Porn for Bibles

Somewhere in this story there's a telling moral. Atheists on the San Antonio campus of the University of Texas are encouraging Christians and members of other theistic religions to trade in their holy books in exchange for pornography.

Let's see: Christians offer atheists an answer to all of life's most crucial questions, including the key to eternal happiness, and atheists offer Christians ..... porn. It says something about atheism, I think, that some atheists implicitly hold pornography in the same esteem as Christians hold the Bible. If they don't why is porn for Bibles considered an exchange of equal value? It also says something about the atheist worldview that in it something as degrading to both men and women as is pornography is such a highly prized commodity:

Thanks to Breitbart for the video.

RLC

Son of Hamas

There's a fascinating story in Haaretz about the son of one of the founders of Hamas who converted to Christianity ten years ago, served for over a decade as an informant for Shin Bet, the Israeli security service, and then fled the region in 2007. Mosab Hassan Yousef is credited with having saved dozens, perhaps hundreds, of lives by passing along information on imminent terror attacks on Israel.

Yousef must have a great deal of courage. He has to know that even though he's now living in the United States he's still a target for Islamist assassins. Nevertheless, his story is about to be published in an article to be released this Friday, and there's a book on his life that's just been released.

Here's an excerpt from the Haaretz piece:

Yousef was considered Shin Bet's most reliable source in the Hamas leadership, earning himself the nickname "the Green Prince" - using the color of the Islamist group's flag, and "prince" because of his pedigree as the son of one of the movement's founders.

During the second intifada, intelligence Yousef supplied led to the arrests of a number of high-ranking Palestinian figures responsible for planning deadly suicide bombings. These included Ibrahim Hamid (a Hamas military commander in the West Bank, Marwan Barghouti (founder of the Fatah-linked Tanzim militia) and Abdullah Barghouti (a Hamas bomb-maker with no close relation to the Fatah figure). Yousef was also responsible for thwarting Israel's plan to assassinate his father.

The story of Yousef's spiritual transformation appeared in Haaretz Magazine in August 2008. Only now, however, is Yousef exposing the secret he kept since 1996, when he was first held by Shin Bet agents seeking to enlist him in infiltrating the upper echelon of Hamas.

"So many people owe him their life and don't even know it," said his Shin Bet handler, named in Yousef's book as Captain Loai. "People who did a lot less were awarded the Israel Security Prize. He certainly deserves it."

I saw Yousef in a television interview last night and heard him warn us not to fall for the moderate/extremist distinction as applied to Muslims. Muslims are devoted to the Koran and the Koran teaches the use of violence to spread Islam.

This is a point others have made before but perhaps it will have more purchase coming from Yousef. Individual Muslims may not engage in violence themselves, but they don't really oppose the use of violence by other Muslims as long as it's directed at infidels.

RLC

Confusion among the Skeptics

Freddie at L'Hote is an atheist who takes his fellow non-believers to task for being so religious about their unbelief. What he says reminds me of a passage in Eric Hoffer's The True Believer:

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not. The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion. He is an atheist with devoutness and unction. According to Renan, "The day after that on which the world should no longer believe in God, atheists would be the wretchedest of all men."

Freddie says some interesting things in his post, but along the way he falls into a confusion that is oddly common among those who don't believe in God. To wit, he writes that:

Above, beyond, and separate from any moral or ethical duty that atheists have to extend basic elements of tolerance and restraint towards the religious in a pluralistic society, there is a compelling, even essential, argument for an atheism of absence that is fundamentally an argument towards self-interest.

As we have noted on more occasions on this blog than I care to count atheists have no moral or ethical duties. Such duties must be imposed upon one and there's no one, other than themselves, who is in a position to lay such an imposition on anybody if there is no God.

If the individual atheist says that he does indeed place the duties upon himself, that's fine (though arbitrary), but he surely can't bind other atheists to that obligation as Freddie does above.

He goes on to chide Christopher Hitchens for writing, "as if atheists have some duty to oppose religion. [But] the absence of belief and the absence of duty are symmetrical qualities."

Hitchens is spanked for suggesting that is one's duty as an atheist to oppose religion, but Freddie thinks this is wrongheaded. The absence of belief, he avers, entails the absence of duty (a formulation with which I agree), but then what does Freddie mean in the first paragraph above when he talks about the duties his fellow atheists have to extend tolerance and restraint? First he says atheists have duties, now he says they have none. Which is it?

Then later there's this:

[T]here are those who shamelessly insert their religion into politics, in defiance of Enlightenment values and the American character, and yes they have to be fought.

If there are no duties, moral or ethical, how or why is anything at all "shameless?" Why, exactly, must it be "fought?" Surely not because it's wrong to insert religion into politics because for the atheist nothing is really wrong. Rather it must be because Freddie doesn't like it, but the fact that someone dislikes something is hardly a sufficient reason, by itself, to fight it.

One wishes that if people are going to insist on touting their atheism they'd at least have the good sense to stop making moral judgments. Or, failing that, at least explain to the rest of us upon what those judgments are based.

RLC

String Theory

In this video Leonard Susskind, one of the premier theoretical physicists working in string theory, explains what string theory is. It's hard to imagine that the fundamental units of reality might be bits of stuff a billion billion times smaller than a proton:

RLC

WAP

The Weak Anthropic Principle has been offered as a rebuttal to the astonishing level of fine-tuning we find in the physical forces, constants, and parameters of the universe. These are calibrated to such fine tolerances that had they deviated from their actual value by as little, in some cases, as 1 part in 10^120 the universe never would have formed and/or life would have been impossible. Robin Collins, author of one of the most notable and accessible arguments for theism based on cosmic fine-tuning, lists the following among the dozens of examples he could have mentioned:

1. If the initial explosion of the big bang had differed in strength by as little as 1 part in 1060, the universe would have either quickly collapsed back on itself, or expanded too rapidly for stars to form. In either case, life would be impossible. [See Davies, 1982, pp. 90-91. (As John Jefferson Davis points out (p. 140), an accuracy of one part in 10^60 can be compared to firing a bullet at a one-inch target on the other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away, and hitting the target.)

2. Calculations indicate that if the strong nuclear force, the force that binds protons and neutrons together in an atom, had been stronger or weaker by as little as 5%, life would be impossible.

3. Calculations by Brandon Carter show that if gravity had been stronger or weaker by 1 part in 10 to the 40th power, then life-sustaining stars like the sun could not exist. This would most likely make life impossible.

4. If the neutron were not about 1.001 times the mass of the proton, all protons would have decayed into neutrons or all neutrons would have decayed into protons, and thus life would not be possible.

5. If the electromagnetic force were slightly stronger or weaker, life would be impossible, for a variety of different reasons.

Imaginatively, one could think of each instance of fine-tuning as a radio dial: unless all the dials are set exactly right, life would be impossible. Or, one could think of the initial conditions of the universe and the fundamental parameters of physics as a dart board that fills the whole galaxy, and the conditions necessary for life to exist as a small one-foot wide target: unless the dart hits the target, life would be impossible. The fact that the dials are perfectly set, or the dart has hit the target, strongly suggests that someone set the dials or aimed the dart, for it seems enormously improbable that such a coincidence could have happened by chance.

The response made by some has been that we shouldn't be surprised that the universe is as precisely calibrated as it is for if it weren't we wouldn't be around to notice. The universe would never have formed or wouldn't be able to sustain life. It has to be the way it is in order for us to exist at all.

Stephen Hawking offers an example of the response to this cosmic precision that Collins is talking about: "Why," he asks, "is the universe the way we see it? The answer is simple: If it had been different, we would not be here."

What are we to make of such a reply?

Imagine that you have just learned that a complete novice at chess had just won the world championship. As a chess fan you're incredulous and you express your amazement that a rank beginner had beaten all of the world's best players. Suppose you were then admonished that you shouldn't be surprised, really, because, after all, if he hadn't beaten the best players he wouldn't be the world champion.

Wouldn't you think this response somewhat misses the point? The question that screams for an answer is not whether this tyro beat the world's best, we know he must have, but rather how did such a prodigy occur? Was there an illicit design or plot to have these grandmasters lose to the amateur?

Whatever the alternatives wouldn't you be inclined to think that the least plausible explanation was that it was just some sort of freakish coincidence? Yet those who invoke the weak anthropic principle are giving a response to cosmic fine-tuning analogous to those who tell us we shouldn't think there was some sort of thought-out plot behind the beginner's victory at the chess tournament.

We know we're here, and of course we know that the universe, therefore, has to be the way it is. The question is how did such a miracle happen? Was it a result of intention or was it just a happy accident? In terms of plausibility there's no contest between the hypothesis that the universe is intelligently designed and the hypothesis that the universe is the way it is because of serendipity.

Indeed, it's the need to explain this extraordinary fine-tuning that leads many skeptics to embrace the multiverse theory, about which we'll have more to say tomorrow.

RLC

Just Friends

Among the numerous responses to last week's posts on C.S. Lewis' thoughts on the nature of friendship in his The Four Loves (see On Friendship (Pt. I)) was one on a passage in which Lewis makes the claim that friends of the opposite sex cannot long remain friends without the Friendship passing into Eros.

Lewis writes:

When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass - may pass in the first half hour - into erotic love. Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other, or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later.

Our reader offers the following based on her own experience:

This post has certainly struck a personal chord with me. Lewis' words seemed to flow right from the paper and into my heart. I love his last statement that says, "Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other, or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later." I was always a tomboy growing up, and, for whatever reason, gravitated more towards having friendships with guys than girls. I never saw any problem with this but rather accepted it as the norm. When I finally found myself in college and in a serious relationship, I began to notice the severity of my situation. I truly believe that it's not possible for a girl to be best friends with a guy, unless of course she is single, unattached, and possibly physically repulsed as Lewis stated. I didn't always believe this to be true considering my closest friends growing up were always boys. Like I said, though, when I found myself in a serious relationship, I noticed that it's not possible to have the one you're dating along with another guy best friend. While jealously isn't always a terrible trait to find in your significant other (within reason), I've learned it's best to be respectful and finally come to grips with the reality that if you want to spend the rest of your life with this person, you are going to have to make sacrifices - these sacrifices being some of the closest friendships you've ever known.

There's a lot of insight in this. People know intuitively that if one member of the couple has an opposite sex friendship with a third party there's cause for alarm. When the person who has the "outside" friendship tries to reassure his/her romantic partner that "we're just friends" that person is either naive or disingenuous. They may be "just friends" now, but the chances are that they won't be for long.

RLC

The Tea Party at One Year Old

It was roughly one year ago that Rick Santelli went on a rant on CNBC against government bailouts and called for another tea party like the one in Boston in 1773. Santelli's tirade went viral across the country sparking a movement that continues to grow in strength and depth. Toby Marie Walker is an organizer for the Texas Tea Party and, for the benefit of those who may be wondering what the Tea Party is all about, and for the benefit of those in the media who insist on mischaracterizing it as a bunch of thugs, xenophobes, and quasi-terrorists, lays out in the Washington Times just what the Tea Party is. She writes:

We Tea Party folks are moms, dads, brothers, sisters, cousins and grandparents. We come in all colors, black, white, brown and more. We come from every profession you can imagine. Some of us are high earners, while some of us struggle each month to make ends meet. We welcome people of all religions, as well as nonbelievers. We are in the Rotary, the Lions Club, the Junior League, the Masons and the Knights of Columbus. We have served our country in battle, as civil servants, as community organizers and as volunteers. We represent a cross-section of America, and we want to be heard.

Some have called Tea Partiers wing-nuts and tried to define us as the extreme right of the right-wing. I've heard us called racists and terrorists and any number of nasty names. Such characterizations are false. We are proud Americans.

Tea Partiers love their country. We love our country so much that we cannot sit by and let politicians destroy what we the people have built. We must stand up and scream, "Stop!"

We can't let our government tinker with our Constitution. We believe in the ideals and principles upon which our nation was founded and so, though we are not a political party, we can't remain idle as politicians manipulate elections, seize more power from the people and the states, and then spend our children's children's money. We want our kids to inherit the most powerful nation on Earth, not a dying superpower.

Ms. Walker goes on to note that the Tea Party has a grievance with both Democrats and Republicans. Check it out.

Meanwhile, Pat Buchanan poses the question, "What called the Tea Party into existence?" Here's part of his answer:

Some are angry over unchecked immigration and the failure to control our borders and send the illegals back. Some are angry over the loss of manufacturing jobs. Some are angry over winless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some are angry over ethnic preferences they see as favoring minorities over them.

What they agree upon, however, is that they have been treading water for a decade, working harder and harder with little or no improvement in their family standard of living. They see the government as taking more of their income in taxes, seeking more control over their institutions, creating entitlements for others not them, plunging the nation into unpayable debt, and inviting inflation or a default that can wipe out what they have saved.

And there is nothing they can do about it, for they are politically powerless. By their gatherings, numbers, mockery of elites and militancy, however, they get a sense of the power that they do not have.

Their repeated reappearance on the national stage, in new incarnations, should be a fire bell in the night to the establishment of both parties. For it testifies to their belief and that of millions more that the state they detest is at war with the country they love.

Both columns make for informative reading. Meanwhile, Jason sends us this 1948 cartoon that depicts the story of a post WWII tea party:

RLC

Cox on Time

Those readers who enjoyed Brian Cox's discussion of the Large Hadron Collider might also appreciate this series of videos on the nature of time. Cox has some fascinating things to say about this enigmatic, but essential part of our lives. This is part one of a six part BBC series:

Cox seems to assume that time is a part of our objective world, but what if Kant was right in saying that time was really a part of our mental apparatus and that apart from a mind, time is nothing? If Kant is correct then time is simply the way we apprehend experience. It's a subjective phenomenon. If there were no minds there'd be no time.

If this is true, though, then it follows that there really was no time before the appearance of minds in the world. There were events, of course, but they were not embedded in any time, at least not the time that our minds impose upon events.

Think of events in the history of the cosmos as frames in a strip of movie film. If we run the movie in "real time" it may take 14 billion years to view everything that occurs in it from the Big Bang to the appearance of mankind. If we speed up the film the events still all occur, and occur in the same relation to each other, but they whiz by twice as fast, or ten times as fast, or virtually instantaneously, depending on how fast we run the tape.

If all this is true then the question of the age of the earth and the age of the universe is moot. The creation event happened, the universe unfolded, and ultimately minds appeared. Those minds look back on the evidence for the evolution of the universe and conclude that had those events been observed they would have taken 14 billion years of the observer's time, but in fact, since they weren't observed (except by God), they happened virtually instantly.

Minds perceive events as forming a "time line" upon which the events reside. The line has a beginning and stretches into the indefinite future. If there were no minds, however, the totality of events would be more like a point than a line.

If time is indeed a subjective phenomenon, like our perception of color, then our sense of vast ages of time having elapsed in the "past" is simply an illusion.

RLC

Census Snoops

2010 is a census year and the Census Bureau will be soliciting information about you this year that they have never sought before and which Jerry Day thinks they have no constitutional authority to ask you for. He makes a pretty good case that this year's census is in large part a government intrusion into our privacy that attempts to gather information which is none of the government's business. Give it a look:

Thanks to Ernest for the link.

RLC

The Anti-Obama

One name being mentioned with increasing frequency when the talk turns to the question of who the GOP candidate might be in 2012 is Mitch Daniels. Daniels is the current governor of Indiana and Mona Charen fills us in on his background. Her column should be read in its entirety for what it tells us about the man, but this excerpt might pique your interest:

When Daniels took office in 2005, Indiana, which had been enduring Democratic governors for 16 years, was running an $800-million deficit. Four years later, it had a $1.3-billion surplus. Daniels accomplished this without raising taxes (as 66 percent of states have done); in fact, he passed the largest tax cut in state history. Nor did he cut essential services like education, as 40 states have done. As Mark Hemingway reported in National Review, "In the last three years, the state has repaid $760 million to schools and local governments that had been appropriated to finance the state's deficit spending." Additionally, Indiana has hired 800 new child-welfare caseworkers and 250 state troopers, all while cutting the rate of increase in state spending from 5.9 to 2.8 percent annually.

Having experience in successful governance isn't the only thing attractive about Daniels. Charen goes on to tell us more:

Daniels has successfully courted business investment and has welcomed "two Toyota plants, a Honda factory, a $500-million Nestl� facility, and a British Petroleum project that will bring $3.8 billion to the state."

This is a laboratory of successful conservative governance. As Daniels put it to NR, "Our health-care plan is health savings accounts for poor people. Our telecommunications policy is deregulation. Our infrastructure policy was the biggest privatization in state history." And his spending policy was less is more.

A former chief of the Office of Management and Budget (under George W. Bush), Daniels is known for his incisive mind and mastery of detail. In addition to government service - he also worked as an aide to Sen. Richard Lugar and as Ronald Reagan's political director - Daniels has headed a conservative think tank, the Hudson Institute, and served as president of Eli Lilly's North American operations.

Not only has he governed but he's also run a major business. No wonder they call him the Anti-Obama.

RLC

More on the Dubai Assassination

Those following the mysterious tale of the assassination of the Hamas terrorist leader Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in Dubai last month may be interested in some of the latest developments. According to DEBKAfile:

Dubai's police chief Dhahi Khalfan said Friday, Feb. 26, that DNA and fingerprint evidence of at least one of the 26 team of assassins had been found in the hotel room where Hamas commander Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh was found dead on Jan. 19. The first arrest warrants have now been issued through Interpol.

DEBKAfile's intelligence sources report that the Dubai authorities believe that a persistent stream of "revelations" about the Mabhouh investigation will make Israel and its Mossad intelligence agency slip up and admit responsibility for his death.

According to those sources, it makes no sense for the Dubai police to have found DNA or fingerprints in room 230 of the Al-Bustan Rotana luxury hotel occupied by Mabhouh and in none of the other rooms taken by hit team members. Any fingerprints will not be of much use unless they can be matched with prints of identified persons already on file with the Dubai police, and in any case are probably not genuine.

Our sources disclose that all the suspects arrived in Dubai disguised from head to toe and their fingerprints were most likely faked along with the rest of their appearance. Therefore, the Dubai police's fine collection of video clips and passport photos are of little use to the inquiry.

DEBKAfile sources therefore dismiss the claims by the Dubai police and certain Israeli publications citing "security experts" that the Mossad was caught unawares by the security cameras which tracked the death squad's movements. They missed the fact that the team was not only aware of the cameras but controlled them and used them in support of their mission.

Therefore, when Khalfan comes out with his next round of "revelations," he will most likely produce video depictions of some of the suspects using electronic gadgets to open the door of 230, Mabhouh's hotel room, at 8:24 p.m. Jan. 19, as the victim climbed up from the lobby to his room. The next shot 19 minutes later will show the same suspects leaving room 230, relocking the door and with the same gadget shooting the inside bolt home to concoct the appearance of a locked room mystery.

But the Dubai police are clearly missing the essential 19-minute segment covering the action inside room 230, without which they have no real evidence of a crime. That did not happen by chance.

According to our sources, the death squad kept the cameras running long enough to exhibit their facility to penetrate any secure site in the Middle East, but switched them off when they wanted to conceal the actions they took in pursuance of their mission.

Well, now. I don't know who DEBKAfile's sources are, but if this was not a Mossad operation who else would be trying to send the message that they could strike anywhere in the Middle East?

I also wonder why DEBKAfile thinks there's no real evidence of a crime if the suspects can be seen surreptitiously entering the room before the murder and leaving it afterwards, locking the body inside. That certainly seems like evidence to me.

Anyway, the TimesOnline reports that since the assassination became public young Israelis are applying for jobs with Mossad in droves.

RLC

Over the Cliff

Ramirez offers his perspective on why Republicans don't want to go along with Democrats on health care:

Pretty funny.

RLC

ID vs. TE

One of the sidebar debates in the intelligent design controversy is the clash between IDers and theistic evolutionists. Both agree that the world is intentionally designed but IDers believe that the evidence of this design can be detected in the world whereas TEers don't. TEers argue that natural forces and laws have produced the world as we see it (at least the living world) but that these laws and forces were the product of a Divine mind. Thus, TEers maintain, even though God is the primary cause of the world, we can know this only by faith not by any discovery of science.

According to TE the world appears just as it would were natural forces and laws solely responsible for it. IDers argue that, on the contrary, the world shows immense evidence of an underlying intelligence. The intelligence may not be that of the God of the Bible (though most IDers personally believe it is), but it's an intelligence all the same.

It seems like a small difference to be so exercised over but the theistic evolutionists, at least, are adamant, and sometimes even angry, in their opposition to ID, especially their opposition to treating ID as science.

A good introduction to the difference between the two positions is a debate that took place about a year ago between William Lane Craig and Francisco Ayala who addressed the question: Is Intelligent Design Viable? Craig argued for the affirmative and, as usual, pretty much dominated the event, which is interesting because Craig is a philosopher (not even a philosopher of science) and Ayala is a biologist.

Anyway, if you'd like to hear the audio you can listen to it here. There's also video of Craig's opening presentation here. The comments at the first site are also worth checking.

RLC

Abstinence Only Ed

The critics of abstinence-only education have been nothing if not adamantine in their insistence that AE doesn't work, that kids are going to have sex no matter what we say, and that we owe it to our young people to give them information on how to protect themselves.

According to a column by Mona Charen that point of view has recently gotten much harder to sustain. Charen says that the claim that kids are going to have sex regardless of what they hear from their elders just isn't supported by recent research reported in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine:

The Obama administration had disdained and defunded abstinence education in favor of "evidence-based" programs to prevent teen pregnancy (Note the assumption that liberal ideas are founded on evidence whereas conservative ideas spring from prejudice, ignorance or downright orneriness.). No one study settles things, but this one, conducted by an African-American professor from the University of Pennsylvania, will be hard to ignore.

Between 2001 and 2004, John B. Jemmott III and his colleagues studied 662 African-American sixth- and seventh-graders (average age 12). The kids were randomly assigned to one of four programs. The first emphasized abstinence and included role-playing methods to avoid sex. The second combined an abstinence message with information about condoms. The third focused solely on condom use, and the fourth (the control group) was taught general health information.

Over the course of the next two years, about half of the kids who received the condom instruction and half of the control group were having sex. Forty-two percent of those who got the combination class were sexually active, but only 33 percent of the abstinence-only group were having sex. Additionally, and this confounds one of the myths of the condom pushers, the study found no difference in condom use among the four groups of students who did engage in sex. "I think we've written off abstinence-only education without looking closely at the nature of the evidence," Jemmott told the Washington Post. "Our study shows this could be one approach that could be used."

Elayne Bennett, founder of the Best Friends program, is delighted that the Jemmott research reinforces her experience with mostly African-American adolescent girls. Offering a mixed program of mentoring, dance, music, and role-playing, Best Friends and its new spinoff, Best Men for boys, has had two decades of success in helping kids abstain from sex, drugs, and alcohol until they graduate from high school. She has found that the kids desperately want someone to tell them it's OK to postpone sex. It's a commentary on our times but there it is - we need special programs to give kids permission to say no.

"The opponents," Bennett notes, "have popularized three words, 'Abstinence doesn't work.'" But her program and others like it have excellent track records. Every previous study showing the effectiveness of abstinence programs has been picked apart for one trivial flaw or another, but the new research seems airtight.

Charen goes on to note that supporters of so-called "comprehensive sex ed," with its heavy emphasis on "safe sex" and condoms, have always argued that "no matter what we say, the kids are going to have sex anyway so they might as well be safe." But they never adopted that logic with, say, cigarettes. They didn't lobby for mandatory filters on the grounds that the kids were going to smoke willy-nilly.

Good point. The problem is that too many people think that, unlike smoking, the only negative consequences of youthful sexual adventures are pregnancy or disease and that if kids protect themselves against these then sex is no more problematic than soccer.

This strikes me as incredibly naive. Sex is psychoemotional nitroglycerin. It's extremely volatile and often changes everything in a relationship. When two people not related in a life-long commitment allow their relationship to go physical the change is often for the worse. I can't prove this, of course, but it seems to me to be a universal human experience. It's why the fear that a boy will no longer respect her after sex is prevalent among many girls. It's why so many relationships falter once the couple has allowed it to become sexual. It's even the impetus behind the lyrics to the 1964 Supremes song "Where Did Our Love Go?" for heaven's sake.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about how the way we see a person changes once we "know" them. He wasn't talking about sex, but he easily could have been:

"Alluring and attractive was [s]he to you yesterday...a sea to swim in. Now you have found h[er]shores, found it a pond, and you care not if you ever see it again."

I know I'm coming across to a lot of people as though I'm a hopeless anachronism, but nevertheless I think it's true that if a girl wants to increase the chances that she'll have a successful marriage one thing she should do would be to make him wait.

RLC

One Consequence of the Summit

I don't know what, if anything, will come of the Health Care Summit the President presided over yesterday, but one thing will almost certainly change. The perception, encouraged by the media, that the Republicans are simply the party of "no," that they have no plan, and that they're uninformed on health care, will no longer be tenable. I didn't watch the whole thing, but in what I did watch the Republicans seemed very well prepared, very bright, and full of ideas. Perhaps I didn't watch enough, but the Democrats seemed to base their arguments mostly on emotional appeals.

The fundamental difference between the two groups seems to be this: The Democrats are primarily concerned with extending coverage to millions of people who don't have it at present. The Republicans are primarily concerned with cutting the costs of health care for everyone which would have as one of its indirect benefits making coverage affordable for those who can't afford it now.

I don't see how extending coverage to millions of people can do other than drive the country to fiscal ruin, which is why I think the republican emphasis is the proper one. It'll do no good to have universal coverage if a third of the nation's workers are out of work.

Anyway, here's an example of why I say it'll be very hard for the media to continue to portray the GOP as inept, uninvolved in the health care issue, and simply trying to obstruct the President for none but political reasons. This is a video of Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. It's a little wonky, but he certainly generates confidence that he knows what he's talking about and isn't just throwing out feel-good platitudes for the tv cameras:

RLC

More PP Pratfalls

It seems that Planned Parenthood is in a contest with ACORN to see whose employees can most often be caught flouting the law.

This video was shot in Wisconsin where sex between an adult and a girl age 16 or under is a felony and must be reported to the authorities by any health care professional who becomes aware of it. Apparently, some PP employees don't think that applies to them:

It'll be interesting to see if Sonia is prosecuted. Any bets?

RLC

Lewis on Friendship (Pt. III)

In the third and final part of our series on C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves we find Lewis sharing some scathing thoughts on the effect of women on male/male friendship. He's not writing of women in general, it must be emphasized, but of a certain kind of woman who is not interested in the things which interest the men in her ambit and who may sometimes begrudge them their friendships:

...[In societies where] it is the men who are civilized [educated] and the women not, and when all the women, and many of the men too, simply refuse to recognize the fact .... we get a kind, polite, laborious and pitiful pretence. The women are deemed (as lawyers say) to be full members of the male circle. The fact - in itself not important - that they now smoke and drink like the men seems to simple-minded people a proof that they really are.

No stag parties are allowed. Wherever the men meet, the women must come too. The men have learned to live among ideas. They know what discussion, proof and illustration mean. A woman who has had merely school lessons and has abandoned soon after marriage whatever tinge of "culture" they gave her - whose reading is the Women's Magazines and whose general conversation is almost wholly narrative - cannot really enter such a circle. She can be locally and physically present with it in the same room. What of that?

If the men are ruthless, she sits bored and silent through a conversation that means nothing to her. If they are better bred, of course, they try to bring her in. Things are explained to her: people try to sublimate her blundering and irrelevant observations into some kind of sense.

But the efforts soon fail and, for manners' sake, what might have been a real discussion is deliberately diluted and peters out in gossip, anecdotes and jokes. Her presence has thus destroyed the very thing she was brought to share. She can never really enter the circle because the circle ceases to be itself when she enters it - as the horizon ceases to be the horizon when you get there....She may be quite as clever as the men or cleverer. But she is not really interested in the same things, nor mistress of the same methods.

The presence of such women, thousands strong, helps to account for the modern disparagement of Friendship. They are often completely victorious. They banish male companionship, and therefore male Friendship, from whole neighborhoods. In the only world they know an endless prattling "Jolly" replaces the intercourse of minds. All the men they meet talk like women while women are present.

This victory over Friendship is often unconscious. There is, however a more militant type of woman who plans it. I have heard one say "Never let two men sit together or they'll get to talking about some subject and then there'll be no fun." Her point could not have been more accurately made. Talk, by all means; the more of it the better; unceasing cascades of the human voice; but not, please, a subject. The talk must not be about anything.

There are women who regard [their husband's friendships] with hatred, envy and fear as the enemy of Eros and perhaps even more, of Affection. A woman of that sort has a hundred arts to break up her husband's Friendships.

Lewis was writing in a time when there was often a much greater disparity between the education of men and women. Even so, he does have an eye for human nature. Men are much more likely to talk about things which women find boring, and vice-versa, and it's certainly true that the presence of people who are bored by a conversation is often fatal to it. This is especially so if the bored, uninformed party seeks to enter the conversation in order to change it or resents not being able to participate in it in the first place.

RLC

That Was Then

Senate Democrats under Harry Reid, and with the encouragement of President Obama, are expected to push health care reform through the Senate in a process called "Reconciliation" which is actually intended to be used only for budgetary measures. Under Reconciliation, which is now called "the nuclear option," a bill only needs a simple majority of 51 votes to pass.

The Democrats are planning to use this tactic to pass health care because they lack the 60 votes necessary in the senate to close off a Republican filibuster. If they go the route of Reconciliation they would only need 50 votes (plus the Vice-President's tie-breaker)to pass the reforms they are trying to enact.

The amusing irony is that back in 2005 the Democrats were, via filibuster, blocking a number of President Bush's judicial appointments, and the President threatened to use Reconciliation to get them through. The Democrats in the Senate were in high dudgeon. Senator Schumer accused Bush of precipitating a constitutional crisis. Then Senator Biden prayed to God that the Democrats would never do something so low. Senators Clinton and Reid decried the move as an arrogant power grab.

Here, thanks to Breitbart tv and Naked Emperor News, is the video of our august senators declaiming against the perfidy of the Bush administration in 2005:

That was then, of course, and this is now. Now these same people are all (Mrs. Clinton excepted since she's no longer in the Senate and hasn't stated her opinion on the matter) very much in favor of doing precisely what their principles impelled them to so vehemently oppose when the GOP was in power.

If we weren't as charitable as we are here at Viewpoint we might call this rank, cynical hypocrisy, but we are charitable so we'll just call it an astonishing inconsistency.

RLC

Lily White at MSNBC

Recently Keith Olbermann of MSNBC thought he'd score a few points on his Countdown show by somewhat unctuously challenging the tea-partiers to explain why there are no minorities at their events. The Dallas Tea Party turned Mr. Olbermann's criticism rather cleverly back upon him in this ad:

The best part is the "Have you no shame, sir?" line which is one of Olbermann's favorite rhetorical cudgels. He uses it often against whomever it is he wishes to disgrace on a particular day.

RLC

No Wonder

Stories on the assault on Marjah in Afghanistan are reporting that it's going slower "than expected." Little wonder that that's the case when you read about another battle in Afghanistan at Ganjgal. If the situation in Marjah is like it was in Ganjgal it's a wonder that the operation is making any headway at all.

Four Marines lost their lives in Ganjgal largely because the artillery support the commanding officer requested when they were ambushed was denied because the Rules of Engagement forbade using artillery if civilians might be killed. As a result four Marines and nine Afghan soldiers died:

Four U.S. Marines were killed Tuesday, the most U.S. service members assigned as trainers to the Afghan National Army to be lost in a single incident since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. Eight Afghan troops and police and the Marine commander's Afghan interpreter also died in the ambush and the subsequent battle that raged from dawn until 2 p.m. around this remote hamlet in eastern Kunar province, close to the Pakistan border.

Dashing from boulder to boulder, diving into trenches and ducking behind stone walls as the insurgents maneuvered to outflank us, we waited more than an hour for U.S. helicopters to arrive, despite earlier assurances that air cover would be five minutes away.

U.S. commanders, citing new rules to avoid civilian casualties, rejected repeated calls to unleash artillery rounds at attackers dug into the slopes and tree lines - despite being told repeatedly that they weren't near the village.

"We are pinned down. We are running low on ammo. We have no air. We've lost today," Marine Maj. Kevin Williams, 37, said through his translator to his Afghan counterpart, responding to the latter's repeated demands for helicopters.

If you go to the link be sure to click on the video.

It is certainly proper that we do all we can to limit civilian casualties, but we should not be sending our young men into combat if we're going to be so punctilious about harming civilians that we sacrifice our sons rather than give them the support they need. If these are the Rules of Engagement our President is going to set then it is morally reprehensible of him to put Americans in the line of fire at all. He should withdraw them from Afghanistan immediately or explain why, as in the case of the battle of Ganjgal, these men were denied the cover they needed.

While he's at it he might also try to explain to the American people why anyone should join the military when the politicians are unwilling to do everything they reasonably can to insure their safety.

RLC