How Much Brain Do We Need?

The conventional wisdom is that brain injury unavoidably results in impairment, but Denyse O'Leary has a post up that strongly suggests that this is not necessarily so. I don't know if the inferences she draws from the data are warranted or not (She thinks the evidence she discusses refutes materialism by demonstrating that the mind and the brain are different entities), but it's fascinating reading nonetheless.

RLC

Absolute Evil

I am at a loss for words to describe the savagery of people who would kill their own daughter because she left a forced marriage:

A Kurdish woman was brutally raped, stamped on and strangled by members of her family and their friends in an "honor killing" carried out at her London home because she had fallen in love with the wrong man.

Banaz Mahmod, 20, was subjected to the 2-1/2 hour ordeal before she was garroted with a bootlace. Her body was stuffed into a suitcase and taken about 100 miles to Birmingham where it was buried in the back garden of a house.

Last month a jury found her father Mahmod Mahmod, 52, and his brother Ari Mahmod, 51, guilty of murder after a three-month trial. Their associate Mohamad Hama, 30, had earlier admitted killing her.

They believed Banaz had brought shame on the family by leaving her husband, an Iraqi Kurd she had been forced to marry at 17, and falling in love with Rahmat Suleimani, an Iranian Kurd.

Her former unnamed partner had raped her as well as repeatedly beating her, the court heard.

Hama, who prosecutors said had been a ringleader in the murder, was caught by listening devices talking to a friend in prison about the murder.

In the recordings, transcripts of which were relayed to the court, Hama and his friend are heard laughing as he described how she was killed with Banaz's uncle "supervising".

"I was kicking and stamping on her neck to get the soul out. I saw her stark naked, only wearing pants or underwear," Hama is recorded as saying.

There are terribly brutal murders in the United States all the time, to be sure, and Americans must recognize that we live in a diseased culture. Even so, we have not yet descended to the place where whole families laugh at torturing and killing a daughter because she has embarrassed them by leaving a marriage she had no say about in the first place.

And where are the feminists who have over the years repeatedly condemned the White House for denying funding for abortions in third world countries because that denial allegedly oppresses women? Where is their outrage at a culture that treats women as lower than dogs? Why are they silent?

RLC

Military Update

Here's a good update from Bill Roggio on military progress in Iraq. Also check out this site for information on Iraq that the lefties don't want you to have. As the summer wears on there has been a subtle shift in the news from that forlorn region. It seems clear that the coalition forces are gaining momentum and that as long as the voices of defeat and retreat in the media and Congress are not allowed to prevail, there is reason to be confident that the situation on the ground will be considerably improved, especially in Baghdad, by October.

We can save Iraq and effect a monumental change in the direction of history but only if we ignore the negativism of those who fear the loss of their own credibility and political power more than they fear the impact defeat would have on the future of our nation.

Some will ask how many lives we should be willing to sacrifice to bring stability to that region. My answer is that the stakes are so high that we should heed the words of John Kennedy at his inaugural about paying any price and bearing any burden. The cost of fighting in Iraq is high, but the cost of surrender would be astronomical. It's not the Iraqis for whom we fight, although they certainly benefit, but for the entire world and especially for ourselves.

We have lost 632 Americans in Iraq so far this year. That is a terrible price, but it doesn't follow that we should therefore abandon that mission. Two hundred thirty two Americans have been murdered in one city alone so far this year - Philadelphia, and the media shrugs, perhaps because Philadelphia is run by their party.

It may add a little perspective to note that more Pennsylvanians have been killed this year in almost every city in that state than have been killed in the entire country of Iraq. And I'm sure this is true for just about every state in the U.S.

In any event, casualties must be measured against the stakes, and the stakes in Iraq couldn't be higher.

RLC

General Patton Speaks

Jason links us to Mike Kaminski doing an updated George C. Scott doing General George Patton from the movie "Patton." It's pretty good but the Last Helicopter crowd won't like it.

RLC

A Man in Full

"We have a lot of work to do. The president already has the mark of the American people - he's the worst president we ever had. I don't think we need a censure resolution in the Senate to prove that." Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Perhaps not but you at least need an argument, and the senator, of course, offers us none. Reid, who has led a congress whose approval ratings have sunk to less than half of those of President Bush, is like the skunk criticizing the horse because he smells. The fact of the matter is that George Bush is far from the worst president in history (worse than Kennedy? Johnson? Nixon? Carter?) and may even turn out to be one of the best. Harry Reid, however, will be forgotten the day he leaves office.

Bill Kristol makes the case that we've been making, only not so well as he, for the fact that history will view George Bush's presidency much differently than current approval ratings would indicate. There are still two years to go, but Bush is on track to be regarded as a successful, perhaps even outstanding, president.

Those who get their opinions from the MSM, the opposition journals or Senator Reid will recoil from such a claim in shock, but I think it's true.

Here's part of what I wrote in October of 2005. I think it still holds today:

The economy is growing steadily. Note that the Democrats rarely refer to the economy anymore by way of criticizing the president. Yet our economic health is the most crucial issue, as the Dems insisted in 1992, in determining which party will prevail in an election. If the Democrats could use our economic condition against Bush they would be doing it, but they can't so they aren't. If the economy continues to grow - and with gas prices falling to less extortionist levels there's reason for optimism in this regard - the public will forget the troubles of the last two or three months like one forgets a dream upon waking.

Iraq seems to be progressing steadily toward a historically unprecedented Arab democracy. Despite the steady drizzle of left-wing criticism and negativity, Bush's strategy in Iraq might well ultimately succeed. It's still unclear if it will, of course, but if it does, history will hail his effort, and that of our military, as an astonishing political, strategic, and human rights achievement, perhaps the greatest that any president or world leader ever accomplished. Success in Iraq will reverberate and ramify throughout the entire region and around the globe for generations. It's very difficult to overstate the significance and importance of such a consummation.

With the withdrawal of Harriet Miers the president has been given an unusual second chance to appoint someone of the very finest timber to the Supreme Court. Miers may have been a good appointment, but there was cause for serious skepticism. Mr. Bush can now name someone about whom there is no doubt. Another conservative justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia, as we were promised in the campaign, and the legal course of this country could be altered for the good for the next thirty to fifty years. Such a nomination would also unify the president's base and make him much more politically formidable.

Assuming there are no further indictments, the Scooter Libby affair will scarcely register on the historical record. On the other hand, it could serve, as did Katrina, as a prod to rouse the administration from complacency. There are signs that this is already happening. We're beginning to hear noises about getting the budget and our borders under control. Success breeds success. If the administration recovers its legislative momentum it may even try again to reform social security. If by 2008 just some of these things are happening, or at least appear to be under way, George Bush, to the everlasting chagrin of the portside media, will be regarded as surpassing even Ronald Reagan and FDR.

This is not to say that the President hasn't tried to undo the legacy he's building. His immigration reform proposal was awful, but it lost and will consequently be forgotten, just like the Harriet Miers fiasco has been forgotten now that Samuel Alito is on the Supreme Court, if real reform is eventually enacted.

Add to all this the failure, so far, of terrorists to strike again within our borders and the fact that European elections have thrust into office in both France and Germany leaders much more compatible with Bush than their predecessors and all, or many, of the ingredients necessary to be regarded as a successful president are in the pot.

If it should happen that Bush's presidency comes to be highly regarded Harry Reid will probably have to be carried out of the Senate in a straight jacket, twitching and muttering, like Inspector Dreyfus in the old Pink Panther movies.

RLC

Hoaxer?

The New York Times asks just who is the "Baghdad Diarist"? Is he legit or is The New Republic, and its readers, being scammed again? Here's the NYT story:

It is a question that many people are asking The New Republic, the Washington political magazine that has been running articles attributed to an American soldier in Baghdad.

The author, who used the pen name Scott Thomas, has written three articles for the magazine since February, describing gruesome incidents in Iraq. Last week, The Weekly Standard questioned the veracity of The New Republic articles and invited readers with knowledge about the military or Baghdad to comment.

Since then, several readers and a spokesman for the base where the soldier is supposedly based have written in, raising more questions.

"Absolutely every piece of information that's come out since we put that call up has cast further doubt on that story," said Michael Goldfarb, the online editor of The Weekly Standard. "There's not a single person that has come forward and said, 'It sounds plausible.'"

Franklin Foer, the editor of The New Republic, will not reveal the author's identity but says the magazine is investigating the accuracy of his articles. In the late 1990s, under different editors, the magazine fired an associate editor, Stephen Glass, for fabrications.

The diaries have described some shocking incidents of military life, including soldiers openly mocking a disfigured woman on their base and a private wearing a found piece of a child's skull under his helmet.

The magazine granted anonymity to the writer to keep him from being punished by his military superiors and to allow him to write candidly, Mr. Foer said. He said that he had met the writer and that he knows that he is, in fact, a soldier.

It will be interesting to see if the liberal press has once again fallen victim to their own preconceptions, prejudices and wishful thinking. When you just know that our soldiers are cruel and callous killers then reports which confirm what you already know just have to be true. We'll see.

RLC

Update on Killing Christians

The Taliban have executed one of the twenty three Korean hostages they've been holding. In so doing they show the world once again the contrast between modern Islam (which is actually pretty primitive) and modern Christianity.

Pastor Bae Hyung-kyu (on the right in the photo below), following Christian tenets to their logical conclusion, traveled to Afghanistan to serve the Afghan people in any way he could. The Taliban, following Islamic tenets to their logical conclusion, show themselves to be blood-thirsty savages, reminiscent of J.R.R.Tolkien's orcs, for whom killing is a pastime. A more pellucid picture of the contrast between good and evil would be hard to imagine.

The next time Muslims go off in a frenzy over cartoons that they say make Muslims look bad someone should ask them how fiercely they protested the murder of Bae Hyung-kyu. My guess is they'll just make excuses for it.

RLC

Killing Christians? (Yawn)

Here in the U.S. you may not have heard about these unfortunate people:

They are twenty three Korean Christians who went to Afghanistan to work in hospitals and among the poor who have been kidnapped by the Taliban and threatened with beheading unless the Afghan government releases a bunch of terrorists.

As Bryan at Hot Air says:

It's hard to find a more stark contrast than that between the way members of two of the world's great religions are behaving in this ordeal. The South Koreans left their safe country and traveled to Afghanistan to work in hospitals among the country's outcasts; the Taliban captured them at gunpoint and are threatening to behead them in order to gain concessions from the Afghan government en route to recapturing power in that country.

These Koreans are living out the Christian faith in ways most of us can't and won't live up to. The Talibanis are unfortunately living up to their faith in a way that's become all too common.

Bryan tells us this is the lead story around much of the world, but in the States Muslims threatening Christians with death is apparently not newsworthy. Do you suppose that's because the perpetrators are Muslims behaving as we've come to expect of Muslims or is it because the victims are Christians and therefore not deemed worthy of media concern? I wonder what our media's reaction would be to the story if the hostages were, say, twenty three French physicians from Doctors Without Frontiers.

RLC

Do's and Don'ts

P.Z.(Zarathustra) Myers gave a talk to a group of Minnesota atheists last Sunday on the topic of a materialist view of mind and soul - to wit, that there aren't any such things. Michael Engor has some fun with it here. Check it out if you're interested in neuroscience and the mind/matter debate. It's funny stuff.

RLC

Immunity for John Doe

Buried deep in a Washington Post article on the Homeland Security bill which a Senate/House conference committee reached tentative agreement on was this piece of very welcome news:

The last obstacle was cleared when negotiators crafted language to satisfy a Republican demand giving immunity from lawsuits to people who report suspicious behavior. The issue grew out of an incident last fall where six Muslim scholars were removed from a flight in Minneapolis after other passengers said they were acting suspiciously. The imams have since filed a lawsuit, saying their civil rights were violated.

Apparently the Democrats realized that by continuing to oppose this provision they were grasping a political high voltage wire. Let's hope the provision makes it into the final draft of the bill, especially in light of this:

Airport security officers around the nation have been alerted by federal officials to look out for terrorists practicing to carry explosive components onto aircraft, based on four curious seizures at airports since last September:

San Diego, July 7. A U.S. person either a citizen or a foreigner legally here checked baggage containing two ice packs covered in duct tape. The ice packs had clay inside them rather than the normal blue gel.

Milwaukee, June 4. A U.S. person's carry-on baggage contained wire coil wrapped around a possible initiator, an electrical switch, batteries, three tubes and two blocks of cheese. The bulletin said block cheese has a consistency similar to some explosives.

Houston, Nov. 8, 2006. A U.S. person's checked baggage contained a plastic bag with a 9-volt battery, wires, a block of brown clay-like minerals and pipes.

Baltimore, Sept. 16, 2006. A couple's checked baggage contained a plastic bag with a block of processed cheese taped to another plastic bag holding a cellular phone charger.

Indeed, this all does sound awfully suspicious, but we wonder: If a passenger had spotted something like this and report it to the authorities, when in fact there was nothing to it, how many Democrats would favor suing the person who reported it?

We also wonder if there was something left out of the above reports. Might there have been another common factor in these episodes? Well, I don't know what, exactly, - maybe ethnicity and religion? Is there some reason why those facts have been omitted? Are they entirely irrelevant?Are we supposed to pretend that terrorists don't fit a profile in order to demonstrate what broad-minded and tolerant people we all are?

RLC

The Turing Test and the Chinese Room

Materialists have a difficult time fitting human consciousness into their worldview, because consciousness is a phenomenon which defies material explanation.

How does it happen that mere matter can produce qualia (e.g. the sensation of red or the taste of sweet)? How does matter produce a belief, a value, a doubt, gratitude, regret, or disappointment? How does material substance produce forgiveness, resentment, or wishes, hopes, and desires? How does it appreciate (e.g. beauty, music, or a book). How does it want, worry, have intentions, or understand something? How does matter come to be aware of itself and its surroundings? These are vexing questions for a materialist view of the world, yet some materialist philosophers remain unmoved by them.

Someday, they believe, computers will be able to do all that human minds can do and then we'll have a denotative example of how matter can produce the phenomena of consciousness. Indeed 57 years ago Alan Turing suggested a test for consciousness in a machine. In the Turing test, an investigator would interact with both a person and a machine, but would be blindfolded so that he did not know ahead of time which was which. If, after interacting with both of them, the investigator still couldn't tell which was the person and which was the machine, it would be reasonable to conclude that the machine, for all intents and purposes, was just as "conscious" as the person.

Proponents of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are confident that the day when the Turing test can actually be carried out is not far off, but many other philosophers are skeptical. Just because a computer can give the same answers to various questions as a person would doesn't mean that the computer experiences what the person experiences.

Philosopher John Searle illustrates the problem that AI faces with a thought experiment he published in 1980 that he calls "the Chinese Room:"

Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the book the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.

Searle goes on to say, "The point of the argument is this: if the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man does not have."

In other words, human minds understand, they feel and experience, computers do not. Minds, whatever they are, are conscious. Machines are not.

So the big questions are, what exactly is consciousness and where did it come from? The materialist answer is simply to deny that consciousness exists. That seems a little counter-intuitive.

RLC

Summer in the City

Journalist Michael Totten tells us what it's like being in Iraq in the summer. It sounds oppressive, but one of the points he makes in a somewhat incidental fashion drew my attention:

After having spent several days Baghdad's Green Zone and Red Zone, I still haven't heard or seen any explosions. It's a peculiar war. It is almost a not-war. Last July's war in Northern Israel and Southern Lebanon was hundreds of times more violent and terrifying than this one. Explosions on both sides of the Lebanese-Israeli border were constant when I was there.

You'd think explosions and gunfire define Iraq if you look at this country from far away on the news. They do not. The media is a total distortion machine. Certain areas are still extremely violent, but the country as a whole is defined by heat, not war, at least in the summer. It is Iraq's most singular characteristic. I dread going outside because it's hot, not because I'm afraid I will get hurt...

...Baghdad is gigantic and sprawling. It looks much less ramshackle from the air than I expected. Individual cities-within-a-city are home to millions of people all by themselves. The sheer enormity of the place puts the almost daily car bomb attacks into perspective. The odds that you personally will be anywhere near the next car bomb or IED are microscopic.

It doesn't sound nearly as chaotic in Baghdad as Harry Reid and the other cut and runners in Congress make it out to be, does it? By September it may very well seem even less so. Will the Democrats still be calling for withdrawal if it looks like we're winning? We'll learn much about their character if and when this question is answered.

RLC

Hate Speech

Some Hispanic spokespersons are pulling out one of the favorite plays in the leftist playbook: Smear those who disagree with you with the label "haters." Don't worry about evidence, the allegation itself carries all the power. Trying to build a case for the smear only weakens its force since evidence is almost always lacking anyway. Just call the opposition "haters" and the uncritical masses will swarm to your side.

The tactic is blatant demagoguery, but when evidence is not on your side, when reason is not on your side, demagoguery is often all you have and it often works:

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. - The nation's largest Hispanic advocacy group says it must come up with a strategy to combat "a wave of hate" its leaders say came from talk radio's efforts to sink the Senate's immigration bill.

"That had an extraordinary impact in the Senate, and as a nation, I don't think we should be comfortable with the fact that the United States Senate responded to what was largely a wave of hate," Cecilia Munoz, the National Council of La Raza's senior vice president for research, advocacy and legislation, told The Washington Times after meeting with NCLR affiliates to talk about a new strategy.

According to Ms. Munoz, it's "hatred" to want to control our borders, to limit who can come in, and to believe that we cannot afford to subsidize millions of poor immigrants. It's hatred to want the United States to be able to assimilate its immigrants and not to be a dumping ground for corrupt, dysfunctional states like Mexico. Ms Munoz's rhetoric is either dishonest or stupid.

I have a couple of questions for Ms Munoz and for anyone who agrees with her that opposing open borders is an act of hate. Is it hate that causes people, including probably Ms Munoz, to lock the doors to their homes or to build a fence around their property? Is it a sign of hate that people live in gated communities in retirement villages? Is it a sign of hate that people want to control who wanders into their home to avail themselves of kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom? If an indigent family in Miami were to walk into Ms Munoz home, raid the refrigerator, refuse to leave, and demand that she allow their relatives to join them, and demand that she pay their education, food and medical bills, would she call the police? Would it be "hate" if she did?

I doubt that many people would see any of this as a sign of hate, but our country is our home writ large. Just as we have a right, indeed a duty, to exercise control over who comes into our home we have a right and a duty to exercise control over who comes into our country. For Ms Munoz to claim that those who call upon Congress to effecetively exercise that right are engaging in hate talk is frivolous and asinine.

RLC

Thus Spake Zarathustra

The anti-theistic Darwinian P.Z. Myers condescends to come down from Mt. Olympus to help benighted souls languishing in ignorance discover the truth. How can we ever repay his selflessness:

There was an immense amount of speculation about my motives [for trashing theists]. People were arguing about whether this helps the cause of atheism, whether it hurts the cause of science education, whether it's all part of my plan to rally the godless to my uncompromising, invigorating banner, yadda yadda yadda. I hate to tell you all this, but in all the guesswork, no one, not even those sympathetic to me, got the right answer, except for Revere. The explanation is very, very simple, and you're going to kick yourself when I say it.

I said it because it was true.

There is no god, or to say it in the most optimistic and sensitive way possible for a rational person, there is absolutely no evidence for a god. In particular, there is no sensible support for the multitude of peculiar doctrinal, dogmatic, and delusional weirdnesses documented in this (much better) map. You've got crazy-ass megalomaniacal evangelical kooks telling people to hate their gay/muslim/hindu/godless/female/evolutionist neighbors, you've got mobs believing them, you've got people electing presidents on the basis of how fanatically they will wage a crusade, and you've got even more swooning with the vapors at anyone who criticizes religious belief. Religion makes you nuts. It makes ordinary people identify with invisible spirits, it turns them into caterwauling flibbertigibbet idiots at any slight to a magic man who has never done a thing for them, and it makes them center their lives around head-dunkings and cracker-eating and gibbering chants to an unheeding phantasm.

I'm not saying you're a bad person or even stupid if you're a believer. I'm saying that you are possibly wicked if you're promoting it, probably ignorant if you accept its contradictions with reality, almost certainly foolish if you think rituals will get you into heaven, definitely deluded by centuries' worth of lies, and most definitely oppressed by your deference to baseless superstition.

Let me interrupt to point out the sleight of hand to which Myers, and many other atheists, resorts. He states his conclusion, i.e. there is no God, and then offers as reasons for the conclusion the eccentric religious beliefs people hold. Even a junior high school student would recognize the irrelevance of his premises to his conclusion. The fact is that if he's going to assert that there's no evidence that God exists he's going to have to grapple with some powerful thinkers who have argued to the contrary, and this he avoids doing.

As for my cause, ultimately it's not anti-religion or pro-science education, although those are subsidiary goals. My cause is simply the truth - the truth stated plainly and openly.

So all those people squawking that they were offended were wasting their efforts. I don't care if you were offended. There is no god (or no evidence of one), and you aren't rebutting my claims by telling me how deeply your feelings are hurt.

You've been given your prescription, people of faith: you believe in a lot of goofy, stupid, ridiculous ideas. You can resign yourself to them if you aren't strong enough to part from them - I'm not going to follow you to church and drag you out with a choke-chain - or you can wake up. It's all up to you. One thing you don't get to do is silence the people who point and laugh.

As for those other causes, truth is always going to be anti-religion, and science is a process that aspires to uncover the truth, so I'm entirely self-consistent. It's those who think they can reconcile a mythology of lies with honest attempts to learn the nature of reality who have muddled objectives.

Actually, consistent is the last thing Myers is. Myers frequently makes moral judgments on one hand while implicitly denying the possibility of morality on the other. He frequently talks about about human rights and dignity on one hand while implicitly denying any basis for these values on the other. He is fond of reason's ability to lead him to truth, but his whole worldview calls into question the trustworthiness of reason as a generator of truth. He values science while undercutting all values.

P.Z.Myers (Does he think his middle initial stands for Zarathustra?) offers us an argument like the above, an argument unworthy of a middle school student, and then, tone deaf to irony, says that he and those like him point at believers and laugh. Whew.

RLC

Cheney Speaks

Stephen Hayes writes an essay in The Weekly Standard which offers us an excellent glimpse of the man conservatives love and liberals hate. The essay is based on his forthcoming book, Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President. Here's an excerpt that recounts events of the morning of 9/11:

Moments later Cheney spoke to Bush for the third time. The Secret Service had told Cheney that another aircraft was rapidly approaching Washington, D.C. The combat air patrol had been scrambled to patrol the area. We have a decision to make, Cheney told the president: Should we give the pilots an order authorizing them to shoot down civilian aircraft that could be used to conduct further attacks in Washington? Cheney told Bush that he supported such a directive. The president agreed.

Within minutes, Cheney was told that an unidentified aircraft was 80 miles outside of Washington. "We were all dividing 80 by 500 miles an hour to see what the windows were," Scooter Libby would later say. A military aide asked Cheney for authorization to take out the aircraft.

Cheney gave it without hesitating.

The military aide seemed surprised that the answer came so quickly. He asked again, and Cheney once again gave the authorization.

The military aide seemed to think that because Cheney had answered so quickly, he must have misunderstood the question. So he asked the vice president a third time.

"I said yes," Cheney said, not angrily but with authority.

"He was very steady, very calm," says Josh Bolten, then deputy White House chief of staff. "He clearly had been through crises before and did not appear to be in shock like many of us."

Cheney says there wasn't time to consider the gravity of the order he had just communicated. It was "just bang, bang, bang," says Cheney, one life-or-death decision after another.

The entire room paused after Cheney had given the final order as the gravity of his order became clear. At 10:18 A.M., Bolten suggested that Cheney notify the president that he had communicated the "shoot-down" order. Shortly after Cheney hung up, the officials in the bunker were advised that a plane had crashed in Pennsylvania.

Everyone had the same question, says Rice. "Was it down because it had been shot down or had it crashed?" Rice and Cheney were both filled with "intense emotion," she recalls, because they both made the same assumption. "His first thought, my first thought--we had exactly the same reaction--was it must have been shot down by the fighters. And you know, that's a pretty heady moment, a pretty heavy burden."

Both Rice and Cheney worked the phones in a desperate search for more information. "We couldn't get an answer from the Pentagon," says Rice. They kept trying.

"You must know," Rice insisted in one phone call to the Pentagon. "I mean, you must know!"

Cheney, too, was exasperated. We have to know whether we actually engaged and shot down a civilian aircraft, he said, incredulously. They did not. For several impossible minutes, Cheney believed that a pilot following his orders had brought down a plane full of civilians in rural Pennsylvania. Even then, he had no regrets.

It had to be done. It was a -- once you made the decision, once the plane became hijacked, even if it had a load of passengers on board who, obviously, weren't part of any hijacking attempt, once it was hijacked, and having seen what had happened in New York and the Pentagon, you really didn't have any choice. It wasn't a close call. I think a lot of people emotionally look at that and say, my gosh, you just shot down a planeload of Americans. On the other hand, you maybe saved thousands of lives. And so it was a matter that required a decision, that required action. It was the right call.

At 10:28, the north tower collapsed. The frenzy in the bunker came to a halt and, but for an occasional whisper, the room went silent. On the television, one floor after another gave way, a bit of order amidst the catastrophe. The building must have been charged, thought David Addington, counsel to the vice president, who was standing against the outer wall of the bunker.

Cheney, seated at the conference table, stared at the screen. Bolten and Mineta stood behind him to his left, Libby and Rice to his right. All wore virtually the same stunned expressions.

But the group in the bunker had little time to reflect on the tragedy. Two minutes later came yet another warning: An unidentified aircraft was in flight less than 10 miles out. Cheney again gave the order to shoot it down.

They waited for news. None came.

Read the whole thing. It's good stuff.

RLC

Viking Treasure

Here's an interesting story for anyone who enjoys antiques and archaeological artifacts:

LONDON (July 21) - One of the biggest Viking treasures ever found has been discovered on an English farm by a father-son team of treasure hunters, the British Museum announced Thursday.

The trove of coins and jewelry was buried more than 1,000 years ago, a collection of items from Ireland, France, Russia and Scandinavia that testified to the raiders' international reach.

"It's a fascinating find, it's the largest find of its type of over 150 years," said Gareth Williams, an expert at the British Museum who examined the items.

He said it was the largest such find in Britain since the 1840 discovery of the Cuerdale Hoard, a mass of 8,500 silver coins, chains, and amulets.

The BBC reported that the treasure could be worth as much as $2 million. "This is a discovery that isn't just once a generation, but once a century," said Jonathan Williams of the British Museum.

David Whelan, 60, and his 35-year-old son Andrew were trawling [with a metal detector] through a farmer's field near Harrogate, in northern England, on Jan. 6 when their detector squealed. The pair began digging, finding a silver bowl more than a foot beneath the soil.

The pair turned the bowl over to archaeological experts, who discovered it was packed with coins and jewelry. The bowl, a 9th century gilt silver container probably seized by Vikings from a monastery, had been used as an improvised treasure chest before being buried.

"We thought it was marvelous," David Whelan told The Associated Press. "But we didn't know for nearly a month what was in it."

In all, more than 600 coins and dozens of other objects, including a gold arm band, silver ingots and fragments of silver were found in and around the container.

Some of the coins mixed Christian and pagan imagery, shedding light on the beliefs of newly Christianized Vikings, said Gareth Williams, a curator of early medieval coins at the British Museum.

The booty was likely accumulated through a combination of commerce and warfare, Williams said. Its quantity indicated that at least some of it was taken by force, perhaps in raids on northern Europe or Scandinavia, he added.

The items were manufactured as far afield as Afghanistan, Russia and Scandinavia.

Go to the link for more on the find, including photos.

RLC

Brave New World

Leon Kass has written an interesting though lengthy article in Commentary titled "Science, Religion, and the Human Future." The essay offers us a perceptive look at where the naturalistic, materialistic metaphysics of "scientism," the belief that science is the key to all knowledge and whatever can't be known through the scientific method is not worth talking about, is taking us. Kass has many excellent things to say in the piece, but perhaps the most important is his claim that scientism is self-refuting. I find this important because of what it entails about the future. Here's what Kass says:

[O]n the scientists' own grounds, they will be unable to refute our intransigent insistence on our own freedom and psychic awareness. For how are they going to explain our resistance to their subversive ideas, save by conceding that we must just be hard-wired by nature to resist them? If all truth claims of science - and the philosophical convictions that some people derive from them - are merely the verbalized expressions of certain underlying brain states in the scientists who offer these claims, then there can be no way to refute the contrary opinions of those whose nervous systems, differently wired, see things the opposite way.

And why, indeed, should anyone choose to accept as true the results of someone else's "electrochemical brain processes" over his own? Truth and error, no less than human freedom and dignity, become empty notions when the soul is reduced to chemicals.

This is frightening stuff when you consider the inmplications. If all knowledge is just a series of chemical reactions in the brain there's no "true" opinion anymore than there are "true" reactions. Moreover, no one can be held responsible for the opinion they hold since it is a product of environmental factors over which they have no control. In other words, all knowledge is determined by our brain chemistry.

This being so, how does one promote one's ideas of what's true among people whose brain chemistry is ill-disposed to accomodate it? The ineluctable answer is that truth and tolerance will give way to compulsion. Different groups will seek to impose their will by the exercise of power. If dissenters are troublesome, then like Rousseau and totalitarians before and since have advocated, they must be eliminated.

This is the logical endpoint of the view that man is just a chemical machine. Machines have no worth beyond their usefulness to their masters. They have no dignity and they have no rights.

Kass continues:

No one should underestimate the growing cultural power of scientific materialism and reductionism. As we have seen, the materialism of science, useful as a heuristic hypothesis, is increasingly being peddled as the one true account of human life, citing as evidence the powers obtainable on the basis of just such reductive approaches. Many laymen, ignorant of any defensible scientific alternative to materialism, are swallowing and regurgitating the shallow doctrines of "the selfish gene" and "the mind is the brain," because they seem to be vindicated by scientific advance. The cultural result is likely to be serious damage to human self-understanding and the subversion of all highminded views of the good life.

Materialist science cannot answer the question, How should we use our technology? The question is nonsense in a worldview bereft of moral value. So, eschewing the moral questions, scientism ...

... tacitly preaches its own version of faith, hope, and charity: faith in the goodness of scientific progress, hope in the promise of transcendence of our biological limitations, charity in promising everyone ultimate relief from, and transcendence of, the human condition. No religious faith rests on flimsier ground. And yet the project for the mastery of human nature proceeds apace, and most people stand on the sidelines and cheer.

Like the German citizens of the 1930s, they stand on the sidelines and cheer as we hurtle toward a brave, new, and horrifying world.

RLC

Suicide by Political Correctness

The Senate failed yesterday to pass the "John Doe" amendment to the Homeland Security bill. The vote was 57-39, but sixty votes were needed for passage. Every nay vote was cast by a Democrat. Michelle Malkin has the details, including the roll call (Be sure to scroll down to watch the video).

For those of you who may not have been following this issue, the John Doe amendment was attached to the Homeland Security bill by rep. Peter King of N.Y. King wanted to immunize against lawsuits citizens who may erroneously report activity that looks like it may be terror-related. The amendment grew out of the case of the six Muslim imams who were behaving in such a bizzare fashion in an airport and aboard their U.S. Air flight last year that a number of passengers reported them to authorities. The imams are now suing these people, who have been designated as John Doe, and they stand to lose everything they own because they were concerned for their safety and the safety of their families.

It's not hard to imagine the chilling effect a successful lawsuit would have on others who observe strange behavior. It is hard, though, to imagine how anyone could vote against this amendment. Little wonder that the country does not trust Democrats to handle national security. These people disqualify themselves every chance they get from having the right to hold the reigns of power. Heaven help us if they get more of it in 2008.

Andrew McCarthy at NRO writes:

The Democrats' maneuver here is also an obnoxious assertion of state power over the individual: If the state subpoenas you for information, you are compelled to provide it to the authorities whether you want to or not; but if you want to provide it voluntarily in order to protect your community, the Democrats say, "prepare to be sued."

What possible good reason is there to silence people who want to tell the police they saw suspicious behavior? Under circumstances where we are under threat from covert terror networks which secretly embed themselves in our society to prepare and carry out WMD attacks? Planet earth to the Democrats: To execute such attacks, terrorists have to act suspiciously at some point. There are only a few thousand federal agents in the country. There are many more local police, but even they are relatively sparse in a country of 300 million. If we are going to stop the people trying to kill us, we need ordinary citizens on their toes. Again, this is just common sense.

Unfortunately, common sense is not a resource in abundant supply among congressional Democrats.

The good news is that the amendment may be revived in conference. You can find your senator's contact information here and find your House representative's phone and e-mail here. Or you can call the Congressional switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask to be put through to your Congressperson.

RLC

At the Center of the Universe

Byron sends along a link to an article by novelist Anthony Doerr who writes a lovely meditation on the Hubble Deep Field photograph that shows the universe to be populated with billions of galaxies. Doerr considers this picture the most important picture ever taken because it shows us how incredibly vast the cosmos is and how incredibly puny we are.

Every speck in this photo is a galaxy like our Milky Way.

In the course of his wonderment Doerr asks whether it can be "even remotely possible that our one, tiny, eggshell world is the only one encrusted with life?"

The answer to this question, according to some astronomers, is that not only is it possible, it's probable (See, for example Gonzalez and Richards' Privileged Planet or Ward and Brownlee's Rare Earth), but as Doerr exclaims elsewhere in his essay, whether there are trillions of earths or just one the circumstances are mind-boggling.

It used to be the case that astronomers argued that the Copernican revolution showed the earth to be an insignificant backwater in the universe and that it was foolishness to think that we were somehow at the center of things as medieval theologians said we were. It turns out, though, that the medieval theologians were more correct than they were given credit for. It appears that the universe pretty much has to be as big as it is in order for us to be here at all.

Scientists believe that the universe started in an enormous explosion of space-time and energy about 14 billion years ago. There was no matter at the instant of that initial "Big Bang," only energy, but in the milliseconds after the Bang matter, in the form of protons and electrons, began to condense out of the enormous energy produced by the explosion, and, as the nascent cosmos expanded it cooled and the protons and electrons combined to form hydrogen gas.

The hydrogen clumped in massive spheres to form the first stars and these huge balls of gas produced in their cores a fusion furnace that generated all the other elements necessary for life. This process took billions of years and all the while the universe was expanding, growing larger and populated by galaxies of these stars.

Eventually, some of the stars themselves exploded, spewing the elements in their cores out into space in great clouds of debris. Some of this debris was captured by the gravitational field of our sun and cooled to form molten spheres which cooled further to become planets.

This happened about 5 billion years ago, and out of the star dust that became earth God fashioned living things.

Now, if this is how creation came about then it took about 10 billion years for the conditions in the universe to be such that the raw materials necessary for life were available. All that time the universe was expanding, getting bigger and more beautiful with every year that passed until man appeared. So, and this is the point, the universe has to be as old as it is and thus as vast as it is in order for life to exist in it at all.

Man may be not at the physical center of the universe but rather at the ontological or existential center. As incomprehensibly big as it is, it all exists so that man can exist. That truly is mind-boggling.

RLC

Unimpressed

My friend Steve links us to an article by former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson who puts his finger on one of several existential problems that the atheist needs to confront but rarely does. It's a problem we've discussed often here at Viewpoint and Gerson starts off his piece this way:

British author G.K. Chesterton argued that every act of blasphemy is a kind of tribute to God, because it is based on belief. "If anyone doubts this," he wrote, "let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor."

By the evidence of the New York Times bestseller list, God has recently been bathed in such tributes. An irreverent trinity -- Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins -- has sold a lot of books accusing theism of fostering hatred, repressing sexuality and mutilating children (Hitchens doesn't approve of male circumcision). Every miracle is a fraud. Every mystic is a madman. And this atheism is presented as a war of liberation against centuries of spiritual tyranny.

Proving God's existence in 750 words or fewer would daunt even Thomas Aquinas. And I suspect that a certain kind of skeptic would remain skeptical even after a squadron of angels landed on his front lawn. So I merely want to pose a question: If the atheists are right, what would be the effect on human morality?

Read the rest of the essay to see how Gerson answers his own question. I said above that it's one of several existential problems that the atheist often avoids facing. To read a little bit about some of the others go here.

UPDATE 1: Christopher Hitchens offers a reply to Gerson that completely misses the point.

UPDATE 2: Years ago Wendy's ran television adds which asked the question of their competitors, "Where's the beef?" I'm reminded of these adds as I try to keep up with the flurry of articles asking the anti-theistic writers pretty much that same question. Where's the philosophical meat? Peter Berkowitz is one example of a writer unimpressed with the "new, new atheists." Taking Christopher Hitchens' god [sic]is Not Great as the best of the lot of the recent spate of anti-religious books he does a fine job of exposing the shallowness of the theological and philosophical pools in which these authors, despite their popularity, are wading.

Dinesh D'Souza adds Stanley Fish to the chorus of serious thinkers who find the arguments of the current crop of anti-theists to be worthy of little more than the indulgent smile one might confer upon a child's inchoate attempts at drawing a flower.

I'm sure many more thinkers will be soon rushing to the fray since the books by Dawkins et al. are such easy sport for anyone who has seriously thought about the matters about which they write.

RLC