With Angela

The author of Angela's Ashes, one of the best books of the last twenty years, died Sunday of complications from skin cancer. Frank McCourt was 78 and his story of growing up poor in Ireland was read and loved by millions around the world. The book won a Pulitzer Prize when it came out a dozen or so years ago.

The Daily News has a story by Denis Hamil that gives us a glimpse of what Frank McCourt was like. If you read Angela's Ashes you'll want to read Hamil's column.

If you've never read Angela's Ashes I can't think of a better book to take to the beach.

RLC

Unchristian

It's the conviction of David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group, a religious research organization, and his co-author, Gabe Lyons, that Christianity has an image problem. Kinnaman and Lyons are two young men who set out to determine through polling and interviews exactly what young people (18-40) who stood outside the faith thought of Christianity and Christians.

They published their findings two years ago in an excellent book titled Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks of Christianity, and the results aren't flattering. Fairly or unfairly, justifiably or unjustifiably, pluralities of younger adults see Christians as hypocritical, insincere, homophobic, naive, too political, and judgmental.

Now this is not how Christians see themselves, of course, and so the news is hard to take. Nevertheless, whether there are good grounds for thinking this way of Christians or not, and the authors cite a lot of anecdotal evidence that certainly justifies at least some of these perceptions, this is how millions of "outsiders" do in fact see those who claim to be followers of one who was none of those things.

Though not without its irritations, this is a book that every Christian, certainly every Christian in leadership or ministry positions, really should read. Only by knowing what those outside the church have experienced and come to believe about Christianity can there be any chance of changing those beliefs.

Kinnaman and Lyons give a chapter to each of the perceptions listed above and explain how they arrive at their conclusions. For example, their data show that in the cohort of outsiders from 16 to 29 years of age 91% think Christians are (a lot or some) antihomosexual, 87% think Christians are judgmental, and 72% think they're out of touch.

Don't think, though, that the book is just page after page of statistics. The stats are just a small part of the information Kinnaman and Lyons provide. Much of the book is comprised of stories like that of a woman who sought help in dealing with her troubled son but received instead lectures from the women in the church about her status as an unmarried mother. She left.

Such stories are depressing, but Christians need to hear them. Only by seeing how others see us can we change those things about us which can be, and need to be, changed.

Buy two copies of Unchristian - one for you and one for your pastor. It can be ordered here.

RLC

Quantum Entanglement

Denyse O'Leary at Uncommon Descent calls our attention to a Wall Street Journal article by Gautam Naik from last May. Naik was writing on the weird, Alice-in-Wonderland world of quantum physics where none of the laws of our everyday experience apply. He says:

One of quantum physics' crazier notions is that two particles seem to communicate with each other instantly, even when they're billions of miles apart. Albert Einstein, arguing that nothing travels faster than light, dismissed this as impossible "spooky action at a distance."

The great man may have been wrong. A series of recent mind-bending laboratory experiments has given scientists an unprecedented peek behind the quantum veil, confirming that this realm is as mysterious as imagined.

Quantum physics is the study of the very small -- atoms, photons and other particles. Unlike the cause-and-effect of our everyday physical world, subatomic particles defy common sense and behave in wacky ways. That includes the fact that a photon, which is a particle of light, exists in a haze of multiple behaviors. They spin in many ways, such as "up" or "down," at the same time. Even trickier, it's only when you take a peek -- by measuring it -- that the photon fixes into a particular state of spin.

In other words, the world of our everyday experience may not be at all the way the world really is. Our perceptions could well be illusions that result from the fact that we are a certain size and observe the world from a particular perspective. Ultimate reality could be very much different than what we imagine it to be.

Stranger still is entanglement. When two photons get "entangled" they behave like a joint entity. Even when they're miles apart, if the spin of one particle is changed, the spin of the other instantly changes, too. This direct influence of one object on another distant one is called non-locality.

Last year, Dr. Nicolas Gisin and colleagues at Geneva University described how they had entangled a pair of photons in their lab. They then fired them, along fiber-optic cables of exactly equal length, to two Swiss villages some 11 miles apart.

During the journey, when one photon switched to a slightly higher energy level, its twin instantly switched to a slightly lower one. But the sum of the energies stayed constant, proving that the photons remained entangled.

More important, the team couldn't detect any time difference in the changes. "If there was any communication, it would have to have been at least 10,000 times the speed of light," says Dr. Gisin. "Because this is such an unlikely speed, the conclusion is there couldn't have been communication and so there is non-locality."

In 1990, the English physicist Lucien Hardy devised a thought experiment. The common view was that when a particle met its antiparticle, the pair destroyed each other in an explosion. But Mr. Hardy noted that in some cases when the particles' interaction wasn't observed, they wouldn't annihilate each other. The paradox: Because the interaction had to remain unseen, it couldn't be confirmed.

In a striking achievement, scientists from Osaka University have resolved the paradox. They used extremely weak measurements -- the equivalent of a sidelong glance, as it were -- that didn't disturb the photons' state. By doing the experiment multiple times and pooling those weak measurements, they got enough good data to show that the particles didn't annihilate. The conclusion: When the particles weren't observed, they behaved differently.

In a paper published in the New Journal of Physics in March, the Japanese team acknowledged that their result was "preposterous." Yet, they noted, it "gives us new insights into the spooky nature of quantum mechanics." A team from the University of Toronto published similar results in January.

Put another way, at a very fundamental level the universe is observer-dependent. The distinction between objective reality and subjective reality is smeared and hazy. The world turns out to be contingent in many ways, perhaps in every way, upon observing minds.

Quantum properties are not understood but they are nonetheless being exploited in a lot of technologies, some of which are discussed in the remainder of the article. It's fascinating stuff.

As I mentioned above, quantum mechanics suggests to some scientists that the reality we see is a kind of illusion. Christian theologians have been saying this for millenia, of course, and in fact, we discussed this on Viewpoint in a little more detail here. I wrote there, in part, that we might:

"Consider just one example from the quantum world. Pairs of sub-atomic particles formed simultaneously share a property known as entanglement. These particles are somehow mysteriously connected to each other even if they are separated by vast distances across space. If one of the pair undergoes some alteration the other undergoes a corresponding alteration even though any message sent from the one to the other would have to travel at near infinite speed in order for the second particle to know that the first has been altered.

How does this happen? There's no physical explanation for this instantaneous connectivity. If, however, these particles, and everything else, are really part of God's consciousness, the problem of entanglement is explained. Every event is immediately known by God, and His mind imposes the laws that govern the behavior of these particles."

That scientists are beginning to discern a deeper, mind-based level of reality reminds me of the closing lines of Robert Jastrow's God and the Astronomers:

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

Or, in the words of Sir James Jeans, "The world is beginning to look more like a grand idea than a great machine."

RLC

What Could Go Wrong?

Betsy McCaughey's column at the New York Post opens with these disturbing graphs:

President Obama promises that "if you like your health plan, you can keep it," even after he reforms our health-care system. That's untrue. The bills now before Congress would force you to switch to a managed-care plan with limits on your access to specialists and tests.

Two main bills are being rushed through Congress with the goal of combining them into a finished product by August. Under either, a new government bureaucracy will select health plans that it considers in your best interest, and you will have to enroll in one of these "qualified plans." If you now get your plan through work, your employer has a five-year "grace period" to switch you into a qualified plan. If you buy your own insurance, you'll have less time.

And as soon as anything changes in your contract -- such as a change in copays or deductibles, which many insurers change every year -- you'll have to move into a qualified plan instead.

When you file your taxes, if you can't prove to the IRS that you are in a qualified plan, you'll be fined thousands of dollars -- as much as the average cost of a health plan for your family size -- and then automatically enrolled in a randomly selected plan.

It's one thing to require that people getting government assistance tolerate managed care, but the legislation limits you to a managed-care plan even if you and your employer are footing the bill (Senate bill, p. 57-58). The goal is to reduce everyone's consumption of health care and to ensure that people have the same health-care experience, regardless of ability to pay.

Unfortunately, it gets no better as the column continues. Especially troubling, in addition to the cost and the inconvenience, is McCaughey's assertion that part of the expense of the new program is to be defrayed by reducing medicare benefits to the elderly. Please read it all to gain a clearer picture of what the Democrats are trying to do to your health care. Also keep in mind that although congress wants to impose this on the rest of us, they will not be subject to it themselves.

Meanwhile, one Canadian's testimony doesn't mean everything, but it should count for something:

The Democrats under President Obama want to replace the best health care system in the world with a bureaucratic nightmare that organizationally looks like this:

Everyone who thinks this'll make health care choices simpler and easier to navigate raise your hand.

RLC

Worldwide Caliphate by 2020

From Strategy Page:

Al Qaeda has a plan, and it was first published, four years ago, in a book (Al-Zarqawi: al Qaeda's Second Generation) by Jordanian journalist, Fouad Hussein. Several al Qaeda leaders were interviewed for the book, including al Qaeda's man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The current version of the plan has been showing up on Islamic radical websites since late last year.

The basic al Qaeda plan lays out a very straightforward strategy for world conquest. Actually, it sounds a lot like what the Nazis and communists had in mind last century. The only difference is that, while the Nazis killed you for who you were, and the communists killed you for what you believed, al Qaeda kills you for not being Moslem. No matter which zealot gets you, you're still dead.

Despite several setbacks, al Qaeda is still proclaiming the plan as in play. The al Qaeda plan has seven phases, all leading to world conquest. It goes like this.

Check out their plan at the link. Despite the fact that al Qaeda has experienced severe setbacks they're still convinced that Allah is on their side and will give them total world domination within ten years.

Exit question: If you were an al Qaeda foot soldier committed to the plan outlined at the link would you consider the election of Barack Obama and Democratic control of the Congress a sign of Allah's favor or his displeasure?

RLC

Heresy in the Episcopal Church

Richard Mouw wishes to take polite exception to a rather surprising claim by the presiding bishop of the Episcopal church. In a brief essay at Christianity Today Mouw writes this:

In her opening address to the Episcopal Church's recent General Convention, the Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the church's presiding bishop, made a special point of denouncing what she labeled "the great Western heresy" - the teaching, in her words, "that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God." This "individualist focus," she declared, "is a form of idolatry."

There is good news and bad news here. The good news is that the Episcopal Church's presiding bishop is not afraid to denounce heresy. The bad news is that we evangelicals turn out to be the heretics she is denouncing.

One wonders why Jefferts Schori thinks heretical the idea that we are each accountable to God, and that we, as individuals, can gain eternal life. Upon what, exactly, does she base this strange notion? The Bible? Christian tradition? Maybe, like lots else that issues forth from the cogitations of our mainline bishops and theological poobahs, she just made it up.

RLC

Israeli Training Upgrade Needed

McClatchy has a report by Dion Nussenbaum on investigations into the conduct of the Israeli military forces during their operation last winter in Gaza against Hamas. Much of it is troubling.

I have no sympathy for Hamas, a brutal terrorist organization committed to the destruction of the Israeli state and the murder of its citizens. I thought at the time that the Israelis should have continued the fight until they had utterly eliminated Hamas as a functioning organization. Even so, without impugning men who must make excruciating decisions in the pressure cooker of combat, I also want to affirm the necessity that wars fought by civilized people against barbarians still be fought by the precepts of Just War theory.

The problem is not that the Israeli government doesn't agree, but rather that the training of its officers needs to be improved so that every one of them agrees as well. In the case of the Gaza conflict, apparently, there were too many cases when it wasn't clear that mid-level officers understood what was acceptable and what was not.

Here are just two excerpts from Nissenbaum's report. There are more at the link:

Two soldiers from the Givati brigade who served in Zeitoun told the story of shooting an unarmed civilian without warning him. The elderly man was walking with a flashlight toward a building where Israeli forces were taking cover.

The Israeli officer in the house repeatedly ignored requests from other soldiers to fire warning shots as the man approached, the soldiers said. Instead, when he got within 20 yards of the soldiers, the commander ordered snipers to kill the man. The soldiers later confirmed that the man was unarmed.

When they complained to their commander about the incident, the soldiers were rebuffed and told that anyone walking at night was immediately suspect.

Israeli combatants said they forced Palestinians to search homes for militants and enter buildings ahead of soldiers in direct violation of an Israeli Supreme Court ruling that bars fighters from using civilians as human shields.

"Sometimes a force would enter while placing rifle barrels on a civilian's shoulder, advancing into a house and using him as a human shield," said one Israeli soldier with the Golani Brigade. "Commanders said these were the instructions, and we had to do it."

That this testimony is true seems hard to deny since it's doubtful that dozens of soldiers would lie about these things. How widespread such abuses were is less clear. That they violated both Israeli law and war doctrine is certain. They reveal a lacuna in the training of Israeli troops that the government should remedy forthwith.

There are more accounts at the link along with Israeli Defense Forces denials of the accuracy of the testimony. Read them and decide for yourself and keep in mind that the Israelis are facing an enemy which couldn't care less whether its troops commit atrocities. Indeed, they encourage it.

RLC

The Wise Latina Is Fibbing

Evidently, even leftist law professionals are disgusted with the prevarications of Sonia Sotomayor in her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. This quote is from a liberal law professor at Georgetown, Mike Seidman, after her second day of testimony:

Speaking only for myself (I guess that's obvious), I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor's testimony today. If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified. How could someone who has been on the bench for seventeen years possibly believe that judging in hard cases involves no more than applying the law to the facts? First year law students understand within a month that many areas of the law are open textured and indeterminate-that the legal material frequently (actually, I would say always) must be supplemented by contestable presuppositions, empirical assumptions, and moral judgments.

To claim otherwise - to claim that fidelity to uncontested legal principles dictates results - is to claim that whenever Justices disagree among themselves, someone is either a fool or acting in bad faith. What does it say about our legal system that in order to get confirmed Judge Sotomayor must tell the lies that she told today? That judges and justices must live these lies throughout their professional careers?

Perhaps Justice Sotomayor should be excused because our official ideology about judging is so degraded that she would sacrifice a position on the Supreme Court if she told the truth. Legal academics who defend what she did today have no such excuse. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Actually, she wouldn't sacrifice a position on the Court if she told the truth. The Democrats are crooning and gushing over her and have more than enough votes to confirm her no matter what she says, unless she blunders by saying something nice about George Bush or Dick Cheney.

It's the fact that she has nothing to lose by telling the truth that makes her unwillingness to do so all the more distressing to observers both left and right.

Quick Quiz: Liberals beat George Bush the elder over the head with one question in particular when he nominated Clarence Thomas to serve on the Supreme Court. Do you know what it was?

Answer: "Is Judge Thomas really the best qualified person that President Bush could have found to nominate to the Supreme Court, or did he nominate Thomas just to curry favor with African-Americans?"

I wonder why liberals have forgotten to raise that question this time around with another minority nominee.

Thanks to The Volokh Conspiracy for the Seidman quote.

RLC

Case in Point

No sooner do I post a meditation on how biologists might profit from a little philosophical training than along comes an article to illustrate the very point I was making.

First a little background. Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell, a recently released book on the evidence for intelligent design found in the cells of living things, wrote a brief piece on ID for the Boston Globe. In it Meyer mentioned that Thomas Jefferson was sympathetic to design as an explanation for natural phenomena.

This affront to Mr. Jefferson's honor was evidently more than a young gentleman and science writer by the name of Ewen Callaway could bear. Rising to defend the reputation of the defamed Mr. Jefferson against Meyer's unconscionable calumny, Callaway wrote a rebuttal which is currently appearing at New Scientist.

Callaway's refutation of Meyer consists in deriding his claim that Jefferson approved of the design hypothesis by stating in no uncertain terms that Jefferson was staunch in his belief in the separation of church and state and would never have approved of teaching ID in public schools.

I know you're scratching your head wondering what teaching ID in schools has to do with being sympathetic to the notion of a cosmic designer, but that's what Mr. Callaway said. You can check it out for yourself at the link.

Meyer never mentioned anything about teaching ID in public schools, and in fact the organization he represents, The Discovery Institute, is decidedly cool to the idea, but that doesn't deter Mr. Callaway. See if you can follow the logic here:

For a newspaper fighting for its survival, The Boston Globe has picked a peculiar time to run an absurdly-reasoned opinion piece supporting intelligent design.

Penned by the Discovery Institute's Stephen C. Meyer, the essay makes the ridiculous assertion that Thomas Jefferson - author of the Declaration of Independence and the third US president - espoused intelligent design.

Meyer sees supports for this claim in an 1823 letter Jefferson wrote to the second US president John Adams: "It is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion."

Fair enough. Though he may not have been a Christian in the strictest sense, Jefferson was deeply spiritual, and he invoked a creator in arguing for universal human rights - "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Now, Callaway had led us to believe he would give us a fulminating rejoinder to Meyer's libel of Mr. Jefferson, but in the event he meekly admits that Meyer is right. This is a rather peculiar way to go about discrediting an opponent's argument, and it seems as if Callaway at some level senses his blunder. Seeking to recover the thread of his objection he goes on to inform us of what Meyer doesn't say about Jefferson:

Jefferson was also a dogged supporter of the separation of church and state. Meyer brushes this aspect of his biography aside: "By invoking Jefferson's principle of separation, many critics of intelligent design assume that this visionary Founding Father would agree with them."

Public schools didn't exist in their current form in America during Jefferson's time, but Meyer never pauses to consider whether Jefferson would have supported the teaching of ID - a religious philosophy - in government-funded schools. He wouldn't have.

So there. ID is religion, don't you know, and Jefferson would have had none of it in public schools if there were such things back then, therefore Jefferson was not sympathetic to purposeful design, and Meyer is a big boob for saying that he was. Or something like that. I don't have it all figured out yet.

But Callaway is not done pelting Meyer's Globe article with rhetorical wiffle balls:

Meyer's argument eventually devolves into ID gobbeldy [sic]-gook:

[Meyer writes that] "Of course, many people assume that Jefferson's views, having been written before Darwin's Origin of Species are now scientifically obsolete. But Jefferson has been vindicated by modern scientific discoveries that Darwin could not have anticipated."

Vindicated how? By the discovery of DNA, of course.

Meyer cannot accept that the genetic code evolved naturally. Never mind the fact that the building blocks of DNA and its cousin molecule RNA existed on early Earth and even in space. Scientists are also making increasing progress in understanding how these chemicals might have stitched themselves together and how they began replicating and evolving.

Callaway oddly faults Meyer for failing to believe what no one has ever demonstrated to be even possible, that specified complexity - meaningful, functional information - can be produced by something other than a mind. Neither Callaway nor anyone else can say how the coded information on the DNA molecule could have arisen purely by natural, physical processes, but this fact is of no consequence when you just know that somehow it must have happened.

To say that the existence of the building blocks of DNA were present in the early earth, something Mr. Callaway can't possibly know, and that therefore it's a mere hop, skip and a jump to self-replicating, protein transcribing, cell regulating nucleic acid molecules is called "wave of the wand" theorizing. It's equivalent to saying that if a billion monkeys were afforded access to typewriters the complete works of Shakespeare would be inevitable. Given the myriad difficulties and improbabilities, why should anyone believe such a thing?

Callaway, like a desperate boxer who finds himself losing to a superior opponent in the final round, swings wildly at Meyer hoping for a knockout, but all he does is embarrass himself:

Instead Meyer pulls out the same lazy, wrongheaded argument that intelligent design supporters have been pushing since the philosophy was adapted from creationism - if something looks designed, it must have been...

Well, so far it's Mr. Callaway who bears the trophy for lazy and wrongheaded. And also ignorant. If he were better informed he would be aware that the Cambridge-educated Dr. Meyer has just written a marvelously researched 508 page book on the very topic upon which Mr. Callaway is at such pains to demonstrate his ignorance. I wonder whether Mr. Callaway has made the effort to read Meyer's book or whether he finds it more agreeable and less intellectually taxing to simply go about waving the wand and launching ineffectual haymakers.

RLC

Believing the Impossible

Bradford at Telic Thoughts discusses atheistic biologist Jerry Coyne's argument against the compatibility of science and religion. In the course of the post Bradford quotes Coyne saying this:

Well, here are two more things that can't happen, given what we know about modern biology: a human female can't give birth to offspring unless she is inseminated, and people who are dead for three days don't come back to life.

This is an incredibly silly thing for a scientist, especially an atheistic materialist, to say. Two words scientists should use with the utmost caution are "can't happen." I addressed the philosophical problems with Coyne's claim in an earlier series of posts and refer the interested reader to it.

For now, I simply wish to mention that whenever a scientist says something "can't happen" it reminds me of the story of the discovery of the chemical composition of the sun. Back in the 1850s Auguste Comte sought to put a limit on what man would be able to discover. He thought and thought and emerged from his ruminations with the seemingly unassailable claim that it would be forever impossible to learn what the sun was made of. That seemed plausible enough back in those days, but just two years after his death in 1857, Kirchoff and Bunsen used spectroscopic analysis, which reveals a kind of chemical fingerprint, to determine that the sun was made mostly of hydrogen. Indeed, another constituent, helium, was discovered on the sun before it was found on earth, and Comte's prediction was consigned to the ash heap of famous last words.

Spectroscopic "fingerprint"

Anyway, even were we to play Coyne's game and agree that the laws of nature make certain things nomologically impossible, surely one of the things that "can't happen" is for mere chance and physical law to produce functional, specified information. It's never happened as far as we've ever been able to ascertain and no one has ever been able to figure out how it even could happen. Yet Coyne believes that exactly this miracle occurred when the first living cells emerged despite the fact that other atheistic scientists (e.g. Fred Hoyle) put the odds against it in excess of 10 to the 40,000 power to 1.

How anyone who can blithely believe that something this incomprehensibly improbable nevertheless happened and yet scoff at the claim that a virgin conceived or a man revivified is certainly beyond me.

RLC

War Whoops

House Democrats continue to make caricatures of themselves in their Ahab-like obsession with being able to hold aloft at least one Bush administration scalp before the Bushies all fade from the scene. In the news lately is the prospect of investigations aimed ultimately at planting their tomahawks firmly in the noggin of their chief bugaboo, Dick Cheney.

It seems that Cheney, as Vice-President, is being accused of having ordered the CIA to conceal certain secret operations from the relevant House oversight committee and now the members of the committee are miffed and vexed.

The funny part of this is that, according to Hot Air, the secret operation was revealed by the New York Times in 2002, the plan was never implemented which means that the Agency was under no obligation to tell Congress about it, and the former CIA Director denies having ever been told by Cheney to withhold information about this or any other operation.

Meanwhile, morale at the Agency deteriorates as does public approval of Nancy Pelosi and her congressional minions.

Like Wile E. Coyote growing ever more desperate to get his paws on the Road Runner, congressional coyotes keep having their hopes dashed as dynamite sticks blow up in their hands, cliffs keep being overrun, and railroad trains keep flattening them just as their goal seems within their grasp. But, like Wile E., they keep picking themselves up, brushing themselves off, and setting themselves up for the next train to run them over.

It's pretty funny. Maybe it'll be a Saturday morning cartoon show someday.

RLC

Shut Up and Just Believe

In the movie Leap of Faith a traveling evangelist played by Steve Martin preys upon and bilks innocent, unsophisticated rural Americans by exploiting their willingness to believe that he's capable of genuine miracles. They're duped by Martin's manipulation of their gullibility and blind faith. The movie's pretty funny, actually, but when this sort of thing happens in real life it's not so funny.

One instance of people's faith being exploited to cajole them out of their money is given to us in a column by Paul Krugman in the New York Times in which Krugman preaches on the apocalypse prophesied in the gospel according to Al Gore:

[C]limate change is a creeping threat rather than an attention-grabbing crisis. The full dimensions of the catastrophe won't be apparent for decades, perhaps generations. In fact, it will probably be many years before the upward trend in temperatures is so obvious to casual observers that it silences the skeptics. Unfortunately, if we wait to act until the climate crisis is that obvious, catastrophe will already have become inevitable.

Perhaps so, but its hard to understand why we should believe we're on the brink of the eschaton if compelling evidence for it is so thin that it cannot be convincingly confirmed and won't be seen for generations. It sounds like we're being asked by the Reverend Krugman to accept the catastrophic consequences of climate change on sheer, blind faith.

Former atheist philosopher Antony Flew once famously wrote that the problem with religious belief is that no evidence is ever allowed to count against it. If the weather is good it's proof of God's blessing. If the weather is bad it's proof of God's judgment. There's no way to falsify such beliefs.

Likewise with the theology of global warming. If the temperature shows an uptick then that's cited as proof that atmospheric carbon is causing the earth to warm and soon we'll all be inundated by rising seas. If the temperature drops, as it did in the 70s, that's proof that atmospheric carbon is causing the earth to cool and soon New York City will be covered by glaciers.

If we're going to allow the evangelists of global warming to fleece and bankrupt the nation in order to reduce carbon emissions and line their own pockets with the profits gleaned from carbon offsets and the like then Reverend Krugman and others who wish to put our economy on a crisis footing need to demonstrate six things:

• They have to show that the average global temperature is in fact rising.
• They have to show that the temperature rise is permanent and not just a cyclical fluctuation.
• They have to show that the environmental consequences of global temperature increase will be, on balance, more catastrophic than the harm done to our economy by attempts to prevent it.
• They have to show that the temperature rise is due to human activity rather than some natural phenomena.
• They have to show the specific human activity that is to blame.
• They have to show that we can, in fact, curtail the behavior sufficiently to avert the disaster.

I'm not saying that these cannot be demonstrated, but if they have been it would be nice if alarmists like the Reverend Krugman would share some of the evidence with us instead of crying that the sky is falling and telling us that we should just believe whatever we're told by the global warming priesthood, especially those who stand to make a boodle if legislation like cap and trade is passed.

RLC

Do As We Say, Not As We Do

Stephen Hayward at No Left Turns notes that when President Obama visited Ghana he told the Ghanian Parliament that:

"No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top."

Hayward then reminds us that the U.S. corporate income tax is at 35 percent, the highest in the industrialized world, and likely to go up.

So what does the President think raising American taxes is going to do to investment in this country, and what was he telling the Ghanians? That they're not taxing business enough?

RLC

Skeletons in the Closet

Progressivism has a long history, steeped in notions of racial superiority, of favoring eugenics and other totalitarian solutions to certain demographic problems. One of the founding purposes of Planned Parenthood, after all, was to make birth control and abortion widely available so as to limit the proliferation of undesirable elements, both racial and intellectual, in our society.

It's this yearning for racial refinement that is one of the links between the American progressives of the 1920s and the German Nazis of the 1930s and 40s. It's also a trait both groups share because of their common Darwinian heritage rooted in notions of survival of the fittest and evolutionary progress.

For the most part modern progressives keep mum about these proclivities, like closeted gays intent upon concealing from others their sexual predispositions, but every now and then the totalitarian inclination toward eugenics bubbles up like an inadvertent burp. We caught of bit of this in an earlier post about President Obama's new science czar and his extraordinary views, and we hear another embarrassing hiccup today from none other than a Supreme Court justice.

Jonah Goldberg provides us the details:

Here's what Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in Sunday's New York Times Magazine: "Frankly I had thought that at the time [Roe vs. Wade] was decided," Ginsburg told her interviewer, Emily Bazelon, "there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of."

The comment, which bizarrely elicited no follow-up from Bazelon or any further coverage from the New York Times -- or any other major news outlet -- was in the context of Medicaid funding for abortion. Ginsburg was surprised when the Supreme Court in 1980 barred taxpayer support for abortions for poor women. After all, if poverty partly described the population you had "too many" of, you would want to subsidize it in order to expedite the reduction of unwanted populations.

Now, as Goldberg points out, Ginsburg might simply be stating the rationale of others for pushing for legalized abortion in the early seventies and not endorsing that rationale herself, though had she been, say, Antonin Scalia or Sarah Palin, you can bet there would've been some very aggressive follow-up questioning to ascertain exactly what she meant.

But Ginsburg's personal views are not so much the point as is the fact that she reveals an attitude on the "progressive" left that would be greeted with howls of outrage did it exist on the right. Contemporary progressives, or at least some of them, are still very much in favor of culling out the undesirables and purifying the race(s), but they know it's impolitic to flout their vision before the public eye, so it's kept in a closet from which it occasionally peeks and affords us a glimpse.

Read the rest of Goldberg's essay to better see what I mean. Better yet, for your summer beach reading, pack up Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism and/or Richard Weikert's From Darwin to Hitler. They're excellent.

RLC

Does Philosophy Make Better Scientists?

A piece at Discover caught my eye recently. It asks whether a more thorough background in philosophy would make scientists better at their vocation:

[A]side from whether modern physicists (and maybe scientists in other fields, I don't know) pay less attention to philosophy these days, and aside from why that might be the case, there is still the question: does it matter? ....

Probably not. Philosophical presuppositions certainly play an important role in how scientists work, and it's possible that a slightly more sophisticated set of presuppositions could give the working physicist a helping hand here and there. But based on thinking about the actual history, I don't see how such sophistication could really have moved things forward....I tend to think that knowing something about philosophy - or for that matter literature or music or history - will make someone a more interesting person, but not necessarily a better physicist.

The essay was primarily directed at the practice of physics, about which I cannot speak, but I do think that biology, or at least theorizing about biology, has indeed suffered for want of philosophical training among its practitioners, especially those who participate in the controversy surrounding the matter of the origin and diversification of life. Philosophy teaches one to recognize inconsistencies and hidden assumptions, both of which are pretty common among biologists who engage in these debates. It also teaches one to recognize fallacies of reasoning, like circular arguments, and it helps us to understand the difference between a metaphysical hypothesis and an empirical one, a distinction which often eludes Darwinian critics of intelligent design. Moreover, a little philosophical background might help more polemicists appreciate the difference between historical science, theoretical science, philosophy of science, and laboratory science, four different disciplines which often get confused in these discussions.

If biologists were more conversant with the philosophical issues related to their discipline there might be much less rancor and discord in the controversies over how best to interpret the biological evidence we have at hand, and there might be considerably more clarity brought to the question whether that evidence is best explained by materialism or by intelligent agency.

RLC

Why They Hate Her

Stuart Schwartz argues that the reason the elites, both liberal and conservative, can't stand Sarah Palin and are obsessed with destroying all vestiges of her political influence is that she takes her religious faith seriously. I imagine that that's largely true. I wrote a couple of years ago that it was his commitment to Christianity that lay at the root of much of the elite hostility to George Bush. It also accounts for a lot of the antipathy that Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney are likely to encounter if they throw their hats in the ring for 2012.

The secular elites, especially those on the left but some on the right, as well, are deathly afraid of any politician who takes the Bible as an authority on how one should live. To actually think that one could talk to God, that God might guide one in making important decisions, that God cares about how we order our lives, that evil is a real moral category, that there are moral constraints on how we express our sexuality, that God actually played a significant role in the creation - is abhorrent to our intellectual and social betters whose religion, if they have one, is a tepid, lukewarm deism.

Sarah Palin, like George Bush, believes in a muscular Christianity. It guides her life and is a lightning rod for the contempt, derision and hatred of people who believe themselves too sophisticated for such superstitious nonsense. Having been to Ivy League universities they scoff at the plebians who presume to think there is really any such thing as Truth, particularly religious truth. They embody the cynicism of historian Edward Gibbon who wrote of the ancient Romans that all religions for the masses were equally true, for the intellectuals equally false, and for the politicians equally useful.

Schwartz does a pretty good job of lampooning the haughty superciliousness of the pseudo-sophisticates of the political and chattering classes. Check it out.

RLC

Neo-Nazi?

You can tell much about a President's frame of mind by looking at the people he appoints to positions of influence and power. In the case of President Obama those appointments have been troubling, including as they do a series of tax cheats, radical pro-abortionists, and leftists of various stripes, but perhaps none is more disturbing Mr. Obama's appointment to the position of new science czar, John Holdren.

Hot Air directs our attention to this report at ZombieTime:

Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A "Planetary Regime" with the power of life and death over American citizens. The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States? Or both?

These ideas (among many other equally horrifying recommendations) were put forth by John Holdren, whom Barack Obama has recently appointed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology -- informally known as the United States' Science Czar. In a book Holdren co-authored in 1977, the man now firmly in control of science policy in this country wrote that:

• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation's drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who "contribute to social deterioration" (i.e. undesirables) "can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility" -- in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational "Planetary Regime" should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans' lives -- using an armed international police force.

ZombieTime has direct quotes from Holdren's book and they're pretty disturbing, not just because this man, whose ideas are frighteningly similar to those of the Nazis, is in charge of science policy, but because his ideas may not be considered objectionable in the Obama White House.

Perhaps the administration was unaware of Holdren's views when they selected him for this post. That would cast doubt on their competency, but at least we can expect the President will do the right thing and terminate his appointment now that he knows.

If, however, the administration does not dissociate itself from this man after his views have been brought to public attention then we have very good reason to worry that the President does not find those views disagreeable, in which case we have very good reason to be very alarmed.

RLC

The State of Hate

We often hear that there's too much hatred in America, and indeed there no doubt is, but much of what's sometimes called "hatred" really trivializes the word. In any case, whatever the state of hate in America, it's strictly minor league compared to what can be found elsewhere in the world, even in civilized countries like, say, France.

Consider this piece from NRO:

Late last night a Parisian court finally announced its verdict in the Ilan Halimi murder trial, which I first wrote about over three years ago here. As I noted at the time, while The Independent in London headlined its piece on the murder "This anti-Semitic attack is terrifying" and Le Monde called it "the anti-Semitic crime of an era," other papers - notably The Guardian's sister paper The Observer in London - scrupulously avoided any mention of the fact that the victim was a Jew, and The New York Times was initially silent about the story.

Youssouf Fofana, leader of the gang that masterminded Halimi's kidnap, torture and murder, which was described by a leading police officer as the most brutal and sadistic in modern French history, was sentenced to life (with a minimum of 22 years). Of the 26 other defendants in the case, two were acquitted and the rest received sentences of between six months and 18 years. Fofana admitted in court that the plan was to "kill a Jew". Halimi, a 23 year-old shop clerk, was chosen at random.

At the end of 24 days of torture that left cuts and burn marks all over his body, including his eyes and throat, Halimi, who was handcuffed throughout his ordeal, was doused in alcohol and set alight. One of the young torturers told police his accomplices took turns to stub out cigarettes on Ilan's forehead and tongue while voicing hatred for Jews. They cut bits off his flesh, fingers and ears.

Fofana, who screamed "Allah Akbar!" (God is greatest) during the trial, has called on others to now murder Halimi's parents and other French Jews. Scores of police, some in full riot gear, took up posts around the Palais de Justice in central Paris as the verdict was read out last night.

The lawyer for Halimi family's immediately announced he would lodge an appeal against some of the lenient sentences the other gang members received.

Halimi's remains have been reburied at Jerusalem's Mount Herzl Cemetery after repeated threats by anti-Semites to attack his grave in France.

Nidra Poller, who was in the court for the verdict last night, writes from Paris that the strange timing of the verdict (after 10 pm on Friday when much of Paris had already departed for the "14th July" weekend, the biggest French holiday of the year, and also after the Jewish Sabbath had started when Halimi's friends and families, many of whom are observant Jews, had left the court) was probably no accident and designed to minimize media coverage. Indeed state-owned France 3 TV unashamedly admitted that the verdict was announced during the Sabbath in order to avoid incidents.

"Allah Akbar," indeed. If Allah is at all just Halimi's torturers will, in the world to come, yearn to be back in the French prisons.

There are haters in this country, to be sure, and doubtless there are some individuals capable of doing to other human beings what these savages did to Halimi, but thankfully it seems we still have a way to go before we've degenerated to the level of barbarity that some Muslims in France have achieved. Thankfully, such acts of pure evil are not yet in this country front page news.

RLC

Common Sense vs. the Ninth Circuit

The LA Times informs us of yet another assault on common sense by the liberal left. This time it centers around whether a pharmacist has the right not to carry abortifacients in his/her pharmacy:

Pharmacists are obliged to dispense the Plan B pill, even if they are personally opposed to the "morning after" contraceptive on religious grounds, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

In a case that could affect policy across the western U.S., a supermarket pharmacy owner in Olympia, Wash., failed in a bid to block 2007 regulations that required all Washington pharmacies to stock and dispense the pills.

Family-owned Ralph's Thriftway and two pharmacists employed elsewhere sued Washington state officials over the requirement. The plaintiffs asserted that their Christian beliefs prevented them from dispensing the pills, which can prevent implantation of a recently fertilized egg. They said that the new regulations would force them to choose between keeping their jobs and heeding their religious objections to a medication they regard as a form of abortion.

Ralph's owners, Stormans Inc., and pharmacists Rhonda Mesler and Margo Thelen sought protection under the 1st Amendment right to free exercise of religion and won a temporary injunction from the U.S. District Court in Seattle pending trial on the constitutionality of the regulations. That order prevented state officials from penalizing pharmacists who refused to dispense Plan B as long as they referred consumers to a nearby pharmacy where it was available.

On Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the injunction, saying the district court was wrong in issuing it based on an erroneous finding that the rules violated the free exercise of religion clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air offers this opinion. Unfortunately, Morrissey's opinion is so sensible that the jurists who sit on the 9th Circuit were sure to reject it:

There have been two different issues in the legal fight over Plan B. In one group, pharmacists not working for themselves - for instance, at chain pharmacies - objected to dispensing the pill and wanted job protection despite their refusal. Those cases hardly stand up to scrutiny. The owner of the pharmacy has the right to decide on his own inventory and what to sell, and the employees of that pharmacy either should follow that policy or find a job somewhere else if it offends them. It falls into the same category as a cashier who refuses to handle meat at the checkout counter because he's a vegetarian.

However, this is something else. The owners of the pharmacy do not want to stock the pills for their own reasons. Even apart from religious grounds, that still seems to be their decision in the marketplace. If they don't want to sell aspirin, or Ginsu knives, or inflatable life vests for swimming pools, that should be their decision, too. If their customers object to their policies, they will find other pharmacies to patronize. The government has a public interest in telling retailers what they cannot sell for safety reasons (like dynamite, as an example), but should not force business owners to sell something they do not want to sell.

How would Judge Sotomayor rule on this case? We may have an opportunity to find out since it seems that the pharmacists are going to appeal it as far as they can. We wish them luck.

RLC

Why?

Like many other Americans you may have wondered why in the world the Obama administration released back to Iran five terrorist operatives who had been captured in Iraq. You may have wondered why we would freed people who were implicated in the deaths of over four hundred Americans and countless civilian Iraqis to a government that is hip-deep in fomenting death and destruction in Lebanon and Israel, which refuses any concessions on its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and which is fresh off the rigging of an election and the murders of its citizens. What possible basis could there be for this shameful act of abasement and appeasement?

Andrew McCarthy offers a pretty good analysis of this question at National Review Online. His piece is compelling and not very flattering to Mr. Obama. McCarthy doesn't use these words, but he gives the impression that if we were being led by people who have no particular love for this country, no particular pride in either our history or our traditions - if we were being led by people who see the U.S. as the source of all the world's problems - they wouldn't govern much differently than Barack Obama and the congressional Democrats are governing today.

During the sixties leftist students demanded that AmeriKKKa be brought low. Those students have now risen to positions of power and influence and find themselves ideally situated to bring about the destruction they dreamt of in their youth.

Letting those who kill American soldiers go free, saddling the nation with so much debt that we collapse under the burden, nationalizing as much of the private sector as they can get their hands on, repeatedly apologizing to the entire world for vague historical shortcomings, and refusing to protect our national borders are all very perplexing policies, but they're not accidents or misjudgments. They're completely consistent with the belief that capitalism is evil and that America is the cause of most of the world's problems.

Read McCarthy's piece. It's worth the time.

RLC