This is a clip from an early Nazi film seeking to justify forced sterilization on the basis of Darwin's theory of natural selection. Whatever the film says, though, don't fall for that anti-Darwinian humbug that there's any connection between Darwin's ideas and Nazi praxis. Gracious, no. That would be so uninformed of you:
No Left Turns asks a question that I've also wondered about:
Several blogs have linked to material about William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, noting that Dohrn and Ayers helped Obama start his political career in the 1990s.
The focus on Obama, and whether there is any significance to his connection (whatever it is) with Ayers, has obscured the real scandal here. Both Ayers and Dohrn are now faculty members in good standing at Universities in the Chicago area. Their views are virtually unchanged from those they held in their younger days. Moreover, their views are probably hard to distinguish from those held by a significant number of their colleagues. The scandal, in other words, is that no one has asked why that is the case, and how we might change it. Are our colleges and universities damaged beyond repair?
William Ayers teaches education courses to prospective teachers at University of Illinois at Chicago, a taxpayer funded school, by the way, and his wife teaches at Northwestern. Ayers was a self-confessed terrorist who bombed a number of buildings back in the sixties and tried to kill police. He would have gone to jail for attempted murder except for a technical mistake in the investigation which got him off. He has said recently that he wishes he had done more. His wife did go to jail for about a year for aiding and abetting the Weather Underground in a number of their crimes and according to Powerline has publicly and enthusiastically approved of the Charles Manson folks for their grisly murders of a pregnant movie actress and her companions. Today she teaches law at Northwestern.
One wonders whether the schools which employ Ayers and Dohrn would hire someone who bombed abortion clinics or the editorial offices of The New York Times. One wonders especially whether they would be permitted to teach education and law. I have a hard time picturing it.
Meanwhile, Guillermo Gonzalez, an astronomer who is by all accounts a fine man with a number of academic distinctions to his credit, was denied tenure by Iowa State University because he commited the grievous sin of thinking that the universe shows evidence of having been intentionally planned. So he's out of a job, and while he searches for a position through which he can make a positive contribution to society these two unrepentant psychopathic terrorists are being paid to teach our children to destroy their society, and the administrators and state legislators of Illinois are evidently fine with that.
What's more, this pair of violent felons is evidently chummy with the man who may well be the next president of the United States.
God help us.
Michelle Malkin has much more on Mr. and Mrs. Ayers and others who are connected to the man who promises us hope and change.
RLC
Abby passes along this cartoon which I thought I'd share for the benefit of those students who find the idea that "my" mind is all that exists a trifle amusing:
RLC
Senator Obama is being called an elitist by both Republicans and Democrats alike for his remarks concerning bitter Pennsylvanians who cling to guns, religion and xenophobia. I think this is a bit unfair, actually, because although it might be that he actually does think people who embrace religion, own firearms, and oppose illegal immigration are motivated by bitterness, one can not logically infer that from what he said. In other words, people who are bitter may do X,Y, and Z, but it doesn't follow that those who do X,Y, and Z are bitter.
Anyway, it's the assumption that elitism is somehow a bad thing that I'd like to consider in this post. Like prejudice and discrimination, whether elitism is an undesirable character trait depends a lot on the kind of elitism we're talking about. To explain what I mean I've dredged up a column I wrote for the local paper about ten years ago and which I've revised only slightly:
The current election campaign has spotlighted a rift between races in this country and sparked some agonizing over what should be done about it. Perhaps I'm naive, but I can't help wondering how much of the apparent gulf between Americans is a function of race and how much of it is actually a function of class. I'm willing to be proven wrong, but I suspect that for many people of all colors, the great social fault line in our society runs between classes; classes as defined not by one's income, but as defined by the moral principles which inform and govern an individual's life and conduct. And surely Americans of every hue populate both sides of this divide.
Unfortunately, use of the word class distresses some who complain that it is just an insidious code word for race, and that when people try to justify distinctions based on class they're really trying to rationalize old-fashioned racial bias. This criticism is valid, however, only in the unlikely event that all members of a given race hold identical moral convictions so that to mention their race is to identify their values. Failing that, the objection reduces to the rather disingenuous ploy of defining another's words to mean whatever one wants them to mean.
Other critics will point out that in our politically correct post-modern world "everyone knows" that no individual's values are any better than anyone else's and that to think otherwise is to be guilty of elitism; to which the appropriate response is: So what.
In The Moviegoer, novelist Walker Percy puts it somewhat differently, if no less bluntly, when he has a Louisiana matriarch named Aunt Edna address herself to this very issue. She says:
"I'll make a little confession. I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people in my class think they're better than other people. You're damn right we're better. We're better because we do not shirk our obligations to ourselves or to others. We do not whine. We do not organize a group and blackmail the government. We do not prize mediocrity for mediocrity's sake....Ours is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal....They say out there that we think we're better. You're damn right we're better and don't think they don't know it."
This proud woman wasn't about to apologize for the obvious political incorrectness of her "elitist" sentiments. Neither should anyone else. Elitism based upon moral principle, so far from being some awful sin, is in fact a virtue, a salutary antidote to the infection of moral relativism currently metastasizing within our culture. This may scandalize those who feel that nobody should be so chauvinistic as to think his principles to be actually better than the next person's, but the irony needs to be noted that those who feel this way evidently believe their own moral egalitarianism to be preferable to my moral elitism.
Aside from those enumerated by Aunt Edna, though, what exactly are the virtues which distinguish her "better" class of people? Without attempting an exhaustive list, it's probably correct to say for starters that, no matter what their race, men and women of this class take a great deal of pride in their work, their property, and their character. They assume responsibility for their actions. They strive to be cordial, courteous, and considerate of others. They're dependable, trustworthy, and temperate, willing to defer short-term gratification for long-term benefit. They're frugal, faithful to their spouses, and committed to the well-being of their families. They're mindful of the fact that children do not raise themselves very well and that properly ushering a child into adulthood requires an enormous investment of time, energy, and self-sacrifice. They enjoy and appreciate excellence, especially in the arts and other forms of entertainment. They esteem education, especially for their children, and possess at least a modest appreciation for the life of the mind.
Why should anyone shrink from affirming the pre-eminence of these qualities and from regarding those who share them to be of superior moral timber to those who don't? And why should the social levelers among us be allowed to succeed in making people feel there is something wrong with choosing to avoid the society of those whose lives and habits are the very antithesis of these values?
It must be said again that this is not a matter of race or economics. People of all colors and incomes cherish these virtues and feel uncomfortable around those who don't. Indeed, it is perhaps true to say that many people who share them feel more comfortable in each other's company, regardless of their ethnicity, than they do in the company of members of their own race who don't share them.
Moreover, when people are made to feel guilty for believing their convictions to be more noble than their contraries, or when substantial numbers of people are persuaded that the precepts one lives by are merely arbitrary preferences, none of which is any better than any other, then, as with money, the worse will inevitably drive out the better. The lowest moral classes will eventually succeed in establishing the behavioral norms of the culture, and the principles, or lack of them, which govern their own lives and which are in large measure responsible for their being lower class in the first place, will eventually percolate upward, like some toxic gas, and permeate the rest of society.
The denouement will be a social unraveling, corruption and disintegration that will substantially diminish the quality of life of everyone.
Three cheers, therefore, for Aunt Edna.
RLC
The Darwinists are in high dudgeon over the implication in the documentary Expelled that the Nazis were among the intellectual heirs of Charles Darwin.
Nevertheless, if people believe that all morality is subjective; that humans are simply animals with no soul; that there's no imago Dei; that we are locked in a struggle for survival one species against another, one race against another; that some races are more gifted by nature than others, and others more debased; and that killing and extinction are part of nature's grand scheme - then it's easy to see how those people might come to see a genocidal holocaust as consistent with the way the world is and not at all "wrong" in any moral sense.
Darwin believed all of these things and though he himself would have doubtless recoiled from any genocidal implications, some of those who were influenced by him were prepared to follow the logic all the way to its grisly end. Darwin's ideas, as distinct from his own character, were completely compatible with the thinking of the Nazis. Given the truth of Darwinian materialism might makes right and there is simply no inconsistency in promoting the "final solution."
On the other hand, it's hard to see how the holocaust could ever come about in a world in which people believe that there is an objective, transcendent right and wrong; that man is created in the image of God and that all men are equally loved by God; who believe that there is no innate competition between races or species but all were created to live in harmony with each other; that death is an evil intrusion into the created order rather than part of the normal order of things and that deliberately killing innocent women and children is morally abhorrent.
Had the Nazis and the German people fervently held those convictions the holocaust would never have happened, and had that set of convictions prevailed anywhere else that there have been similar genocides before and since the German atrocities, none of them would have ever occured either.
Genocide, at least in the West, has almost always been carried out by people who hold to the same worldview as Charles Darwin did. Maybe there's something wrong with the worldview.
RLC
Strategy Page brings us this news about the state of the battle against al Qaeda in Iraq:
April 22, 2008: Between mid-March and mid-April, al Qaeda suffered major losses in Iraq. American and Iraqi troops killed or captured 53 al Qaeda leaders. These include men in charge of entire cities (or portions of large cities like Mosul or Baghdad), as well as men in charge of various aspects of terror operations (making bombs, placing them or minding the bombers).
Most important, nine of the ten most senior men involved were captured, and interrogated. This led to locating more al Qaeda staff and assets. Hundreds of weapons and explosives caches have been discovered this year as a result of interrogating captured terrorists. The result has been a sharp fall in suicide bomber attacks, and the ones still carried out are against soft targets (civilians), including the recent funeral of two men earlier killed by terrorists. This was part of an al Qaeda campaign to force Sunni Arabs to switch sides again and support terrorism. But these attacks have the opposite effect, causing more hatred for al Qaeda.
This is pretty significant news, I should think, and I thought those readers concerned about the war would want to know it. I'm pretty sure you haven't heard it on CBS, ABC, NBC, or CNN or read about it in Newsweek, Time, U.S. News or in the major papers. For those media outlets the only significant news about Iraq, apparently, is news about setbacks and American casualties.
RLC
A lot of Obama supporters were outraged that their man was asked in his last debate with Hillary Clintion about his associations with terrorist William Ayers and anti-American preacher Jeremiah Wright. Complaints in the MSM and blogosphere were loud and numerous that the debates should be about issues and that the matters dwelt upon by ABC's debate moderators are just distractions.
I don't think so. Debates, to the extent they're useful, which isn't often, should only be about issues if there's a clear difference between the candidates' positions. In the case of Senators Clinton and Obama there's not a sliver of ideological daylight between them, and, besides, whatever differences may exist won't matter anyway when the winner moves into the White House. Very few presidents do what they said they would do during those debates, George Bush being an exception.
The purpose of a debate in a campaign such as we have today between the two Democrats aspiring to the presidency should be to show the party faithful something of the character of the candidates and which of the two is most electable. In that case questions about Obama's friendship with Ayers and Wright are very relevant.
After all, if it transpired that John McCain was found to have been friendly with an abortion clinic bomber and that he had had as his pastor for twenty years a man who consorted with known anti-semites, despised his country and held bigoted views toward blacks, I doubt that Obama supporters would think those associations to be mere distractions.
RLC
Here's an article that will interest everyone who owns a car. Car owners often hear conflicting advice as to how often one should change the oil in their automobiles. This piece explains why the old standard of every 3000 miles is no longer applicable:
For years the accepted oil change interval (as per the carmakers) has been every 3 months or 3 thousand miles, whichever comes first. Why? Because the oils of yesterday degraded and broke down when left in the crankcase environment for longer than the prescribed interval. The combination of heat, friction, and the oil oxidizing over time resulted in an unholy clothing of the engine's internal parts called sludge.
As an automotive machinist for a good part of my career, I can tell you that sludge is an engine killer. Sludge takes a greasy, cake-like oily form and plugs oil return passages and acts like a sponge and soaks up good oil to grow its grotesque form starving the engine of vital lubricants.
Once established, engine heat crystallizes it to a hardened rock of ughhhhhh, I have spent many an hour scraping and yes, sometimes chiseling established sludge from the inside of an engine before performing a machining operation on it! As the machinist prepares to perform a machine operation on a cylinder head, crankshaft, engine block or the likes he/she must clean their work meticulously before performing the prescribed operation. If the sludge is not cleaned properly, the result will be a failed engine.
Why this lesson about sludge? Because without clean good quality oil in your car's engine, it will develop sludge and cause premature engine failure.
Go to the link for the author's recommendation and his rationale for it.
RLC
I need to visit the Huffington Post more often; there's some remarkable stuff there. Take Sunday's piece by novelist Nora Ephron, for example. What she reveals about the seamy truth of her party is just scandalous. She writes:
This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don't mean people, I mean white men. How ironic is this?
Here's how ironic it is. The men she's talking about, the "white men" who'll be voting against either the woman or the black man in today's primary in Pennsylvania, are all Democrats. Liberal Democrats, for the most part. Ephron is revealing what she believes to be an ugly truth about white male liberals: They're racist, misogynist bigots.
According to Ms Ephron Democrat males who vote for Hillary are not doing so because they like her but rather because they hate blacks and those who vote for Obama are not doing so because they like him but because they hate women. This is a quite astonishing admission. The assumed repository of tolerance and righteousness in our polity, the Democratic party, is thoroughly infected with the bacillus of race hatred and sexism. Who'd have thought it?
She goes on:
To put it bluntly, the next president will be elected by them: the outcome of Tuesday's primary will depend on whether they go for Hillary or Obama, and the outcome of the general election will depend on whether enough of them vote for McCain. A lot of them will: white men cannot be relied on, as all of us know who have spent a lifetime dating them.
White men cannot be relied upon? I think you can pretty much rely upon conservative white men to vote for the most conservative candidate. Ms Ephron evidently means that liberal white men, as every woman knows, cannot be relied upon. Fascinating.
And McCain is a compelling candidate, particularly because of the Torture Thing. As for the Democratic hope that McCain's temper will be a problem, don't bet on it. A lot of white men have terrible tempers, and what's more, they think it's normal.
I wonder if a post that said similar things about blacks or women would be allowed at HuffPo. Perhaps the sacred categories of racism and sexism don't pertain when the object of ridicule and insult is white men. It is quite acceptable to smear them as much as one cares to. In the liberal universe racism and sexism are crimes of which only white men can be guilty so Ms Ephron is immunized against the charge that her post is perhaps one of the most bigoted pieces of writing ever to appear in the mainstream blogosphere.
Hillary's case is not an attractive one, because what she'll essentially be saying (and has been saying, although very carefully) is that she can attract more racist white male voters than Obama can.
Yes, and this is in the Democratic party, too. Who would have guessed that a Democrat of Ms Ephron's stature would so blatantly acknowledge that her party is chock-full of bigoted cretins? Next time a male of your acquaintance identifies himself as a Democrat ask him why he's such a racist pig.
RLC
Which is the most odious regime on planet earth today, you wonder? Ed Morrisey makes a good case for it being Communist China. The ChiComs have just sent a shipment of weapons and ammo to Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe to help him prop up his faltering tyranny there. This follows their support for Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Myanmar and their brutal oppression of Tibet. That's quite a record of support for human depravity.
Morrissey writes:
Wherever peoples are oppressed these days, two constants appear. One is the inevitable chorus of apologists with ready excuses for the oppressors, blaming colonialism from a century ago or Crusades from a millenium past. The other is the Chinese government.
In Iran, the Chinese refuse to meaningfully support the sanctions regime intended on both ending nuclear proliferation and the reign of the mullahcracy. In Sudan, Beijing props up the government that conducts genocides against its own people and allied with Arab Janjaweeds to conduct a parallel Islamic ethnic cleansing. They have kept Kim Jong-Il in power for decades while North Koreans starve to death. Now they want to prop up Robert Mugabe while Zimbabwe melts from a self-sufficient nation to a failed state of starving masses.
Why do the Chinese seem so insistent on subsidizing oppression? It's not just oil. That could certainly be the reason in Iran and Sudan, but not in North Korea or Zimbabwe. Rather, it seems to be a deliberate policy to support regimes that murder, starve, and oppress people. There is a word for that - evil.
After this latest proof of Chinese policy, the International Olympic Committee has even more reason to hide their heads in shame this summer when they supply Beijing with its propaganda platform.
Indeed. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in the 1970s we boycotted the Moscow Olympics in 1980. We should do the same thing to the Chinese whose support for Mugabe and the others is contemptible.
RLC
The media has suddenly lost their voice with regard to the fighting in Basrah in the south of Iraq. You'll recall that three weeks ago Basrah was being portrayed as the Waterloo of the Iraqi army (IA) which had been halted in its tracks, suffering casualties, numerous defections and ignominious defeat at the hands of Muqtada al Sadr's powerful Mahdi army.
The media at the time were at full volume crowing about the IA's inadequacies, but sage observers cautioned against concluding too much from just one phase of the battle. This turns out to have been good advice. The IA seems to have surrounded the Mahdi fighters in Basrah and, with U.S. logistical and air support, are decimating them in Baghdad. Perhaps because it's good news you probably haven't heard about this from the MSM, but if you go to Long War Journal, Bill Roggio will fill you in on what's been happening.
Here's a key paragraph:
Iraqi and Coalition forces have inflicted serious casualties on the Mahdi Army since launching Operation Knights' Assault. Four hundred Mahdi Army fighters have been killed since March 25, while Iraqi soldiers have lost 15 killed in fighting and have had another 400 wounded. More than 400 Mahdi Army fighters were captured and 1,000 wounded in the clashes in Basrah alone.
Somebody please explain to the folks at the New York Times that a mortality ratio of 7:1 is a disaster for the Mahdi army, not a decisive victory.
RLC
If you have been keeping up with the media churn over the recently released documentary Expelled you will have noticed that there have been some critical reviews, particularly in the more liberal media outlets. Perhaps these have you wondering about the trustworthiness of either the movie or the review. Before you decide which you should place your confidence in you might wish to read a very helpful review of the reviews. If that one's a little too lengthy you might settle for a shorter chortle at the New York Times' silly assessment of the film.
It should be kept in mind that this is not a movie about creationism, nor is it really primarily about the intelligent design/Darwinism debate. It's really about academic freedom and the suppression of a free exchange of ideas by the Darwinian power structure.
It opened this past weekend and scored the second highest opening box for a political documentary ever. Only Fahrenheit 9/11 did better and that was on a topic of broader interest and had much more favorable media buzz prior to its release.
RLC
A student of mine, a former Marine who served in Iraq during the early period of the war, responds to the video of Democratic leaders prior to 2003 pronouncing their conviction that Saddam Hussein had WMD and that he must be dealt with.
His reply is on the Feedback page.
RLC
George Will avers that modern liberal elitism got its start not so much with FDR but with Adlai Stevenson back in the 1950s. Barack Obama, Will writes, is actually Stevenson's successor:
Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many working class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns, religion and "antipathy to people who aren't like them" because of "frustrations." His implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry are balm for resentments they feel because of America's grinding injustice.
By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.
When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, "Yes, but I need to win a majority." When another supporter told Stevenson, "You educated the people through your campaign," Stevenson replied, "But a lot of people flunked the course." Michael Barone, in "Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan," wrote: "It is unthinkable that Roosevelt would ever have said those things or that such thoughts ever would have crossed his mind." Barone added: "Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture -- the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting."
Will explains how the progressive elite bypasses the people to implement its goals and objectives. The people, progressives believe, are literally too dull to know what's best for them. They have a "false consciousness," that misleads and blinds them to the nature of their true good:
... Because the manipulable masses are easily given a "false consciousness" (another category, like religion as the "opiate" of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism), four things follow:
First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats.
Read the rest of Will's essay to see how this relates to Senator Obama and his analysis of the "bitter" American.
HT: Jason
RLC
If you've ever wondered why President Bush thought Saddam Hussein was a terror threat to the U.S. and was working on weapons of mass destruction, this video very clearly explains it. He was listening to the Democrats.
Watch this and you'll have to wonder whether, if Bush lied us into the war, all these Democrats were lying as well. You'll also have to wonder how these same people can possibly keep a straight face while accusing Bush of going into Iraq under false pretenses.
RLC
The movie Expelled being released this weekend has the Darwinists in a swivet because it draws a link between Darwinian evolution and Nazism. This, the modern day Darwinists protest, is simply beyond the pale. Richard Weikert, author of From Darwin to Hitler, rejoins that indeed the connection is historically demonstrable. He offers for our consideration six key elements of Darwin's thought that were enthusiastically embraced by the Nazis:
1. Darwin argued that humans were not qualitatively different from animals. The leading Darwinist in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, attacked the "anthropocentric" view that humans are unique and special.
2. Darwin denied that humans had an immaterial soul. He and other Darwinists believed that all aspects of the human psyche, including reason, morality, aesthetics, and even religion, originated through completely natural processes.
3. Darwin and other Darwinists recognized that if morality was the product of mindless evolution, then there is no objective, fixed morality and thus no objective human rights. Darwin stated in his Autobiography that one "can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones."
4. Since evolution requires variation, Darwin and other early Darwinists believed in human inequality. Haeckel emphasized inequality to such an extent that he even classified human races as twelve distinct species and claimed that the lowest humans were closer to primates than to the highest humans.
5. Darwin and most Darwinists believe that humans are locked in an ineluctable struggle for existence. Darwin claimed in The Descent of Man that because of this struggle, "[a]t some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races."
6. Darwinism overturned the Judeo-Christian view of death as an enemy, construing it instead as a beneficial engine of progress. Darwin remarked in The Origin of Species, "Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows."
These six ideas were promoted by many prominent Darwinian biologists and Darwin-inspired social thinkers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. All six were enthusiastically embraced by Hitler and many other leading Nazis. Hitler thought that killing "inferior" humans would bring about evolutionary progress. Most historians who specialize in the Nazi era recognize the Darwinian underpinnings of many aspects of Hitler's ideology. . . .
Weikert's book, despite being assiduously ignored by Darwinists, is a thoroughly documented elaboration of the connection between Darwin's ideas and the attitudes toward racial purity and eugenics that were widespread among German intellectuals in the early twentieth century and which were carried to their logical conclusion by the Nazis in the 1930s and early 1940s. His book should be read by anyone who wishes to know more about the Darwinism/Nazism nexus. Ideas really do have consequences.
RLC
Here's an irony. College students at George Washington University, who would presumably not hesitate to sign a declaration demanding an end to our engagement in Iraq, nevertheless refuse to sign a declaration against genocide. Even the Young Republican organization on campus came down with a sudden case of writer's cramp when asked to append their signatures to the declaration:
When George Washington University senior Sergio Gor tried to get campus student groups to sign a Declaration Against Genocide last week, he thought it would be a no-brainer. Who, after all, wouldn't support a statement endorsing such uncontroversial tenets as the "right of all people to live in freedom and dignity," the equal dignity of men and women, and the freedom of conscience?
All too many, as it turned out. Having approached all the largest student groups at the school to support the declaration, Gor, the president of the George Washington chapter of the Young America's Foundation, was refused time and again. For most students, the message of the declaration, which is a central component of the Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, was simply too "controversial to support."
Read the rest of the article here.
I once watched a hawk swoop down and seize a chipmunk. The chipmunk, once secured in the hawk's talons, didn't even twitch. There was no struggle, no fight, just resignation to its fate.
Apparently there are a lot of chipmunks at George Washington. The University's namesake must be spinning in his grave down the road at Mt. Vernon.
RLC
Bill Maher continues his quest to become the world's most odious man with his recent attack on Pope Benedict. Having already expressed his wish for the death of Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh, Maher now calls the Pope a Nazi, the leader of a cult of pedophiles, and his supine audience exults in the hilarity of it all.
Maher's "humor" is as craven as it is sick since he knows he'll get nothing but kudos from all the beautiful people, and he'll anger only those yokels in the Catholic Church. He's been hammering Catholicism in particular, and American religion in general, for years but has not yet found the time to do likewise to Islam. I'm sure, though, that ridicule of Islam is in the pipeline. His writers are no doubt working even now on a few wisecracks about Mohammed and his nine year-old wife.
We'll let you know when Maher delivers the lines. His audience will certainly be rolling in the aisles, or at least part of them will.
RLC
NewsMax reports that signs continue to point to an imminent war with Iran:
Contrary to some claims that the Bush administration will allow diplomacy to handle Iran's nuclear weapons program, a leading member of America's Jewish community tells Newsmax that a military strike is not only on the table - but likely.
"Israel is preparing for heavy casualties," the source said, suggesting that although Israel will not take part in the strike, it is expecting to be the target of Iranian retribution.
"Look at Dick Cheney's recent trip through the Middle East as preparation for the U.S. attack," the source said.
Cheney's hastily arranged 9-day visit to the region, which began on March 16, included stops in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, Turkey, and the Palestinian territories.
Read the rest of the article. It may be that war is not on the near horizon, but much of the Middle East appears to be acting as if it were.
RLC
My friend Byron is a bookseller and probably knows as much or more about the Christian book market as anyone in the country. He was therefore especially interested in the post (Easy Way Out) on the study by David Kinnaman titled Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity.
He shares his thoughts on our Feedback page. Along the way he gently chides me for not being more sympathetic to the opinions expressed by the respondents in Kinnaman's study. He makes several worthy points, but in my defense I have to say that I'm just a wee bit weary of hearing the complaints that Kinnaman's research turned up. There is so much good taking place in most American churches and most of the people in those churches are such good and decent people that I suspect that anyone who offers up the complaints that Kinnaman's respondents did simply hasn't taken the trouble to look into the matter very deeply or is looking to rationalize their rejection of the church.
Sure, there are problems and embarrassments (I'm doubtless one of them), but compared to the good that is being done in our communities by our churches it seems almost churlish for outsiders to dwell on them. Here's a short list off the top of my head of good organizations and good things being done in the city and county where I live that probably wouldn't exist or get done were it not for Christians: Food Banks, soup kitchens, homeless and abuse victim shelters, food and clothing drives, disaster relief such as missions to rebuild Katrina-ravaged areas, crisis pregnancy counselling, homes for the elderly, medical facilities, private schools staffed by volunteers, immigrant resettlement programs, Salvation Army, Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, prison ministry, child care programs, and on it goes. I'm sure you can think of even more.
Thus, when I hear people disparage Christianity because Christians are "too judgmental" or "too political" or "too hypocritical," I just have to think that these people simply don't know what they're talking about. They remind me of the man who was asked after visiting Yosemite National Park for his impressions, and his only comment was that the road going in had potholes in it.
Byron tells me I sound grumpy, but the fact is that the people who sound grumpy are the people who overlook the enormous good the church is doing to focus on the relatively negligible negatives.
RLC