Intelligent Design

Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost has an interesting debate going about Intelligent Design and Methodological Naturalism for those Viewpoint readers with a philosophical turn of mind who are interested in the question of how life arose. Warning: Some of the comments are pretty technical but Joe's arguments are relatively brief and easy enough to understand by a non-specialist who has read a little bit on the topic.

A Force For Evil?

According to this Fox News report 40% of Canadian youth think the U.S. is a force for evil in the world. Youth can be forgiven their stupidity, but the Canadian media and educators who instill this nonsense into callow minds cannot.

If Canada's youth wish to see real evil in action they might simply read this news report. The United Nations, determined to show the U.S. why it should withdraw from this tawdry organization forthwith, voted 156 to 6 with ten abstentions to approve a resolution calling upon Israel to heed an International Court of Justice ruling that called upon them to tear down the barrier that has reduced terrorist attacks by 90% and saved the lives of countless Israeli women and children.

Unfortunately, the spared lives are evidently of no moment to the august delegates in Manhatten, who voted, in effect, to have the murders resume. Their rationale was that the wall is working a hardship on Palestinian landowners in some regions, but one would think that if that were really their concern the U.N. could bring other resources to bear to mitigate the hardship. Instead, the U.N. prefers to salve the suffering of the Palestinians by adopting measures that can only insure that more Israelis will die.

Only Israel, the U.S., Australia, Micronesia, Palau, and the Marshall Islands voted against this odious resolution. Where was Canada? Canada was too busy teaching its youth that the U.S. is a force for evil in the world to vote against a resolution which would deprive Israel of any means of protecting its citizens from the savages who wish to blow them to bits. In a display of moral courage they abstained.

Isn't it past time that the United States washed its hands of this absurd institution? America should join together with those nations which pledge themselves to the values of equality under the law, freedom of religion, press, and speech, representative government, free and open elections, and establish an alternative to the United Nations. The U.N. is little more than a bunch of thugs masquerading as statesmen and we should no longer be party to the charade.

Wilson, Berger, and Chirac

Marty Peretz, editor-in-chief at The New Republic has some thoughts on a variety of matters including the Joe Wilson and Sandy Berger affairs as well as the attitude of the French toward their own Jewish population. About the Wilson episode he says this:

[I]n a lot of dining rooms where I am a guest here, there is outrage that someone in the vice president's office "outed" Ms. Plame, as though everybody in Georgetown hadn't already known she was under cover, so to speak. Under cover, but not really. One guest even asserted that someone in the vice president's office is surely guilty of treason, no less--an offense this person certainly wouldn't have attributed to the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss, Daniel Ellsberg or Philip Agee. But for the person who confirmed for Robert Novak what he already knew, nothing but high crimes would do.

Regarding Sandy Berger he asks:

So my question is: Did Berger, who knew that he was under scrutiny since last fall, alert Kerry to the combustible fact that he was the subject of a criminal probe by the Justice Department and the FBI? My guess is not. Kerry is far too smart, too responsible to have kept him around had he known. But if Kerry didn't know, it tells you a lot about Berger, too much, really.

Perhaps another question Mr. Kerry might wonder about is this: Evidently Bill Clinton knew that Berger, an important advisor to Kerry, was under investigation, so why didn't he tell Kerry about it?

On the French, Peretz notes this troubling anecdote:

[Chirac} demonstrated in an off-hand remark that, for him, neither Jews nor Muslims, for that matter, are really genuinely French: "we are witnessing racial events involving our Jewish and Muslim compatriots. ... Sometimes just simple Frenchmen are attacked." This is an ugly dichotomy. But it is not new. After the terrorist bombing of the rue Copernic synagogue on October 3, 1980, Raymond Barre, the French prime minister, alluded to this "odious act which intended to strike Jews [and] struck innocent Frenchmen." Of course, Chirac and Barre are from the center-right and right where anti-Semitism has always nested. But such views are now a staple of the oh, so enlightened left, as well. French hatred of Jews now goes wall-to-wall. And French hatred of Israel, too. A few days ago, France went into a frenzy to mobilize the countries of the European Union at the UN to vote "yes" on the General Assembly resolution calling on Israel to take down the security barrier it is building against Palestinian terror. Many fatuous reasons were mustered to support this demand. But the real reason that France and some others oppose the fence is that it works.

There's more at TNR Online.