Obama Believes In Magic

[From article]
Historians commonly date the birth of Western civilization from the Greek development of mathematics. Greek mathematics was the first point of view able to regard the world as potentially comprehensible. While computational methods to solve practical problems existed as far back as the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations they were always ad hoc; a way of solving problems rather than of understanding the universe.
The Western revolution was based on the semi (and often frankly) religious goal of understanding the universe. From that world view flowed the ‘how’ as a byproduct — the technology we often mistake for the spirit of inquiry itself – of the quest for truth. The great empires of the time did not trouble themselves with the Western world view, with the source of the Fire, content with appropriating the results. They could simply keep their own cultural context and still use the borrowed fruit.
The Romans, the Hellenistic world and later the Arabs were content to simply adopt the technology. They copied mathematical results and physics and with it learned enough to slay and conquer — even the Greeks — an incident encapsulated in the death of Archimedes at the hands of a Roman soldier, who finding the deaf old abstracted man in his path solving a problem in the sand, stabbed the philosopher where he sat.
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The Middle East that Obama inherited in 2009 was largely at peace, for the surge in Iraq had beaten down the al Qaeda-linked groups. U.S. relations with traditional allies in the Gulf, Jordan, Israel and Egypt were very good. Iran was contained, its Revolutionary Guard forces at home. Today, terrorism has metastasized in Syria and Iraq, Jordan is at risk, the humanitarian toll is staggering, terrorist groups are growing fast and relations with U.S. allies are strained.
How did it happen? Begin with hubris: The new president told the world, in his Cairo speech in June 2009, that he had special expertise in understanding the entire world of Islam—knowledge “rooted in my own experience” because “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.” But President Obama wasn’t speaking that day in an imaginary location called “the world of Islam;” he was in Cairo, in the Arab Middle East, in a place where nothing counted more than power.
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The Left is contemptuous of costs because they don’t believe it matters. With the certainty of those who are devoted to magic, like those who burned the library of Alexandria, costs don’t matter because the government will pay for it. Like barbarians they don’t really see the connection between Truth — or God if you prefer — and consequences. Goodies are simply there. Arithmetic is only useful for convincing people, for making the spell work.
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How could Obama admit to error, when having built his power on sorcery he must now cling to infallibility? The power of magicians to command the weather is destroyed once the magician is exposed as fake. For a sorcerer a mistake is not mere error but catastrophe. So the idea that reality can be trumped by perception is now the ultimate in modern sophistication, a necessary device to support the world of magic.

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/06/23/sword-and-sorcery/

Sword and Sorcery
June 23rd, 2014 - 4:33 pm
Richard Fernandez