The Right Lane update 6.01.13

The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, free markets and individual liberty

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

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The Real War on Women   by David L. Goetsch

One of the most consistent themes of Barack Obama’s re-election campaign was that Republicans are conducting a “war on women.” What the Republican’s supposed war on women really consists of are two components: 1) Opposition to abortion on demand for the sake of convenience, and 2) Mandatory tax-payer subsidized birth control for women. If I am following liberal logic—and I use the term loosely here—expressing moral concerns over the killing of unborn babies and thinking that women should pay for their own birth control pills constitutes an act of war. This definition of war only shows that most feminists have never been to war, or even served in the military for that matter.

Perhaps feminists should choose their metaphors more carefully. Their over-the-top rhetoric might one day come back to haunt them. For example, assume for the sake of argument that feminists and liberals in general are eventually successful in their campaign for allowing women in combat. If this happens—and they will not stop pushing until it does—there will come a time when some unfortunate women now serving in combat roles are going to find out first-hand what the term “war” really means. When women start coming home in body bags, missing limbs, or with traumatic brain injuries, feminists who think opposition to abortion and tax-supported birth control constitutes war are going to look like the foolish zealots they are.

However, I do not expect the irresponsible rhetoric to stop. After all, it was feminists and liberals in general who decided that since the term abortion conjured up unpleasant images of what it really is—the brutal murder of unborn babies—they would go for a spin-control homerun and start calling it choice. With that little linguistic trick accomplished, they nailed their strategy down by couching their pro-abortion argument in terms of a woman’s right to choose. If you can overlook the dishonesty, distortion, and deceit—not to mention the mass murder it covers up—playing the name game with abortion was a brilliant political strategy. After all, who would want to deny a woman her rights, particularly the right of choice?

For liberals of all stripes, including feminists, indulging in over-the-top rhetoric is just another day at the office. Further, with Hillary Clinton waiting in the wings for the 2016 presidential campaign, feminists are no doubt already sharpening their rhetorical daggers. This comment about Hillary assumes, of course, that she is able to stay out of jail as the Benghazi version of Watergate continues to unfold. However, if Hillary crashes and burns over Benghazi and/or the subsequent cover up, feminists will find another standard bearer for their nefarious cause.

What is especially sad about the feminist-liberal alliance is that it is not Republicans and conservatives who are making war on women, but liberal Democrats. Liberals in Congress and the White House who have done more real harm to women than conservatives could possibly have done with their opposition to abortion on demand and mandatory tax-supported birth control. The truth is that the party making war on women in America the Democrats and the warrior leading the charge is Barack Obama. As a group, women have suffered more under Barack Obama than under any other president in America’s history.

During President Obama’s administration the unemployment rate for women reached unprecedented heights, the number of women on welfare grew exponentially, and the treatment of women who hold traditional values or conservative views turned vicious. In fact, during the Obama administration the harshest war on women has been waged against conservative women who have run for political office. These women—think of Sarah Palin and Micelle Bachman—have been vilified, degraded, and belittled for daring to step forward in ways that do not comport with liberal orthodoxy. Conservative women do not fit the mold liberals, feminists, and the mainstream media try to force them into. Hence, they must be defeated regardless of their abilities, dedication to our country, and monumental accomplishments. There is something badly wrong when a woman’s accomplishments cannot be celebrated and appreciated simply because she has a conservative worldview.

Here is a message for feminists and liberals. If you want to stop the war on women, elect a conservative as president in 2016. Liberals and feminists use women to advance their agendas. Conservatives respect women for the invaluable asset they are.

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Perspectives on near death experiences

One of the questions we’re often asked is how we explain near-death experiences.

Josef L., U.S., asks,

I’m not really sure how to ask this question, but lately I’ve been thinking of the atheist’s position that when we die, it’s all over. I’ll confess if there is one thing that sort of makes me doubt my faith, it’s comas or near-death experiences (I do not mean the light at the end of the tunnel type of stuff), such as when people are in a coma or are clinically dead but come back, they often say nothing happened. Also, I think about people who suffer brain trauma and their personalities change. It makes it seem like our consciousness is a function of our physical bodies. In light of stuff like this, how should Christians view the spirit? Like is our spirit our personalities? If so, it seems to be dependent on the wellness of our physical-self. Another example would be as we age, our personalities can change or degenerate.

Lita Cosner answers:

Dear Josef,

Thanks for writing in. If God didn’t reveal to us what happens after death, we wouldn’t know. Apart from a few very specific examples in Scripture, no one has come back from the dead, truly, to tell us what it’s like, and of those who were resuscitated, no one’s testimony of what it was like has survived.  Of course, the great exception is Jesus—He died, and He was truly dead for three days, and then He was resurrected. Since He has actually died, He is an authority on what death and the afterlife is like. And He promises that death isn’t the end of everything. Jesus said that He is preparing a place for us, and that if we trust in Him during this life, we will be with Him after death. People who have ‘near death’ experiences, by definition, haven’t died. People who have ‘near death’ experiences, by definition, haven’t died. People who are successfully resuscitated by doctors also haven’t died, even if they fit the clinical definition of death for a few minutes. The brain, often starved of oxygen and in the stages of shutting down, may produce hallucinations. Others don’t experience (or at least remember) this. Regarding how the brain and the ‘person’ are related, if humans are meaningfully both physical and spiritual (e.g. not just spirits in body suits), we would expect damage to the body to affect personality. For instance, some people with various mental health issues can be tremendously helped by medication which corrects a chemical imbalance—does this introduce an artificial element to the person’s personality, or does it correct a defect, allowing that person’s ‘true’ personality to come through?

Or, for another example, too many of us have had the heartbreaking experience of seeing an elderly relative go through Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia. A formerly lovely person can become agitated, fearful, angry, and unlike themselves. Is this a genuine change in personality, or does the degenerating brain render one less capable of being themselves, just as the degenerating joints and muscles make one less mobile? Or to put it another way, you could have a great computer program, but if the hard drive is defective, it won’t work.

The atheists’ view that ‘we are our brain chemistry’ and it all ends when we die is terribly depressing. Rather, the Christian view of a fallen world, including fallen human bodies, allows for the view that all sorts of psychological defects or brain injuries are not permanent, or even really a part of one’s ‘real’ self, but rather products of the Curse that will be removed in the Resurrection.

By the way, Phineas Gage, the most prominent example of catastrophic brain injury, did not turn into the monster he is frequently portrayed as. By the way, many of the issues you raise about the way in which physical factors affect our personality and so on were utilized by one Keith Augustine in a 1997 paper arguing for the extinction of the personality at death (since expanded into a paper called ‘The Case Against Immortality’) and a staple of humanists/atheists. In 2004, we provided a detailed commentary on Augustine’s original paper, which is likely quite pertinent to your queries; see Brain chemistry and the fate of the personality after death.

Gary Bates answered:

You asked about near death experiences. There have been lots of information and explanations for these over the years. We have some brief information at the article Near death experiences: what should Christians think? You said that they claim to see Heaven but not hell. I think these fall into a different category than the straight near death experiences. These are where people are really having an out of body experience (OBEs), like a vision that lasts for hours. This is different to near death experiences (NDEs).Obviously this cannot be really happening, and it demonstrates a surfacing of whatever the person already believes or is being subjected to at the time.

For example, a lot of NDEs seem to occur when people are in surgery or on an operating table. Anesthesia produces a vulnerable state where there seems to be a cessation and contraction of time, as opposed to sleeping, for instance. During such events (and hypnosis can induce the same state), the mind has been shown to be highly suggestible leading to something known as false memory syndrome. I believe that alleged alien abductees suffer from the same practice although deliberately implanted by fallen angels. However, our minds, that is, our imaginations can also create these false memories. The reason that people remember them so vividly is because of the state they were in when the alleged memory was implanted or created. They are unable to distinguish it from reality. I.e. people have been experimentally hypnotized, given a false memory then woken up. They had already incorporated the false memory into their memory banks even having a sense of a real physical experience. When told that it had just been deliberately implanted, they would not accept it. People who’ve had NDE’s also claim to see their own bodies on the operating table, and also see a white tunnel of light with their deceased relatives on the other side. Some report they also see aliens standing next to the relatives. Obviously this cannot be really happening, and it demonstrates a surfacing of whatever the person already believes or is being subjected to at the time. If you get the book Alien Intrusion: UFOs and the Evolution Connection there is a brand new section that covers all of the above (i.e. hypnosis, suggestibility and false memories etc.). You can click on the link supplied.

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Dick Morris: Obama Must Have Been 'Deeply Involved' in IRS Targeting By Greg Richter

There's no chance President Barack Obama knew nothing of the IRS targeting conservative groups, says political pundit Dick Morris. Why else would IRS Commissioner Douglas Schulman have visited the White House at least once a week? "The incredible frequency of the White House visits — essentially weekly — indicate that Obama must have been deeply involved with the inner workings of the audits and harassment of conservative groups," Morris writes.  Morris asks what other reason would have brought Schulman to the White House 157 times during the period that groups with "tea party," "patriot" and other conservative buzzwords in their names were being targeted for extra scrutiny.  "Not ObamaCare. Not without having (Health and Human Services) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in attendance, you wouldn’t," Morris says. "About Treasury issues? Deficit reduction? Not without Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner." The reason, Morris says, is that Obama was following the IRS actions with an "obsessive, personal involvement." The Citizens United ruling galvanized Obama into action, Morris says, and "tapped so deeply into his psyche that he was determined personally to supervise the castration of the wealthy people and groups whose access to the political system was opened wide by the (U.S. Supreme) Court."

Schulman held a subordinate, non-policy making position, Morris said, so to have seen him 157 times, Obama had to have been "a president on a mission." The scandal is not one of a rogue agency, Morris says, but one of a rogue president using the agency for his personal purposes. "An instrument of vengeance, or self-defense, and of political influence."

President Richard Nixon was doomed, Morris says, when the public realized that his own paranoia had infected his entire administration. "When Chuck Colson led the plumbers unit to investigate leaks and to use the IRS to terrify and intimidate his enemies, we realized that he was operating as Nixon’s man doing Nixon’s bidding based on the needs of Nixon’s psyche," he writes.  The public now realizes that the IRS harassment went deeper than was initally admitted, he said.  "This scandal will destroy him."

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Obama’s Dorothy Doctrine By Charles Krauthammer,

“This war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises . . .” — Barack Obama, May 23

Nice thought. But much as Obama would like to close his eyes, click his heels three times and declare the war on terror over, war is a two-way street.  That’s what history advises: Two sides to fight it, two to end it. By surrender (World War II), by armistice (Korea and Vietnam) or when the enemy simply disappears from the field (the Cold War).  Obama says enough is enough. He doesn’t want us on “a perpetual wartime footing.” Well, the Cold War lasted 45 years. The war on terror, 12 so far. By Obama’s calculus, we should have declared the Cold War over in 1958 and left Western Europe, our Pacific allies, the entire free world to fend for itself — and consigned Eastern Europe to endless darkness.

John F. Kennedy summoned the nation to bear the burdens of the long twilight struggle. Obama, agonizing publicly about the awful burdens of command — his command, which he twice sought in election — wants out. For him and for us.  He doesn’t just want to revise and update the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which many conservatives have called for. He wants to repeal it. He admits that the AUMF establishes the basis both in domestic and international law to conduct crucial defensive operations, such as drone strikes. Why, then, abolish the authority to do what we sometimes need to do? Because that will make the war go away? Persuade our enemies to retire to their caves? Stop the spread of jihadism? This is John Lennon, bumper-sticker foreign policy — Imagine World Peace. Obama pretends that the tide of war is receding. But it’s demonstrably not. It’s metastasizing to Mali, to the Algerian desert, to the North African states falling under the Muslim Brotherhood, to Yemen, to the savage civil war in Syria, now spilling over into Lebanon and destabilizing Jordan. Even Sinai, tranquil for 35 years, is descending into chaos.

It’s not war that’s receding. It’s America. Under Obama. And it is precisely in the power vacuum left behind that war is rising. Obama declares Assad must go. The same wish-as-policy fecklessness from our bystander president. Two years — and 70,000 dead — later, Obama keeps repeating the wish even as the tide of battle is altered by the new arbiters of Syria’s future — Iran, Hezbollah and Russia. Where does every party to the Syrian conflict go on bended knee? To Moscow, as Washington recedes into irrelevance.

But the ultimate expression of Obama’s Dorothy Doctrine is Guantanamo. It must close. Must, mind you.  Okay. Let’s accept the dubious proposition that the Yemeni prisoners could be sent home without coming back to fight us. And that others could be convicted in court and put in U.S. prisons. Now the rub. Obama openly admits that “even after we take these steps, one issue will remain — just how to deal with those Gitmo detainees who we know have participated in dangerous plots or attacks but who cannot be prosecuted.”  Well, yes. That’s always been the problem with Gitmo. It’s not a question of geography. The issue is indefinite detention — whether at Gitmo, a Colorado supermax or St. Helena.  Can’t try ’em, can’t release ’em. Having posed the central question, what is Obama’s answer? “I am confident that this legacy problem can be resolved.” That’s it! I kid you not. He’s had four-plus years to think this one through — and he openly admits he’s got no answer.  Because there is none. Hence the need for Gitmo. Other wars end, at which point prisoners are repatriated. But in this war, the other side has no intention of surrender or armistice. They will fight until the caliphate is established or until jihadism is as utterly defeated as fascism and communism. That’s the reason — the only reason — for the detention conundrum. There is no solution to indefinite detention when the detainees are committed to indefinite war. Obama’s fantasies are twinned. He can no more wish away the detention than he can the war.

We were defenseless on 9/11 because, despite Osama bin Laden’s open written declaration of war in 1996, we pretended for years that no war against us had even begun. Obama would return us to pre-9/11 defenselessness — casting Islamist terror as a law-enforcement issue and removing the legal basis for treating it as armed conflict — by pretending that the war is over.

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Teacher Faces Disciplinary Action For Telling His Students About Their Constitutional Rights by Frank Camp

Robert Heinlein said: “When any government…undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.”

Oppression is a daily occurrence. We are oppressed by our public schools; we are oppressed by our “scientists,” and we are oppressed by our federal government. All major industries related to the federal government have cornered the market on oppression of the people. Public schools indoctrinate our children, universities force Socialist and Marxist ideals on their students, and “scientists” don’t allow anyone into their fields who would question the status quo. It is with oppression that power is at its strongest.

“An Illinois Social Studies teacher faces disciplinary action for reminding his students of their Fifth Amendment rights when filling out a school survey on behavior…John Dryden was collecting the surveys before class when he noticed the students’ names were printed on them. He looked to see what was being asked and noticed questions about alcohol and drug use…Dryden told his students that they had a Constitutional right to not incriminate themselves by answering questions on the survey.”

As a result of Mr. Dryden informing his students about their basic Fifth Amendment rights, he is now facing disciplinary charges. Lucky for him, numerous people have risen to his defense.

With all the government scandals bringing fresh memories into our minds of past tyranny, it is an incident like this that makes my skin crawl. Tyranny doesn’t have a grand beginning; it never does. It starts with minor incidents; slowly collecting over time, and culminating in outright oppression. Tyranny takes time to accumulate strength; like a fighter in training. When it’s ready, it will knock us out with a single blow.

First, whether or not it is within the powers of the school to bring the hammer down with disciplinary action, it is entirely absurd. Dryden did absolutely nothing wrong when he merely informed his students of their Fifth Amendment right to decline self-incrimination if they had anything they didn’t want made public. Second, I’m not sure whether it is within the bounds of the school’s power to ask these types of questions in the first place. Without anonymous surveys being offered, any information provided a link directly to the student who filled out the survey. This behavior is unseemly at best and dangerously invasive at worst. With Dryden facing disciplinary action, I can only shiver at the thought of what else public schools could do with the power they believe they have. Tyranny starts in small places.

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Record 10,978,040 Now on Disability; ‘Disability’ Would Be 8th Most Populous State By Terence P. Jeffrey

The total number of people in the United States now receiving federal disability benefits hit a record 10,978,040 in May, up from 10,962,532 million in April, according to newly released data from the Social Security Administration. The 10,978,040 disability beneficiaries in the United States now exceed the population of all but seven states. For example, there are more Americans collecting disability today than there are people living in Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey or Virginia. The record 10,978,040 total disability beneficiaries in May, included a record 8,877,921 disabled workers (up from 8,865,586 in April), a record 1,939,687 children of disabled workers (up from 1,936,236 in April), and 160,432 spouses of disabled workers.

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PC Gone Wild: Spanish Word for “Black” Gets Spanish Teacher Fired

Petrona Smith is a teacher at a Bronx middle school who, by teaching kids Spanish, gave them the valuable knowledge of how to survive in this country that increasingly resembles Mexico. Unfortunately for Smith, there was one particular seventh-grader in her class who, I’d put money on, had been brought up in a liberal household, because he finds words to be offensive—the word “negro” in particular. No, not as in what Senator Harry Reid would call the “Negro dialect” of a black person, but as in the Spanish word for the color black. The lesson in class that day was on colors, and this seventh-grade whiner evidently took offense at the Spanish language’s designation of the word “negro” for the color black, even though, it’s worth adding, the Spanish language existed long before the racial term “Negro.” As any kid on his way toward being a good liberal in life would do, he tattled on the teacher for her lack of political correctness. The teacher was fired and now she’s suing.

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Churchill on organised Islam  by Ataturk Society UK

“Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.” Winston Churchill 1899
CHURCHILL ON ISLAM “How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome …” Sir Winston Churchill; (Source: The River War, first edition, Vol II, pages 248-250 London).

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The Bullying Pulpit By Thomas Sowell
We have truly entered the world of "Alice in Wonderland" when the CEO of a company that pays $16 million a day in taxes is hauled up before a Congressional subcommittee to be denounced on nationwide television for not paying more.  Apple CEO Tim Cook was denounced for contributing to "a worrisome federal deficit," according to Senator Carl Levin — one of the big-spending liberals in Congress who has had a lot more to do with creating that deficit than any private citizen has.

Because of "gimmicks" used by businesses to reduce their taxes, Senator Levin said, "children across the country won't get early education from Head Start. Needy seniors will go without meals. Fighter jets sit idle on tarmacs because our military lacks the funding to keep pilots trained."  The federal government already has ample powers to punish people who have broken the tax laws. It does not need additional powers to bully people who haven't.

What is a tax "loophole"? It is a provision in the law that allows an individual or an organization to pay less taxes than they would be required to pay otherwise. Since Congress puts these provisions in the law, it is a little much when members of Congress denounce people who use those provisions to reduce their taxes. If such provisions are bad, then members of Congress should blame themselves and repeal the provisions. Yet words like "gimmicks" and "loopholes" suggest that people are doing something wrong when they don't pay any more taxes than the law requires.  Are people who are buying a home, who deduct the interest they pay on their mortgages when filing their tax returns, using a "gimmick" or a "loophole"? Or are only other people's deductions to be depicted as somehow wrong, while our own are OK?

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed out long ago that "the very meaning of a line in the law is that you intentionally may go as close to it as you can if you do not pass it." If the line in tax laws was drawn in the wrong place, Congress can always draw it somewhere else. But, if you buy the argument used by people like Senator Levin, then a state trooper can pull you over on a highway for driving 64 miles per hour in a 65 mile per hour zone, because you are driving too close to the line. The real danger to us all is when government not only exercises the powers that we have voted to give it, but exercises additional powers that we have never voted to give it. That is when "public servants" become public masters. That is when government itself has stepped over the line.

Government's power to bully people who have broken no law is dangerous to all of us. When Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department started keeping track of phone calls going to Fox News Channel reporter James Rosen (and his parents) that was firing a shot across the bow of Fox News — and of any other reporters or networks that dared to criticize the Obama administration. When the Internal Revenue Service started demanding to know who was donating to conservative organizations that had applied for tax-exempt status, what purpose could that have other than to intimidate people who might otherwise donate to organizations that oppose this administration's political agenda?  The government's power to bully has been used to extract billions of dollars from banks, based on threats to file lawsuits that would automatically cause regulatory agencies to suspend banks' rights to make various ordinary business decisions, until such indefinite time as those lawsuits end. Shakedown artists inside and outside of government have played this lucrative game.

Someone once said, "any government that is powerful enough to protect citizens against predators is also powerful enough to become a predator itself." And dictatorial in the process. No American government can take away all our freedoms at one time. But a slow and steady erosion of freedom can accomplish the same thing on the installment plan. We have already gone too far down that road. F.A. Hayek called it "the road to serfdom."  How far we continue down that road depends on whether we keep our eye on the ball — freedom — or allow ourselves to be distracted by predatory demagogues like Senator Carl Levin.

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