News

Yazidi girls who managed to escape Islamic State tell their stories

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In the radically leftist New York Times, of all places.

Excerpt:

The 15-year-old girl, crying and terrified, refused to release her grip on her sister’s hand. Days earlier, Islamic State fighters had torn the girls from their family, and now were trying to split them up and distribute them as spoils of war.

The jihadist who had selected the 15-year-old as his prize pressed a pistol to her head, promising to pull the trigger. But it was only when the man put a knife to her 19-year-old sister’s neck that she finally relented, taking her next step in a dark odyssey of abduction and abuse at the hands of the Islamic State.

The sisters were among several thousand girls and young women from the minority Yazidi religion who were seized by the Islamic State in northernIraq in early August.

The 15-year-old is also among a small number of kidnapping victims who have managed to escape, bringing with them stories of a coldly systemized industry of slavery.

Their accounts tell of girls and young women separated from their families, divvied up or traded among the Islamic State’s men, ordered to convert to Islam, subjected to forced marriages and repeatedly raped.

You might think that this would be a big concern to Sandra Fluke feminists here in the West, but it isn’t. They all voted Democrat so that our armed forces would pull out and when we are not present we create a vacuum where this sort of behavior becomes possible.

Anyway, back to the Yazidi girls. I was a bit curious to see whether the Quran and Hadith teach that this practice is OK.

Answering Muslims has a listing of verses, and yes – Muslims are allowed to rape captive girls. Moreover, they are allowed to rape women who are already married – as long as they kill the husbands first. You might think that would be seen as adultery, and a serious crime to those who believe the Ten Commandments, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for Muslims – the Quran is all in favor of it. Just think about that for a minute. Think of the fear that a girl feels being kidnapped from her family and then raped, or seeing her husband murdered and then raped. This is the religion that Obama is so insistent is a religion of peace. And don’t expect the moral relativists on the secular left to condemn it, they’ve jettisoned God and so they have no ground to condemn other cultures. They believe in cultural relativism – different things are right in different times and places. Atheists may disagree with rape and sex slavery, like they disagree with varieties of ethnic food, but rape and sex slavery are not objectively wrong on atheism.

I just want to contrast the Muslim view of women with the Christian view of women. In Christianity, men are commanded to be abstain from sex outside of marriage. No sexual intercourse outside of marriage is permitted. Men are commanded to love their wives as Christ loved the church – i.e., to die for them if necessary as a way of loving them self-sacrificially.

Take a look Ephesians 5:22-33: [ESV]

22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.

23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.

24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,

26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word,

27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.

29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church,

30 because we are members of his body.

31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

33 However,let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

In Christianity, the man has a self-sacrificial obligation to love the woman. He has to sacrifice his own needs and own interests in order to care for her and treat her as worthy and precious. It’s from these Christian convictions that chivalry emerged – a standard of conduct that aims to protect women and love them romantically. There is no chastity in Islam. There is no chivalry in Islam. There is rape in Islam. There is adultery in Islam. It’s not a moral religion, and it’s remarkable to me that anyone would stand in front of a teleprompter and claim that they are moral with a straight face. If you want to be a good person, and not frighten and abuse women, then don’t be a Muslim.

By the way, it’s interesting to look at the recent comments by the secular leftist President of the United States. After a terrorist attack against a Jewish synagogue, the President urged both sides to refrain from violence. That’s like telling a victim of rape and her rapist to refrain from future rapes. But that’s not all. President Moral Equivalence also recently said that the beheadings conducted by Islamic State “represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith“. Least of all. That means that it is more likely that Christians and Jews would behead their enemies than it is that Muslims would. This is the level of amorality we are dealing with in Barack Obama. The man simply cannot do morality.

News

Japan in recession after following Paul Krugman’s Keynesnian advice

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Here’s the news story as reported by CBC:

Japan’s economy unexpectedly slipped back into recession as housing and business investment dropped following a sales tax hike, hobbling its ability to help drive the global recovery.

The world’s third-largest economy contracted at a 1.6 per cent annual pace in the July-September quarter, the government said Monday, confounding expectations that it would rebound after a big drop the quarter before.

The news cast a pall over financial markets: Japan’s share benchmark fell 3 per cent, and many others in Asia also declined. Shares were lower in early trading in Europe and Dow Jones and S&P futures were off 0.5 per cent, suggesting a dismal start for the week on Wall Street.

This Daily Signal article by respected economist Stephen Moore explains what led to this mess:

The tenets of Lord Keynes and his modern disciples have been put on trial in Japan, and the verdict is not a happy one. The rest of the world, not least of all the U.S., ignores these lessons at its own peril.

The engine of growth that created the Land of the Rising Sun economic miracle in the post-World War II era first began to falter in the early 1990s in large part because of a centrally planned industrial policy model.

The panicked response to the downturn was to flood the economy with a continuing series of Keynesian monetary and spending stimulus injections.

None of it has worked.

The collapse of Japan’s stock market tells the whole story. In December 1989, the Nikkei 225 index stood at a lofty 38,900. Today, almost a quarter-century later, the index stands at just under 16,000.

In 25 years Japan has experienced a nearly 3/5 liquidation of its financial wealth.

Japan has directed tens of billions of dollars into public works projects — “investments,” as President Obama calls them. This was paid for with debt. In the last two decades, Japan’s debt burden catapulted from 19% of GDP, among the lowest in the industrialized world, to over 142%, among the highest.

The government spending coincided with a monetary policy almost unprecedented in its looseness. From the late 1980s through 2000, the central bank’s balance sheet more than doubled — a precursor to the “quantitative easing” carried out by the U.S. Federal Reserve. And since 2000, the balance sheet has doubled once again.

Inflation rates in Japan are bearing down on 4% — a near-high among major competitors.

The result? The expected Keynesian “multiplier effect” from spending and a flood of yen into the market never arrived.

Housing starts in Japan are still lower than the level nearly 25 years ago. Unemployment, still low by international standards, is nearly twice the level of 1990, and wages have been flat.

Labor force participation continues to trend downward as well — falling by around 4 percentage points over the last two decades.

Yet, liberal economists have urged Japan to keep the stimulus coming. Last winter, the New York Times’ Paul Krugman exulted in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s expansionary fiscal and monetary policies.

“So, how is Abenomics working?” he wrote. “The overall verdict on Japan’s effort to turn its economy around is so far, so good. If Abenomics works, it will serve a dual purpose — giving Japan itself a much-needed boost and the rest of us an even more-needed antidote to policy lethargy.”

Japan, Krugman predicted, “may also end up showing the rest of us the way out” of stagnation.

Forbes magazine confirms leftist “economist” Paul Krugman’s detailed advice to Japan:

In the 1990s it was Krugman who most loudly championed Japan’s innumerable and reckless “stimulus” schemes, together with dozens of rounds of “quantitative easing” (fiat money printing). Japan followed his advice and ever since then has suffered a secular stagnation. Since 1990 Japan’s public debt has ballooned from 68% to 233% of GDP; its money supply is up 286%, while its industrial output is lower by 3.4% and its equity index is down by 73%. This is what Keynesians “stimulus” has done for Japan – and Krugman wants the same for the U.S.

Mr. Krugman repeatedly invokes the magic multiplier, the bogus claim that when we spend our own dollar we boost GDP by a dollar, but when the government takes it and spends it, GDP is boosted by $1.40. Wow. Fabulous. Government spending not only “pays for itself,” but more than pays for itself. On this view, were government to take everything we earned and spend it, the economy might well expand to the moon. Is it magic – or voodoo?

I notice that leftists at the BBC are calling the failure a “surprise“.

Where did Abenomics go wrong?

In the spring of 2013, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe launched an ambitious growth strategy that rapidly became known as Abenomics.

Its aim was to drag Japan’s economy out of 20 years of deflation and put it back on the road to growth. Billions of dollars were pumped into the economy through stimulus spending. The Bank of Japan went on an even bigger spree, printing hundreds of billions of dollars of new money and using it to buy government bonds.

And the leftist New York Times is calling it “unexpected“:

The surprise recession underscores the difficulties faced by Mr. Abe, who won power two years ago on a pledge to reinvigorate the economy and end his country’s long streak of wage and consumer-price declines. His agenda, dubbed Abenomics, has focused largely on stimulus measures, in particular an expanded program of asset purchases by the central bank. Yet its impact, economists say, has been dulled by the tax increase, which was approved under a previous government.

[…]Then, in early 2014, Mr Abe’s government took a calculated gamble. With the economy growing he could risk putting up taxes for the first time in nearly 20 years. Consumption (purchase) tax would rise from 5 to 8%. The tax rise was urgently needed to plug the giant hole in Japan’s public finances.

Why does anyone take economic advice from people on the left like Paul Krugman? Raising taxes, increasing debt and more government spending never helps the economy grow. Certainly not at the rate that pro-growth policies do.

We need to cut our corporate tax, which is the highest in the world. We need to cut spending and cut government duplication and waste. We need to privatize inefficient government programs. We need to reward work instead of dependency. We need to stop borrowing money and raising our national debt. We need to stop printing money, aka – quantitative easing. We need to raise interest rates and encourage saving instead of spending.

Commentary

Is asking “Am I going to Hell?” a good response to scientific arguments for theism?

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I want to use this woman’s story to show how sensible atheists reach a belief in God.

Excerpt:

I don’t know when I first became a skeptic. It must have been around age 4, when my mother found me arguing with another child at a birthday party: “But how do you know what the Bible says is true?” By age 11, my atheism was so widely known in my middle school that a Christian boy threatened to come to my house and “shoot all the atheists.” My Christian friends in high school avoided talking to me about religion because they anticipated that I would tear down their poorly constructed arguments. And I did.

As I set off in 2008 to begin my freshman year studying government at Harvard (whose motto is Veritas, “Truth”), I could never have expected the change that awaited me.

It was a brisk November when I met John Joseph Porter. Our conversations initially revolved around conservative politics, but soon gravitated toward religion. He wrote an essay for the Ichthus, Harvard’s Christian journal, defending God’s existence. I critiqued it. On campus, we’d argue into the wee hours; when apart, we’d take our arguments to e-mail. Never before had I met a Christian who could respond to my most basic philosophical questions: How does one understand the Bible’s contradictions? Could an omnipotent God make a stone he could not lift? What about the Euthyphro dilemma: Is something good because God declared it so, or does God merely identify the good? To someone like me, with no Christian background, resorting to an answer like “It takes faith” could only be intellectual cowardice. Joseph didn’t do that.

And he did something else: He prodded me on how inconsistent I was as an atheist who nonetheless believed in right and wrong as objective, universal categories. Defenseless, I decided to take a seminar on meta-ethics. After all, atheists had been developing ethical systems for 200-some years. In what I now see as providential, my atheist professor assigned a paper by C. S. Lewis that resolved the Euthyphro dilemma, declaring, “God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God.”

Joseph also pushed me on the origins of the universe. I had always believed in the Big Bang. But I was blissfully unaware that the man who first proposed it, Georges Lemaître, was a Catholic priest. And I’d happily ignored the rabbit trail of a problem of what caused the Big Bang, and what caused that cause, and so on.

By Valentine’s Day, I began to believe in God. There was no intellectual shame in being a deist, after all, as I joined the respectable ranks of Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers.

I wouldn’t stay a deist for long. A Catholic friend gave me J. Budziszewski’s book Ask Me Anything, which included the Christian teaching that “love is a commitment of the will to the true good of the other person.” This theme—of love as sacrifice for true good—struck me. The Cross no longer seemed a grotesque symbol of divine sadism, but a remarkable act of love. And Christianity began to look less strangely mythical and more cosmically beautiful.

So, I want to point out the progression of her beliefs from atheist to deist to Christian. First, she listened to the scientific arguments for God’s existence, which took her to deism, which is a variety of theism where God just creates the universe and then doesn’t interfere with it after. Those arguments, the Big Bang and the cosmic fine-tuning, were enough for her to falsify atheism and prove some sort of theism. After that, she remained open to the evidence for Christian theism, and finally got there after looking at other evidence.

But this makes me think of how some of the atheists that I talk to do the exact opposite of what she did. I start off by explaining to them scientific evidence for a Creator and Designer. I explain the mainstream discoveries that confirm an origin of the universe (e.g. – light element abundance predictions and observations), and I cite specific examples of fine-tuning, (e.g. – the gravitational constant). I explain protein sequencing and folding, and calculate the probabilities of getting a protein by chance. I explain the sudden origin of the phyla in the Cambrian explosion, and show why naturalistic explanations fail. I talk about the fine-tuning needed to get galaxies, solar systems and planets to support life. But many of these atheists don’t become deists like the honest atheist in the story. Why not?

Well, the reason why not is because they interrupt the stream of scientific evidence coming out of my mouth and they start to ask me questions that have nothing to do with what we can know through science. See, evangelism is like building a house. You have to start with the foundation, the walls, the plumbing, the electricity, etc., but you can’t know all the specific details about furniture and decorations at the beginning. But militant atheists don’t care that you are able to establish the foundations of Christian theism – they want to jump right to the very fine-grained details, and use that to justify not not building anything at all. Just as you are proving all the main planks of a theistic worldview with science, they start asking “am I going to Hell?” and telling you “God is immoral for killing Canaanite children”, etc. They want to stop the construction of the house by demanding that you build everything at once. But, it is much easier to accept miracles like the virgin birth if you have a God who created the universe first. The foundation comes first, it makes the later stuff easier to do.

So rather than adjust their worldview to the strong scientific evidence, and then leave the puzzling about Hell and Old Testament history for later, they want to refute the good scientific arguments with “Am I going to Hell?”. How does complaining about Hell and unanswered prayer a response to scientific evidence? It’s not! But I think that this does explain why atheists remain atheists in the face of all the scientific evidence against naturalism. They insulate their worldview from the progress of science by focusing on their emotional disappointment that they are not God and that God isn’t doing what they want him to do. That’s the real issue. Authority and autonomy. In my experience, they are usually not accountable to science, although there are, thank God, exceptions to that rule.