An AH-HA Moment

After reading this article from Dinesh Disouza, you will have one of the biggest AH-HA moments regarding our current President.

Please, pretty please read the entire article. Here are the highlights:

Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.

.......The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%. Yet he wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren't paying their "fair share." This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair--to the rich.

Obama's foreign policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that "our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be constructed at Ground Zero.

Recently the London Times reported that the Obama Administration supported the conditional release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber convicted in connection with the deaths of 270 people, mostly Americans. This was an eye-opener because when Scotland released Megrahi from prison and sent him home to Libya in August 2009, the Obama Administration publicly and appropriately complained. The Times, however, obtained a letter the Obama Administration sent to Scotland a week before the event in which it said that releasing Megrahi on "compassionate grounds" was acceptable as long as he was kept in Scotland and would be "far preferable" to sending him back to Libya. Scottish officials interpreted this to mean that U.S. objections to Megrahi's release were "half-hearted." They released him to his home country, where he lives today as a free man.

One more anomaly: A few months ago NASA Chief Charles Bolden announced that from now on the primary mission of America's space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the President. "He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering." Bolden added that the International Space Station was a model for nasa's future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Obama's redirection of the agency caused consternation among former astronauts like Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, and even among the President's supporters: Most people think of nasa's job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Sure, we are for Islamic self-esteem, but what on earth was Obama up to here?

........Theories abound to explain the President's goals and actions. Critics in the business community--including some Obama voters who now have buyer's remorse--tend to focus on two main themes. The first is that Obama is clueless about business. The second is that Obama is a socialist--not an out-and-out Marxist, but something of a European-style socialist, with a penchant for leveling and government redistribution.

These theories aren't wrong so much as they are inadequate. Even if they could account for Obama's domestic policy, they cannot explain his foreign policy. The real problem with Obama is worse--much worse. But we have been blinded to his real agenda because, across the political spectrum, we all seek to fit him into some version of American history. In the process, we ignore Obama's own history. Here is a man who spent his formative years--the first 17 years of his life--off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.

.......What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.

So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.

An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.

I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century. To most Americans, however, anticolonialism is an unfamiliar idea, so let me explain it.

Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races."

.......Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa. For Obama Sr. this was an issue of national autonomy. "Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?"

As he put it, "We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now." The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that "theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."

.........It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world's energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America's carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.

Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks to decolonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the government's leash. That's why Obama retains the right to refuse bailout paybacks--so that he can maintain his control. For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with them. He even promised them expanded business as a result of his law forcing every American to buy health insurance.

If Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anticolonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn't really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified under certain circumstances.

Clearly the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. And we can be doubly sure about his father's influence because those who know Obama well testify to it. His "granny" Sarah Obama (not his real grandmother but one of his grandfather's other wives) told Newsweek, "I look at him and I see all the same things--he has taken everything from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted. The dreams of the father are still alive in the son."

In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir "the record of a personal, interior journey--a boy's search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." And again, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself." Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, "My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!"

The climax of Obama's narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father's grave. It is riveting: "When my tears were finally spent," he writes, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father's pain."

In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.

Cost of Government Growth

From John Mauldin's weekly E-Newsletter:

But It's More Than the Deficit

We talked earlier about how increasing government debt crowds out the necessary savings for private investment, which is the real factor in increasing productivity. But there is another part of that equation, and that is the percentage of government spending in relationship to the overall economy. Let's look at some recent analysis by Charles Gave of GaveKal Research.

It seems that bigger government leads to slower growth. The chart below is for France, but the general principle holds across countries. It shows the ratio of the private sector to the public sector and relates it to growth. The correlation is high. (In the book we will show the same graph for other countries.)

That is not to say that the best environment for growth is a 0% government. There is clearly a role for government, but government does cost and that takes money from the productive private sector.

Charles next shows us the ratio of the public sector to the private sector when compared to unemployment (again in France). While there are clearly some periods where there are clear divergences (and those would be even more clear in a US chart), there is a clear correlation over time.

And that makes sense, given our argument that it is the private sector that increases productivity. Government transfer payments do not. You need a vibrant private sector and dynamic small businesses to really see growth in jobs.

And at some point, government spending becomes an anchor on the economy. In an environment where assets (stocks and housing) have shrunk over the last decade and consumers in the US and elsewhere are increasing their savings and reducing debt as retirement looms for an aging Boomer generation, the current policies of stimulus make less and less sense. As Charles argues:

"This is the law of unintended consequences at work: if an individual receives US$100 from the government, and at the same time the value of his portfolio/house falls by US$500, what is the individual likely to do? Spend the US$100 or save it to compensate for the capital loss he has just had to endure and perhaps reduce his consumption even further?

"The only way that one can expect Keynesian policies to break the 'paradox of thrift' is to make the bet that people are foolish, and that they will disregard the deterioration in their balance sheets and simply look at the improvements in their income statements.

"This seems unlikely. Worse yet, even if individuals are foolish enough to disregard their balance sheets, banks surely won't; policies that push asset prices lower are bound to lead to further contractions in bank lending. This is why 'stimulating consumption' in the middle of a balance sheet recession (as Japan has tried to do for two decades) is worse than useless, it is detrimental to a recovery.

"With fragile balance sheets the main issue in most markets today, the last thing OECD governments should want to do is to boost income statements at the expense of balance sheets. This probably explains why, the more the US administration talks about a second stimulus bill, the weaker US retail sales, US housing and the US$ are likely to be. It probably also helps explain why US retail investor confidence today stands at a record low."

This is the fundamental mistake that so many analysts and economists make about today's economic landscape. They assume that the recent recession and aftermath are like all past recessions since WWII. A little Keynesian stimulus and the consumer and business sectors will get back on track. But this is a very different environment. It is the end of the Debt Supercycle. It is Mohammed El-Erian's New Normal.

Business Lessons from Boise

The passage below is specifically talking about how and why Boise State's offense is able to be so effective in so many different ways. Beyond football, there are many valuable lessons from Boise on how we can be more effective in our business and how we can attack our competition:

Schemes

Boise State’s linebacker coach, Jeff Choate, once told me at coaching clinic two years back, “We run plays, we don’t have an offense. It makes it difficult to defend.” At that time he was working with the running backs. Before this project, I wondered how an offense can’t be a system. Coordinators pride themselves on establishing identities: “It’s what we do” is a common mantra among the coaching profession. Urban Meyer at Florida has his spread option, Chip Kelly at Oregon has his QB run game, Steve Sarkasian at Washington has his pro-style offense that he developed at USC. Well, apparently Boise was the Seinfeld of college football — their lack of identity is their identity. Although I may not have understood it then, the method behind this apparent lack of cohesion became much clearer to me after hours of study.

Boise specializes in getting defenses out of position to make plays by utilizing the three major essentials in offensive football: numbers, leverage and grass. “Numbers” means outnumbering the defense at the point of attack — i.e. more blockers than defenders on the edge, more receivers than zone defenders, etc. “Leverage” refers to out-flanking a defense at the point of attack — i.e. you may not have numbers but the angles are on your side. “Grass” harkens to Willie Keeler’s baseball adage, “hit ‘em where they ain’t.” Run the ball where there are the fewest defenders. As it turned out, Choate was right: Boise spends more time on distracting you then developing themselves. But don’t get confused: the point is that although the Broncos have the talent to be one of the best teams in the country and could simply overrun certain opponents, their modus operandi is to be patient and to take what the defense gives them — a true reflection of Petersen, their coach. The quintessential underdog philosophy, they wear you down by picking at four and five yard gains until they pop a big one. Watching them on film, it’s never surprising they score, but to a football junkie, the methodology of how they score is a work of art. Basically, Boise uses three distinct ways to score: (1) pre-snap leverage by the use of formation, (2) post-snap misdirection and (3) calling the unexpected — the dagger after lulling you to sleep

More to Make You Gag

Just in case the last post didn't make you sick, this from Senator Tom Coburn should push your gag reflex to the point of no return:

Do you realize that 1 in 20 Americans have now been officially qualified as “disabled” by the Social Security Administration, meaning they can longer work a full time job, and thus qualify for Federal disability benefits? If you’re at all skeptical that such a large number of Americans are truly eligible, you are right to question.

It is true that many Americans meet the test for these benefits, and receive much needed assistance. However, a recent investigation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) paints a troubling picture of the $159 billion program.

Its findings include:

• The program was responsible for at least $10.7 billion in overpayments from 2004-2008.
• 600,000 Americans receiving disability benefits have been issued commercial drivers licenses (CDL).
• A smaller sample of disability recipients also carrying CDL’s, estimated that 43 percent of these permit holders qualified for their license after the Social Security Administration determined they were eligible for full disability benefits. As a physician who has had to certify patients looking to qualify for a CDL, I can assure you that the two categories are mutually exclusive. One cannot qualify for a CDL and be classified as disabled.
• By comparing federal workforce and disability program data, the GAO discovered that 1,500 Federal employees may be improperly receiving payments, at a cost of $1.7 million per month.

This type of fraud is widespread throughout many federal benefit programs, and costs taxpayers billions each year. It will not stop until Congress does its job.

The next time you hear a politician say that raising taxes is the only way to balance the budget, remind them of the $350 billion that federal agencies lose each year to pure waste, fraud, and duplication. Demand they do the necessary work to oversee bureaucracies, and demand they eliminate fraud and waste before they ever mention raising our taxes again.

Not Exactly What We Were Hoping for Mr. President

This will literally make you gag:

In the first 19 months of the Obama administration, the federal debt held by the public increased by $2.5260 trillion, which is more than the cumulative total of the national debt held by the public that was amassed by all U.S. presidents from George Washington through Ronald Reagan.

........At the end of fiscal year 1989, which ended eight months after President Reagan left office, the total federal debt held by the public was $2.1907 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That means all U.S. presidents from George Washington through Ronald Reagan had accumulated only that much publicly held debt on behalf of American taxpayers. That is $335.3 billion less than the $2.5260 trillion that was added to the federal debt held by the public just between Jan. 20, 2009, when President Obama was inaugurated, and Aug. 20, 2010, the 19-month anniversary of Obama's inauguration.

By contrast, President Reagan was sworn into office on Jan. 20, 1981 and left office eight years later on Jan. 20, 1989. At the end of fiscal 1980, four months before Reagan was inaugurated, the federal debt held by the public was $711.9 billion, according to CBO. At the end of fiscal 1989, eight months after Reagan left office, the federal debt held by the public was $2.1907 trillion. That means that in the nine-fiscal-year period of 1980-89--which included all of Reagan’s eight years in office--the federal debt held by the public increased $1.4788 trillion. That is in excess of a trillion dollars less than the $2.5260 increase in the debt held by the public during Obama’s first 19 months.

More Mitch

Mitch Daniels from today's Wall Street Journal:

Time for Emergency Economic Reform

How about a payroll tax holiday, funded by a federal spending, hiring and pay freeze?

By MITCH DANIELS

Ronald Reagan enjoyed telling of the elderly Blitz victim rescued from her demolished London flat in World War II. A fireman found a bottle of brandy under the ruins of her staircase and offered her a nip for her pain. "Leave it right there," the matron ordered. "That's for emergencies."

A look around the American economy suggests that it's time to break out the brandy. By any measure, growth is anemic—alarmingly so for this time in what is supposed to be a recovery period. The administration's wild foray into trickle-down government spending has clearly failed. Funneling borrowed billions to government workers hasn't stimulated anything where it counts, in the private sector.

Moreover, the administration's big-government policies—most notably health-care reform—are holding back job creation. Drowning in new or pending regulations and taxes, businesses, banks and investors are understandably sitting on dollars that could be putting Americans to work.

Especially ominous are the implications of slow growth for the nation's burgeoning debt. The government's projections, which already point to national bankruptcy, rely on growth assumptions we aren't even close to achieving. They say the economy must grow at an average rate of 3.4% for 10 years—better than any previous decade in a half century. And that is just to achieve disaster, with debt rising to as much as 90% of GDP. To stave off catastrophe, nothing short of a truly vibrant, extended boom will do.

Most Americans don't know these figures in detail, but they have a strong sense that we are in a dangerous place. As I was leaving a small-town Indiana diner a couple weeks ago, a local said to me, "When the boys in there are discussing Greece, and it doesn't refer to the cheeseburgers, something is different." Odds seem strong that a degree of balance is about to be restored to the currently lopsided Congress.

Republicans may not reach a majority, but they will be looked to for constructive answers to this central dilemma of our era. A time-limited, emergency growth program aimed at triggering new private investment should be a primary goal of the next Congress, one hopes on a bipartisan basis.

What might such a project comprise? Here are a few suggestions:

• Payroll tax holiday. Suspend or reduce for the emergency period, say one year, the Social Security payroll tax on workers. Offset the revenue loss twice over through a combination of the following four policies.

• Impoundment power. Presidents once had the authority to spend less than Congress made available through appropriation. On reflection, nothing else makes sense. Plowing ahead with spending when revenues plummet is something only government would do. In Indiana, we are still solvent, with no new taxes, money in reserve, and a AAA credit rating only because our legislature gave me the power to adjust spending to new realities. I promise you that a president who wanted to could put the kibosh on enormous amounts of spending that a Congress might never vote to eliminate, but the average citizen would never miss.

• Recall federal funds. Rescind unspent Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds and any unspent funds from last year's $862 billion "stimulus" package, as well as large amounts of the hundreds of billions of "unobligated funds" unspent from previous appropriations bills.

• Federal hiring and pay freeze. Better yet cut federal pay, which now vastly outstrips private-sector wages, by 10% during the emergency term, and freeze it after that.

• A "freedom window." Might we try some sort of regulatory forbearance period in which the job-killing practice of agonizingly slow environmental permitting is suspended, perhaps in favor of a self-certification safe harbor process? Businesses could proceed with new job creation immediately based on plans that meet current pollution or safety standards, or use best current technology, subject only to fines and remediation if a subsequent look-back shows that the promised standards were not met.

• Accelerated or full expensing of business investment. Economists differ about its success on past occasions, and certainly it involves a degree of pulling forward investment that would have happened eventually. But it seems well matched to the current situation where so much money is cowering on the sidelines, and a burst of new investment might jump-start growth that enables more investment in the future. (Reports indicate that the administration is about to propose this very idea. If so, good.)

Surely there are better ideas or variations on these suggestions that a jobs-minded Congress could fashion. And clearly permanent tax and regulatory moderation is vastly superior to temporary. But to have a prayer of avoiding fiscal ruin, we need to go to economic general quarters immediately.

It may be fanciful to imagine that the Obama administration, chastened by economic reality and an election setback, might join or even champion such a plan. But no one has a bigger stake in the kind of private-sector growth it would attempt to generate. Any hopes of paying for their health-care and other spending schemes depend on it.

With or without Democratic help, Republicans should step forward with these or superior ideas. A stagnant, impoverished America will not be a greener or safer or fairer place. Grown-ups make trade-offs. Pass the brandy, then let's get busy.

Mr. Daniels, a Republican, is the governor of Indiana.

Unions - Not what they used to be

Interesting Union Facts:

1. Half of all American union members live in just six states: California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey (from Linda Chavez's article).

2. The bottom chart above shows that there in 2009 there were more public-sector union members (7.89 million, 37.4% of all government workers) than private-sector members (7.43 million, 7.2% of all private workers) for the first time ever.

Hail Caesar!

I like to think that I am a curious person with an inquisitive mind. That being said, I can honestly say I have never once thought to ask why in the world a Caesar Salad is called a Caesar Salad.

Let's not forget the words of one of my childhood heroes, G.I. Joe, who said, "Now you know and knowing is half the battle."

"The name conjures up a toga-clad emperor tucking into a spot of lunch before perhaps throwing a Christian or two to the lions.

But, actually, Caesar salad is less than 100 years old and hails from a restaurant in Mexico run by a man called Caesar Cardini - a restaurant so good that one day it virtually ran out of food.

In a fit of panic, Caesar threw together everything left in the kitchen: lettuce, croutons, Parmesan cheese, eggs, olive oil, lemon juice, black pepper and Worcester sauce - mixed it all together and presented it with a confident flourish to a group of film stars who’d flown in from Hollywood. It was a huge success and Caesar Cardini became a very rich man."

One more from Mr. Pascal's Pensees

We do not require great education of the mind to understand that here is no real and lasting satisfaction; that our pleasures are only vanity; that our evils are infinite; and, lastly, that death, which threatens us every moment, must infallibly place us within a few years under the dreadful necessity of being for ever either annihilated or unhappy.
There is nothing more real than this, nothing more terrible. Be we as heroic as we like, that is the end which awaits the world. Let us reflect on this and then say whether it is not beyond doubt that there is no good in this life but in the hope of another; that we are happy only in proportion as we draw near it; and that, as there are no more woes for those who have complete assurance of eternity, so there is no more happiness for those who have no insight into it.

Surely then it is a great evil thus to be in doubt, but it is at least an indispensable duty to seek when we are in such doubt; and thus the doubter who does not seek is altogether completely unhappy and completely wrong. And if besides this he is easy and content, professes to be so, and indeed boasts of it; if it is this state itself which is the subject of his joy and vanity, I have no words to describe so silly a creature.

How can people hold these opinions? What joy can we find in the expectation of nothing but hopeless misery? What reason for boasting that we are in impenetrable darkness? And how can it happen that the following argument occurs to a reasonable man?

"I know not who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am. I am in terrible ignorance of everything. I know not what my body is, nor my senses, nor my soul, not even that part of me which thinks what I say, which reflects on all and on itself, and knows itself no more than the rest. I see those frightful spaces of the universe which surround me, and I find myself tied to one corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am put in this place rather than in another, nor why the short time which is given me to live is assigned to me at this point rather than at another of the whole eternity which was before me or which shall come after me. I see nothing but infinites on all sides, which surround me as an atom and as a shadow which endures only for an instant and returns no more. All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least is this very death which I cannot escape.

"As I know not whence I come, so I know not whither I go. I know only that, in leaving this world, I fall for ever either into annihilation or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing to which of these two states I shall be for ever assigned. Such is my state, full of weakness and uncertainty. And from all this I conclude that I ought to spend all the days of my life without caring to inquire into what must happen to me. Perhaps I might find some solution to my doubts, but I will not take the trouble, nor take a step to seek it; and after treating with scorn those who are concerned with this care, I will go without foresight and without fear to try the great event, and let myself be led carelessly to death, uncertain of the eternity of my future state."

Pascal Pensees

From Blaise Pascal's Pensees:

Therefore I shall not undertake here to prove by natural reasons either the existence of God, or the Trinity, or the immortality of the soul, or anything of that nature; not only because I should not feel myself sufficiently able to find in nature arguments to convince hardened atheists, but also because such knowledge without Jesus Christ is useless and barren. Though a man should be convinced that numerical proportions are immaterial truths, eternal and dependent on a first truth, in which they subsist and which is called God, I should not think him far advanced towards his own salvation.

The God of Christians is not a God who is simply the author of mathematical truths, or of the order of the elements; that is the view of heathens and Epicureans. He is not merely a God who exercises His providence over the life and fortunes of men, to bestow on those who worship Him a long and happy life. That was the portion of the Jews. But the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of Christians, is a God of love and of comfort, a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom He possesses, a God who makes them conscious of their inward wretchedness, and His infinite mercy, who unites Himself to their inmost soul, who fills it with humility and joy, with confidence and love, who renders them incapable of any other end than Himself.