrative bureaucrats employed by the school districts), whose labor is no longer necessary or affordable at their current rates by deeply indebted communities.

Morality has nothing to do with the correct conclusion that when a glass is already full, you cannot pour more water into it. It’s simply an observable matter of fact. And if a full glass happens to be shrinking, then water is going to have to come out of it. Taking exception to such basic logic does not make you a moral exemplar, rather, denying it makes you an intellectual imbecile. Based on the evidence here, logic also dictates that no economist, or even economically aware individual, need concern themselves with what Mr. Clark thinks of their moral judgments or anything else.

If Clark wishes to wax indignant over gross and destructive immorality, he should focus his ire on the Fed, on the banks, and on the politicians who constructed a fraudulent financial system that was mathematically certain to fail and inflict millions of job losses on teachers, real estate agents, government employees, Fortune 500 corporations, and small family businesses alike. The salient fact is not whether 9.7% unemployment is high enough or not, but that utilizing more government intervention to prevent that rate from rising higher is guaranteed to extend and exacerbate the trauma to the labor force.

The reason the economic contraction confounds so many political bloggers like Slacktivist regardless of their party allegiance is that the problem cannot possibly be characterized as a Democratic problem or a Republican problem. It is, instead, a fundamentally structural problem with the financial system that dates back to the establishment of the fourth U.S. central bank. The long run has arrived and it has rendered the conventional liberal vs conservative debate completely irrelevant. Ironically, the solution is to be found in the example set by a Democratic president, Andrew Jackson. If Democrats want to find an plausible answer, they need to look to their party roots, not their present ideology.

UPDATE: the comments are even better. This was my favorite: “If Krugman and DeLong are right (and Paul Krugman is always right) then short-term government borrowing and spending should be a high priority right now.”

Paul Krugman is always right? That’s an intriguing statement.

1. Paul Krugman recommended investing in real estate and stocks while making fun of gold investors in 2002.
2. Paul Krugman thought the Fed should inflate a housing bubble in 2002.
3. Paul Krugman declared a $600 billion stimulus plan was required in November 2008. In 2009, he complained that the Obama adminstration’s $787 billion stimulus plan was too small.
4. And he was a bit late in recognizing the obvious.

Worse than Katrina

I expected Obama to be worse than Bush in many ways. I did not, however, expect his administration’s response to a natural or environmental disaster to be even more incompetent than the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina:

Sixteen barges sat stationary today, although they were sucking up thousands of gallons of BP’s oil as recently as Tuesday. Workers in hazmat suits and gas masks pumped the oil out of the Louisiana waters and into steel tanks. It was a homegrown idea that seemed to be effective at collecting the thick gunk…. But the Coast Guard ordered the stoppage because of reasons that [Louisiana governor] Jindal found frustrating. The Coast Guard needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board, and then it had trouble contacting the people who built the barges.

Unbelievable. I am a confirmed skeptic – nay, utter cynic – regarding government competence, and yet no matter how pessimistic my view of federal government agencies, they always manage to fall short of even my lowest expectations. Keep this in mind the next time you find yourself thinking that more government regulation is capable of preventing or solving ANYTHING in a reasonable manner.

Doing nothing is to be vastly preferred to actively working to prevent others from fixing the problem. You have to feel sympathy for those poor state and local officials who have been waiting for two months for the federal agents to ride in and salvage the situation, only to discover that the cavalry is fighting on the side of the Indians.

Yes, it shows

PZ Myers provides an illuminating example of the careful logic and deep thought that goes into so much atheist reasoning:

A couple of years ago, I sat down one morning, bemused by yet another bit of empty apologetics from god’s sycophants, and banged out a short bit of amusement called The Courtier’s Reply. It got picked up everywhere, to my surprise. I mean, seriously, I have to confess that I whipped that out in 20 minutes, no edits or rewrites, just shazam, it’s done.

That’s certainly amusing, if not exactly surprising to anyone who has read it. As I have mentioned before, The Courtier’s Reply is a blitheringly stupid attempt to justify atheist ignorance of that which they are criticizing. In his recent post, PZ tries to claim otherwise, but the fact of the matter is that whatever PZ’s original purpose may have been, that purpose is not synonymous with either its logical consequences or how it is habitually utilized by atheists who refer to it. He states “they see the Courtier’s Reply as an attempt to excuse atheists from bothering with theology at all, when it’s quite the opposite: it’s a rebuke to theologians, pointing out that going on at length about rarefied epiphenomena and delicate points of dogma is a waste of time when you haven’t even established the central point of the matter, a reasonable justification for believing in a god or gods, period.”

Of course, being cited to excuse atheists from bothering with theology at all is exactly how The Courtier’s Reply is utilized; it is the ONLY way it is utilized. PZ’s attempt to provide a belated defense is easily proven to be false by no less than Richard Dawkins himself, who publicly cited it as an excuse for his own ignorance of theology in the Times.

You can’t criticise religion without detailed study of learned books on theology.

If, as one self-consciously intellectual critic wished, I had expounded the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus, Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope (as he vainly hoped I would), my book would have been more than a surprise bestseller, it would have been a miracle. I would happily have forgone bestsellerdom had there been the slightest hope of Duns Scotus illuminating my central question: does God exist? But I need engage only those few theologians who at least acknowledge the question, rather than blithely assuming God as a premise. For the rest, I cannot better the “Courtier’s Reply” on P. Z. Myers’s splendid Pharyngula website, where he takes me to task for outing the Emperor’s nudity while ignoring learned tomes on ruffled pantaloons and silken underwear.

As if Richard Dawkins knows the first thing about the theology of Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Tertullian, or even CS Lewis. But this example of Dawkins is far from the only one and many more can be found on PZ’s own site for those with the fortitude to slog through that swamp of pseudo-scientific smuggery. The core problem with The Courtier’s Reply is that it is a category error. PZ does not understand that while the discussion of God’s Will or divine characteristics are conceptually related to discussions of God’s existence, they are not synonymous. The Courtier’s Reply is that of the innumerate individual claiming that because no one has ever shown him a “one” or a “two”, it is a waste of time for mathematicians to go on at length about rarefied imaginary numbers and delicate points of calculus. The fact that religion and the theology from which it derives makes real, material, and observable differences in the lives of its practitioners, be they for good or for ill, is sufficient to justify its study regardless of whether one can establish its ultimate source to the satisfaction of scientists or not. And only a complete ignoramus who knows nothing of history, economics, socionomics, or demographics would be foolish enough to assert that the material effects of theological differences are too unimportant to bother with the matter.

The thing that is so ridiculous about latter day atheists like PZ is that they are not only theologically ignorant, but they know next to nothing about secular philosophy either. Intelligent atheists have known for decades that science can never provide the replacement for religion that fantasists like PZ and Sam Harris believe it can for the simple reason that science does not and cannot dictate values. This is why a strong dedication to rational science, with or without the additional complication of atheism, so readily produces monstrous leaders like Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin in such short order, monsters of the sort that were so few and far between in the centuries prior to the Enlightenment.

Theology is the precise opposite of useless because it provides that which science intrinsically cannot; a basic framework upon which guidelines for human behavior can be structured in a viable manner that is coherent, self-consistent and understandable even to the non-believer. Consider how it is entirely normal for the atheist to criticize the Christian for failing to live up to the standards set by Christian theology; to what scientific standard can the non-atheist ever hope to hold the atheist?

Myers further demonstrates his astounding ignorance when he claims: “Science provides tangible evidence of its accuracy and importance. Religion makes excuses for its absence of the same. There is no “rich tradition of rigorous inquiry” in religion, as we can see from its lack of progress, and the apologists are deluding themselves when they claim there is.” And yet, ironically enough, there is no shortage of empirical evidence, scientific evidence, demonstrating both the accuracy and importance of religion. PZ’s incompetent blathering would be entirely amusing, were it not for the panoply of self-deluded idiots at Pharyngula that actually take the man’s illogical meanderings seriously. But, if nothing else, the forthcoming book he mentions should provide for a deliciously target-rich environment.

UPDATE – Buttressing my point about how mathematics, among other disciplines, demonstrates the philosophical absurdity and irrelevance of The Courtier’s Reply, wrf3 quotes from Introduction to Artificial Intelligence by Philip C. Jackson:

“[T]he mathematical theory of Euclidean geometry gives us certain axioms or postulates concerning the undefined concepts of “point,” “line,” “plane,” “between,” etc.; the “thing” described by this theory is a “geometry,” consisting of interrelationships existing among lines, points, planes, circles, spaces, etc.

The ingredients of a mathematical theory, then, are the following:

1. A set of basic words (e.g. “point,” “line,” “between,” “distance,” “x,” “y,” “not,” “implies,” “for all,”) that refer to different objects, relations between objects, variables, logical connectives, quantifiers, and so on. These are the undefined words or symbols of the theory.

2. A set of basic sentences made of these basic words. These basic sentences are the axioms or postulates of the theory.

3. A set of logical rules, also made of these basic words, that tell us how to derive new statements from the ones we are given.”

If one is so foolish as to take The Courtier’s Reply seriously, one must then throw out all mathematics since mathematicians haven’t established the central point of the matter, a reasonable justification for believing in the undefined words or symbols of the theory. As I have said on numerous occasions before, the New Atheists are logical incompetents and philosophical ignoramuses. This is precisely why I have referred to them from the very start as The Clowns of Reason.

No sympathy

Given the present anti-father legal regime, why would any man feel any pity whatsoever for this clueless British mother who signed custody of her son away to her dead husband’s relatives?

Rebecca Jones signed legal papers written in Arabic and witnessed by her dead husband’s family – believing they were about an inheritance for her boy Adam. But instead the documents gave full custody to 77-year-old Mariam Al Madhaiki – who immediately swept the frightened child away from Rebecca and enrolled him in an Islamic school in Qatar. Last week, to Rebecca’s dismay, Sharia judges in the Middle East state THREW OUT her appeal to win him back after a seven-month battle – despite Adam sobbing in court: “I want my mother.”

The judges ruled she can see her son twice a week for just FOUR HOURS, supervised by cops in a room. Now the 43-year-old mum from Sheffield is going to the High Court to try to get justice over what she calls a “kidnap”.

“I was tricked into it. This is completely against the rights of my child and me as his mother,” she said.

So she lost custody of her son. Boo freaking hoo. Precisely how is that any worse than what happens every single day to men who are divorced by their wives, robbed of their children, and stripped of their assets? At least she had the option to NOT sign a contract she couldn’t read in a foreign country and she still gets to see him every week. Moreover, she doesn’t have to foot the bill for his expenses or the lifestyle of her in-laws either.

Notice the tone of the article. Newspapers don’t even bother to report on men losing their children because it happens so often and it is something that many journalists outright support. But if a mother loses custody of her child, then naturally it must be grounds for an international incident.

To be honest, I have zero sympathy for any Western woman who is foolish enough to get romantically involved with an Arab man these days regardless of how the relationship eventually implodes. The difference between Western and Middle Eastern legal and marital norms have been well known for at least two decades now, so there’s no excuse for claiming one didn’t know about them. And of course they all act charmingly modernized at first, it’s not as if anyone was ever likely to get a date riding around on a camel shrieking “death to the infidel!”

The cross of Goldman

The Republicans are determined to crucify themselves upon it:

Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Oversight committee, is demanding a slew of documents from the Securities and Exchange Commission, asserting that the timing of civil charges against Goldman Sachs raises “serious questions about the commission’s independence and impartiality.”

Issa’s letter, addressed to SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro and signed by eight other House Republicans, asks whether the commission had any contact about the case, prior to its public release, with White House aides, Democratic Party committee officials, or members of Congress or their staff.

“[W]e are concerned that politics have unduly influenced the decision and timing of the commission’s controversial enforcement action against Goldman,” Issa writes.

Beautiful! Simply beautiful! The Republicans are so astoundingly stupid, so uncompromisingly idiotic, that they are actually going to take on the SEC in defense of Goldman Sachs! Apparently they learned absolutely nothing from giving away the presidency in return for the banking bailout, now they’re threatening to get Obama re-elected on behalf of the Vampire Squid… who gave more money to Obama and the Democrats in 2008 anyhow.

No wonder they’re called the stupid party.

This is how you do it

PawnTakesQueen declared yesterday that those who do not believe that Obama has provided a legitimate birth certificate proving that he is a natural born citizen and is therefore Constitutionally qualified to hold the office of President are “dumbass Birthers” and are either “dumb, dishonest, or ignorant”. I was somewhat disappointed that those who responded to him demonstrated that they have not yet mastered the correct way to deal with aggressive interlocutors of inferior intelligence holding opinions that are unsupported by evidence or correctly applied logic. As I explained in the comments, the correct way to go about dismantling both the arguments and the intellectual credibility of these annoying individuals is not to pay any attention to their insulting statements about those with whom they disagree, because that is their only hope of being able to escape a critical dialogue relatively unscathed. In fact, the primary reason they always begin in such a provocative manner is that they need to keep the discussion at a level that permits them to avoid providing any objective information subject to independent verification. I recommended the following approach:

You simply ask direct questions about the assertions and assumptions that support their posturing, they immediately start evading, at which point you begin the process of pinning them down until they are eventually forced to run away or concede. Never skip ahead, as you only give them the chance to avoid being forced to defend their unsupportable assumptions.

Therefore, I asked PTQ the following question: “[W]hat are your reasons for believing that Obama was born in the United States? They must be remarkably conclusive for you to conclude that anyone believing otherwise is either dumb, dishonest, or ignorant!” And, as I expected, he responded in a manner which demonstrates that he has absolutely nothing which is even remotely capable of justifying the dismissive stance he assumed from the outset.

My reasoning for believing that Obama was born in the United States?

Well, for starters we’re not talking about a normal vetting process here. You don’t think the CIA checked him out? This wasn’t for some entry level CIA agent position. We’re talking the Presidency of the United States. Top secret clearance? Try the very highest, strictest security clearance. You think they’d let a Kenyan get through? You think something so ridiculously fundamental as a fake birth certificate would get past the CIA, FBI, NSA, and the other 13 U.S. intelligence agencies? Of course you do. They’re all included in your conspiracy theory apparently. Or maybe you didn’t think of that. You are, after all, a dumbass birther. Actually “dumbass birther” is redundant, but it’s fun to say.

First, note that despite answering the question – commendable – PTQ still attempts to direct the discussion back to the perjorative level. Second, notice that he does nothing more than appeal to logic in contradicting the logic that points towards precisely the opposite conclusion. And he has far less evidence in support of that logical appeal; whereas the large amount of manpower and money expended in pursuit of concealing Obama’s actual birth documentation, kindergarten records, Punahou school records, Occidental College records, Columbia University records, Columbia thesis, Harvard Law School records, Harvard Law Review articles, scholarly articles from the University of Chicago, passport, medical records, Illinois state senate files, Illinois State Bar Association records, and adoption records has been widely reported and is not in dispute, PTQ cites no evidence whatsoever that the CIA, FBI, NSA, or any government agency has ever vetted Obama, or for that matter, any other presidential candidate in the past.

Moreoever, PTQ’s argument makes no sense because the citizenship-related aspect of top secret national security clearances only relates to citizenship, not natural born citizenship. “Subject must be a U.S. citizen. Independent verification of citizenship received directly from appropriate registration authority. For foreign-born immediate family members, verification of citizenship or legal status is also required.”

And finally, the idea that the very federal agencies which are known to have been involved in some of the worst abuses of the U.S. Constitution in American history are in any way concerned with guarding against the Constitutional illegitimacy of a sitting U.S. Senator is risible. There is no question of those agencies letting “a fake birth certificate” get past them; the Hawaiian document which has been produced is a real document, the problem is that it is not the relevant long-form documentation of birth that is required in order to prove Obama’s claims. No document of that sort, fake or real, has been produced to date. There is no reason that agencies with no responsibility or authority to vet the Constitutional legitimacy of a U.S. citizen and U.S. Senator should not have accepted the Hawaiian certificate at face value in lieu of the relevant long-form document despite its shortcomings, just as the mainstream media and PTQ himself have done.

As for the other reason he provided, that “corporate America, including Big Pharma, the AMA, Big Oil, and all the rest of the businesses who don’t want to pay higher taxes under a Democratic president” would not “let this fake birth certificate stuff slide”, PTQ clearly does not realize that Obama raised more money from Big Pharma than McCain did, the AMA supported Obama and even endorsed his health plan, and Obama received significant donations from Big Oil, although only about a third of what McCain received. Corporate America has no objection to Obama whatsoever, primarily because he is as beholden to Wall Street as McCain and nearly every other national Democrat or Republican are. It should be obvious that these corporate Obama supporters have zero interest in rending their investments in him worthless.

Now, perhaps PTQ has other reasons for believing that Obama was born in the United States that he has not shared with us. But clearly the reasons that he has provided so far are not only superficial, inconclusive and incorrect, but rest upon logic that is much more questionable than the competing logical reasoning that he previously rejected in such perjorative terms. The amusing thing, of course, is that I told PTQ yesterday exactly what I was going to do prior to his response and warned him that there was nothing he could do about it. I leave it to you to ascertain the accuracy of that prediction.

Hope, Change, and Murdering American Citizens

I don’t think this is what the Obamatrons had in mind. And I’m not sure which is more appalling. The news that Barack Obama has just decided to start killing American citizens without granting them the benefit of an arrest, a trial, or a conviction, or the fact that writers at National Review are actually supporting his dictate:

The Obama administration has authorized operations to capture or kill a U.S.-born Muslim cleric based in Yemen, who is described by a key lawmaker as Americas’s top terrorist threat, officials said on Tuesday. The decision to add Anwar al-Awlaki, of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, to the target list followed a National Security Council review prompted by his status as a U.S. citizen.

Officials said Awlaki directly threatened the United States. “Awlaki is a proven threat,” said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “He’s being targeted.”

Rep. Jane Harman, chairwoman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, described Awlaki as “probably the person, the terrorist, who would be terrorist No. 1 in terms of threat against us. He is very much in the sights of the Yemenis, with us helping them,” said Harman, who recently visited Yemen to meet with U.S. and Yemeni officials. She told Reuters that Awlaki’s U.S. citizenship made going after him “certainly complicated.”

To his credit, Kevin D. Williamson is among the sane “conservatives” left at NRO:

I hate to play the squish, but am I the only one who is just a little bit queasy over the fact that the president of the United States is authorizing the assassination of American citizens? Andy writes that this is “obviously the right call.” I might be persuaded that this is, in fact, the right call. But obviously? No hesitation there? It seems to me that the fact of U.S. citizenship ought to be a bright line on the political map.

Surely there has to be some operational constraint on the executive when it comes to the killing of U.S. citizens. It is not impossible to imagine a president who, for instance, sincerely believes that Andy McCarthy is undermining the Justice Department’s ability to prosecute the war on terror on the legal front. A government that can kill its citizens can shut them up, no? I ask this not as a legal question, but as a moral and political question: How is it that a government that can assassinate Citizen Awlaki is unable to censor Citizen McCarthy, or drop him in an oubliette? Practically every journalist of any consequence in Washington has illegally handled a piece of classified information. Can the president have them assassinated in the name of national security? Under the Awlaki standard, why not?

Odious as Awlaki is, this seems to me to be setting an awful and reckless precedent. Consider how “interstate commerce” has been redefined over time to cover that which is neither interstate nor commerce, for the sake of political expediency. It is easy to imagine “national security” being treated the same way, particularly in an open-ended conflict against a loosely defined enemy.

No, this is not the right call. This is madness. And it is another step in the descent to open and unmitigated evil. There is no other way to describe it. The sickening thing is that without the ludicrous decision to grant citizenship to so many third worlders possessing zero loyalty to the nation, there would be no excuse for legally painting federal crosshairs on each and every U.S. citizen. This isn’t merely a direct assault on the Constitution, it is far more impeachment-worthy than anything Bill Clinton ever did.

If Citizen Awlaki is deemed worthy of government assassination today, you can be assured that other American citizens will deemed “a proven threat” in the future.