The Divine Conspiracy Blog

It Is Safe to Resume Ignoring the Prophets of Doom … Right? See here.

The Last Sane Liberal by Tevi D. Troy.

This past summer, Edward I. Koch, a Democrat, made headlines by noisily endorsing Republican Bob Turner in a special election to fill the congressional seat of disgraced Tweeter Anthony Weiner. The former mayor explained that he’d decided to rally Jewish voters in Brooklyn and Queens to chastise President Obama for his Israel policy. Koch’s outsize role in Turner’s surprise victory made for big political news and led to speculation that Obama could be facing trouble in his reelection bid.

The episode was unusual, but unusual has always been de rigueur for Koch, a three-term mayor and a constant post-mayoral presence in New York City. For one thing, Koch has long described himself as a “liberal with sanity” in a city that consistently tilts left. Further, Koch’s personality and ego have always been larger than life, and long before the era of 24-hour news, the mayor found imaginative ways to keep himself in the spotlight. So while the role he played in the Turner election was eye-catching, it wasn’t surprising when you considered his eventful, iconoclastic career.

More at City Journal.

Media Genuflect Before Church of Planned Parenthood. See here.

Flawed Studies Link Diet Soda To Weight Gain, Heart Attacks by Cameron English.

Two weeks ago, researchers from the University of Texas claimed that diet soda may promote weight gain, and research released Tuesday suggested that there may be a link between diet soda consumption and increased vascular events (heart attacks and strokes). Such claims about the sugar-free beverages have the potential change the way Americans look at dieting and weight loss.

There’s one problem, however: they’re not true. There is very little evidence to support the assertion that diet soda is responsible for weight gain or poor cardiovascular health.

Read the rest here.

Jeff Goldberg speaks truth to power.

I know. What’s being reported is that the unemployment rate has fallen yet again (hell, not just a fall, but a “plummet”!) And subsequent reports will likely show unemployment continuing to edge down in the run-up to the 2012 election, creating a picture of an economy on the mend under the steady stewardship of a driven President refusing to be defeated by either the fiscal mess Bush bequeathed him, or the do-nothing Republican Congress that is trying to thwart him, most likely because he’s Black.

And that’s because we have a media who are actively interested in seeing Obama re-elected — so much so that they no longer concern themselves with facts, but rather only with how best to frame facts in the aid of a progressive world view. And if that means massaging the narrative a bit — by, for instance, leaving unmentioned the strange decline in the numbers of Americans (who it would appear at a casual glance must be dying off at a remarkable clip) being counted as part of the potential work force — well, then an activist with the best of intentions acting on his or her patriotic duty to bring the hoary old US Constitution kicking and screaming into the 21st century has gotta do what an activist with the best of intentions acting on his or her patriotic duty to bring the hoary old US Constitution kicking and screaming into the 21st century has gotta do.

Fortunately, some of us know the real story. Unfortunately, the postmodern President and his academic sophists are willing to bet that they can shape perception and create an alternate set of “truths” before the election — and given the way we’ve been conditioned to accept the media as mostly unbiased, and given how we’ve been inculcated with deconstructed and reframed notions of “fairness,” “tolerance,” and the like, they may just be right.

But on the off-chance some erstwhile non-engaged American happens by here, allow me to help. From Americans for Limited Government:

Once again, the civilian labor force participation rate has declined, from 64 percent to 63.7 percent in a single month. Since January 2009, it has declined from 65.7 percent, resulting in approximately 4.7 million people no longer being counted towards the unemployment rate. If they were included, the real rate of unemployed working age adults would be 11.01 percent, and the underemployed would be 17.6 percent.

Overall, that includes the 12.7 million people that BLS says are actually unemployed, and then 4.7 million who have given up looking for work, plus another 10.5 million who can’t find full-time work. All together, there’s 28 million working age adults who simply cannot find work in the Obama economy.

Notes Jim Pethokoukis:

Bottom line: The unemployment rate is dropping because economic growth continues to be so anemic that nearly 4 million Americans have quit looking for work and have been disappeared by the Labor Department. This still isn’t much of a recovery.

— Says you. To the mainstream press, such an unemployment rate “plummet” is a clear sign that The Won may have finally been able to break the Bush curse and raise the economy from the dead.

Couple that with the fact that, since Obama took office, we no longer have to worry about the seas rising, and what we have here is the perfect storm for a progressive re-election — and the fundamental transformation of the US!

Heather Mac Donald reviews The City That Become Safe: New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control by Franklin Zimring.

Addicts’ Brains May Be Wired At Birth For Less Self-Control by Jon Hamilton.

Many addicts inherit a brain that has trouble just saying no to drugs.

A study in Science finds that cocaine addicts have abnormalities in areas of the brain involved in self-control. And these abnormalities appear to predate any drug abuse.

The study, done by a team at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., looked at 50 pairs of siblings. One member of each pair was a cocaine addict. The other had no history of drug abuse.

But brain scans showed that both siblings had brains unlike those of typical people, says Karen Ersche, the study’s lead author.

More at NPR.

Arab Spring or Islamist Winter? by Michael J. Totten.

The phrase “Arab Spring” is a misnomer. The political upheavals sweeping Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria are concurrent yet different phenomena, and it’s premature to assume that any of them, let alone all of them, will bring their respective countries out of the long Arab winter of authoritarian rule. In the medium term, the number of genuinely liberal democracies to emerge in the Arab world is likely to be one or zero.

I’ve been to all three countries that overthrew tyrants last year—Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya—and I rented an apartment in Lebanon while the government of Syria, which may well become fourth on the list, waged a murder and intimidation campaign against Lebanese journalists and elected officials. The only things these countries have in common with each other is that they’re in turmoil and that they are Arab.

Large parts of Tunisia appear so “Westernized,” at least on the surface, that visitors might think they’re in Greece or even in France if they didn’t know better. Egypt is an ancient and crushingly poor nation ruled, as it has been more often than not, by a military dictatorship. Libya under Muammar el-Qaddafi was an oil-rich dungeon state that had more in common with North Korea and the former Soviet Union than with its neighbors. Syria, meanwhile, unlike any place in North Africa, is a sectarian tinderbox with the potential to Lebanonize or to Iraqify almost immediately upon the overthrow of the state.

These nations differed dramatically from each other before the region-wide upheaval began, so it logically follows that the revolutions themselves, not to mention their conclusions and aftermaths, should also differ dramatically. The Arab Spring isn’t one thing, as the post-Communist revolutions in 1989 more or less were, with local variations in only a couple of places like Romania and Yugoslavia. Here each country and revolution is its own Romania or Yugoslavia, differing significantly from each of the others.

More at WA.

Charles Murray Reiterates Willpower by Eric Falkenstein.

Scribes have always been jealous of the wealthy and powerful, thinking that an elite set of navel-gazing intellectuals such as themselves would be more efficient, as if they wouldn’t turn into illiberal tyrants in short order (see what became of young intellectuals Trotsky, Mao, Ho Chi Min, and Mugabe). They convince themselves prior attempts along these lines were co-opted, but that’s purely self-serving confabulation. Unfortunately, these same people dominate the media and academia by their very nature (wordsmiths), so it will be hard for modern mores to change because people wise enough to see it’s wrong will tend to simply succeed off the grid, without reconciling their success theoretically in a treatise.

More here.

John Nolte gets this exactly right.

Left-wing operatives, like those who run Politico, are intentionally attempting to create their own reality. In the same way the left turned “30 Rock,” a show that ranked 106 in the ratings last season, into some sort of cultural phenom, the idea here is to push the political and social values of something no one watches into our country’s cultural and media narrative as though it’s something it’s not — popular.

Politico loves Stephen Colbert because Stephen Colbert loves Barack Obama and is waging war against the Right and free speech. America, however, is, to be kind, indifferent to Colbert. 1.44 million viewers and only half that among the 18-49 group, does not make you King of anything.

But Colbert knows how to play the game and understands that if he wants these kinds of hollow accolades and the opportunity to push his left-wing agenda and to have history revised in his favor, he must appeal to the right people, and the right people are not THE people; the right people are the left-wing elites who infest our corrupt media.

More at Big Hollywood.

The Coming Arizona Public Employee Union Apocalypse by Thomas Grier.

It was just last February that the nation was fixated on Madison, Wisconsin. Governor Scott Walker’s budget and public employee union reforms made the Midwestern city ground zero for progressive and union activists. At the height of the demonstrations, there were approximately 100,000 protesters gathered in Madison. The massive protests were followed by recalls, faulty constitutional lawsuits and expensive judicial elections. Wisconsin was and continues to be a political zoo of epic proportions.

Now, Arizona Republicans are planning to drop the public employee reform hammer in a big way with help from the Goldwater Institute. On Wednesday the Arizona Senate Government Reform Committee discussed a package of bills that are intended to curb public employee union corruption. In addition to ending collective bargaining for public employee unions, the bills go even farther in limiting union power.

Read more here.

John Stossel: Policing the World

We could save a lot of money if America adopted a policy designed for defense rather than policing the world.

More at Reason.

Big-Government Republicans by Andrew C. McCarthy.

Forget the fratricidal warfare between two establishment soldiers so harmonious on substance that their contest, inevitably, has descended into a poisonous, personal food-fight. The problem is not the GOP infighting. The problem is the GOP. Republicans are simply not interested in limiting government or addressing our death spiral of spending.

More here.

Vanderbilt University’s Assault on Religious Liberty by David French.

A remarkable thing is happening down here in Nashville. An old story — a university attempts to throw Christian student groups off campus unless they are open to non-Christian leadership — has a very new twist. Hundreds of Christian students are mobilizing against the policy and challenging the administration directly. Tuesday night, Vanderbilt held a “town hall” to discuss the policy, and the room was packed with students wearing white (the color students chose to signal their protest) and hundreds more were turned away and forced to watch on a live stream.

More at NRO.

Is GOP a SOPA “Nope” Hope? by Stewart Baker.

What went wrong for SOPA, the entertainment industry’s proposal for stopping international piracy? And what does it mean for Hollywood’s future clout in Washington?

I had a ringside seat for the battle over SOPA, though not as a supporter. I thought it would make Internet users more vulnerable to cybercrime. That was a problem that could have been fixed. Instead, after a brief halt and some modest changes, the entertainment industry decided to press for a showdown.

And a showdown, of course, is what it got.

Why did it turn out so badly? The entertainment industry’s first mistake, then and now, is believing that its adversary is a group of other companies — Google, Internet service providers, and others — who are somehow hoping to profit from the Internet travails of the entertainment industry.

In fact, the industry is fighting what amounts to a new popular culture.

More at VC.

The Splintering of Al Shabaab by Bronwyn Bruton and J. Peter Pham.

For the better part of five years, much of Somalia’s long-suffering population has been caught in a deadly stalemate between al Shabaab, an al Qaeda-linked militant group, and African Union peacekeepers, known as AMISOM. The peacekeepers are tasked with defending the country’s weak Transitional Federal Government (TFG), which, despite years of backing from regional powers and the West, remains politically dysfunctional and incapable doing anything resembling governing. Fielding an army of its own remains a distant aspiration.

That is why quelling the insurgency has fallen entirely on AMISOM. Over the last 18 months or so the 12,000 strong force has honed its tactics and made gains, however stilting, against al Shabaab. Insistent that no American boots hit the ground in Somalia, Washington has backed the mission. (That is, of course, no American boots on the ground with the exception of last week, when a Navy Seal team rescued two aid workers in central Somalia, some 500 kilometers north of Mogadishu.) In return for their troop contributions to AMISOM, the United States has given Burundi and Uganda several hundred million dollars in salary, equipment, training, and logistical support. Perhaps more importantly, Washington now calls both countries allies.

Read the rest.

The Hard Way Out of Afghanistan by Luke Mogelson.

For years, in the village of Juz Ghoray, at the remote fringes of the Musa Qala District in northern Helmand Province, the Taliban enjoyed free rein, collecting taxes from local poppy farmers and staging attacks on any foreign patrol that moved within shooting range of an abrupt desert prominence called Ugly Hill. After a Marine unit found nine I.E.D.’s hidden beneath Ugly Hill’s scarred and caverned faces last year, coalition forces seldom ventured near it. Until one night this October, when members of Echo Company, from the Second Battalion, Fourth Marines — known since Vietnam as the Magnificent Bastards — quietly sneaked into Juz Ghoray and posted signs on people’s doors and windows. Their idea was to co-opt the infamous Taliban practice of intimidating government sympathizers with night letters threatening execution. The Marines’ signs were bordered with the nation’s colors, and in Pashto and Dari they announced: “The Afghan National Security Forces are coming.” Two weeks later, about 60 members of Echo Company, along with 30 Afghan National Army soldiers, traveled on foot through the night and took Ugly Hill without a shot. At dawn, as villagers emerged from their homes, they found laborers stacking bastions to fortify a new Afghan police post. And something else, which many residents of Juz Ghoray had never seen before: an Afghan flag raised on a wooden pole.

More at the NYT.

How to Answer ‘Why Would God Allow Evil?’ by Alex Murashko.

Providing a rebuttal to the question of why God would allow such things can be challenging, said Mittelberg, who is the author of The Questions Christians Hope No One Will Ask and other books about defending the Christian faith.

Mittelberg told The Christian Post recently that in fact, it was the issue of evil that initially led the renowned author and scholar C. S. Lewis into atheism. However, upon further reflection, Lewis began to see that if there is no God, then there is no such thing as evil either.

“Evil can only be known and measured against a standard of good. Apart from God and the morality that flows from Him there is no standard – and therefore no evil either,” he explained. “But we know in our hearts – it’s inescapable – that evil is real.”

Read the rest here.

Why Women Lose Interest in Sex

New research is demonstrating what many people already knew from experience: Women lose interest in sex over time, while men don’t.

The finding has the potential to help couples, the researchers said. Knowing that many women’s sexual desire diminishes over the course of a relationship could encourage both partners to be more realistic about their sex lives, and could help them weather the changes in desire as they occur.

Read more here.

The Genetics of Same-Sex Attraction by Stanton L. Jones.

So in plain English, the best contemporary scientific findings are that when one identical twin brother is gay, the probabilities of the second twin being gay are approximately 10%. This suggests that the contribution of genetics to the determination of homosexual orientation is modest at best.

More at FT.