Letting the Consumer Decide

Here's some good news in the battle against pain:

Withdrawn arthritis drug Vioxx may make a comeback on the market after advisers to the Food and Drug Administration narrowly voted it was safe enough to be sold despite an increased risk of heart attack and stroke. The FDA panel concluded Friday that popular painkillers Vioxx, Celebrex and Bextra pose an increased risk for heart problems but should remain on the market because the benefits outweigh the dangers.

The panel strongly favored keeping Celebrex on the market, split over Bextra and favored Vioxx - which is currently not on sale - by a vote of just 17-15. Vioxx is substantially worse than the others, panel chairman Alistair J.J. Wood of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine said. "The data is very compelling," Wood said.

Vioxx is manufactured by Merck and Co. while Celebrex and Bextra are manufactured by Pfizer Inc....It was a stunning turnaround for Vioxx, which was withdrawn in September by Merck after a study showed Vioxx doubled heart attack and stroke risk compared to a placebo.

"Merck has appreciated the opportunity to present data at this advisory committee meeting," the company said in a statement. "We look forward to discussions with the FDA." The FDA usually follows advice from its panels. Officials have said the agency will make final decisions on Celebrex and other pain relievers in a matter of weeks. All three drugs are part of a class called Cox-2 inhibitors.

The panelists suggested restrictions on the drugs such as placing a severe "black box" warning on them, including more patient information with the drugs, restricting which patients could get the drugs and possibly banning direct-to-consumer advertising for the products. The panelists were unanimous in saying the drugs, known as Cox-2 inhibitors, pose risks of heart trouble. Studies of Bextra were limited, but showed a greater risk than Celebrex, the committee noted.

Wood of Vanderbilt University Medical School said it is important to find some way to help the public better understand the nature of risk. "People worry about crime and then drive drunk," he said, indicating they don't really understand relative risks.

Dr. Steven Nissen, medical director of the heart center at the Cleveland Clinic, said "What we really want is to make sure it's available for patients that need it and is unavailable to patients who whom it's inappropriate."

The committees were asked to assess the drugs after Merck pulled Vioxx from the market last fall because of health concerns. Since then questions have been raised about Bextra and Celebrex. The excess risk from Celebrex varied in different studies and the panel didn't seek to determine just how much more hazard a user faces than someone on another drug.

However, the panel was told that no cardiovascular problems were seen at the normal prescription dose of 200 milligrams. Heart trouble began to appear in colon polyp study patients who took 400 milligrams. (emphasis ours)

Earlier in the meeting, Wood said the safety problems reported in connection with Cox-2 inhibitors exceed those of products that have been withdrawn from the market. However, since the side effect involving heart attacks, irregular heartbeat and stroke is a relatively common problem, that makes it harder to pin it to the drugs than if it were a rare side effect.

Dr. Peter S. Kim, president of Merck Research Laboratories, had told the FDA committees earlier that new studies indicated the side effects aren't unique to its product."There are unique benefits to Vioxx," he said. "The science has progressed and we need to take that science into consideration."

While the committees heard evidence that all drugs in the group can increase the risk of heart attacks, irregular heart beat and strokes, it noted that Vioxx seemed to have more such reports than the other drugs. On the other hand, Kim said, Vioxx is the only one of the drugs approved for people with certain allergies and did better at preventing the stomach and intestinal problems often caused by over-the-counter painkillers.

The FDA's decision seems to us to be the right one. Inform consumers of the risks, and then let them decide whether they wish to place themselves at increased hazard or to live in pain.

Peculiar Choice

Does it not strike you as odd that the navy is commissioning an attack submarine named for former president Jimmy Carter, known around the world as something of a pacifist? It does this cartoonist.

It's almost like naming a destroyer after an Amishman. We understand there are plans afoot, by the way, to name the next aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Mother Teresa.

Don't Fix It, End It

Ask yourself one simple question. Why does our government insist on total control of our well being when it comes to the issue of Social Security? Where, in the Constitution of the United States, is it mandated that the Federal Government insure our retirement years? And if, by some stretch of imagination, one could make the claim that it does exist, then our government has failed miserably with regard to their charge.

President Bush speaks of an "ownership society" and at the same time is trying to control and direct that "ownership". It is a fact that conflicting messages from parents can make a child schizophrenic. The mixed message here is "I advocate an 'ownership society'. One where Americans take 'ownership' of their Social Security accounts by privatizing them, but we will control those private accounts." Ok. Just give me another shot of thorazine and I'll be fine...honest.

Presently, employees pay 6.5% of their wages into Social Security up to a cap of $90,000. The standard operating procedure of our government when faced with a failed system like Social Security is to raise the cap so they collect more dollars, raise the age at which individuals are able to collect their benefits so they pay out fewer dollars, and decrease the amount of benefits the individual eventually receives...if they live long enough. That's not my idea of a "fix".

The fact of the matter is that over the years our government has broken many promises to the American people and Social Security is just one of them. Raising the age at which one is eligible to collect what they have paid into all their lives, raising the cap and paying out a lesser amount in benefits are perhaps the most recent examples.

You can be sure you will be hearing more about these "solutions" as our government attempts to "fix" Social Security".

In addition, the Social Security reform plan anticipates the need to borrow $2 Trillion dollars to keep Social Security solvent. Ask yourself who is actually expected to pay off that "loan"? The interest alone could probably go a long way to keeping the plan solvent but the interest doesn't go into the Social Security system. So where does it go? And who pays it?

And given the government's proclivity to conservative estimates when it comes to spending, the cost is likely to go much higher. The "estimate" to fix Medicare was $400 billon dollars. Now, before prescription one has been written under the new, improved, "fixed" Medicare plan, the cost is now estimated at $700 billion to $1 trillion dollars.

I submit that the best way to fix Social Security is to discontinue payments into the system...immediately.

Those who are 65 get full benefits. Those who are 64 get 98% of the benefits, 63 get 96%, etc. Those who are 16 pay nothing into the system and get nothing from it. They have their entire working lives to provide for their own well being when they retire. Responsibility for one's own well being. Now there's a concept.

How can this work? Simple. Instead of individuals paying 6.5% of there wages into the plan each year they get to allocate their new found savings into their own retirement plans. That's "ownership".

In addition, presently, employee Social Security tax contributions must be matched by their employers. Eliminating those contributions would mean a 6.5% windfall to corporate America that goes right to the bottom line. Businesses will be better able to compete in the global economy, thus, more likely to create more jobs hiring more Americans who will be able to contribute to the economy in the form of increased purchasing power as well as increasing revenues of the government through income taxes. Businesses would also have a new-found ability to raise matching contributions to employee IRAs.

Currently, self employed individuals have to pay 13% into Social Security. That savings would also surely be used to fund their personal retirement plans and perhaps stimulate the economy as well.

Once again we see that when government butts out of private individuals lives, things have a much better chance of working just fine.

For more reading on the subject of Social Security, see here, here, and here.

Lastly, my proposal for Social Security just might not be viable. If, as has been alleged, the Social Security fund has been looted by our government and replaced with I.O.U.s in the form of bonds (loans), then there is no money in the system at the present time to pay anyone. You be the judge.

A Natural Ally

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail makes a case for cultivating India as an ally in the war on terror. The Russians have demonstrated themselves to be unreliable companions in the fight against Islamism, having foolishly decided to cooperate with Iran in its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and that leaves India as the most logical choice:

Russia has indicated that it will continue with assisting Iran's nuclear program, increasing the likelihood of a nuclear-armed Iran. Between the soft efforts of the European Union 3 (EU-3) to stop the Iranian nuclear program and Russia's encouragement and support, the Mullahs of Iran are sure to continue their quest to become a nuclear power.

The impact of Russia's support of Iran's nuclear program is both far-reaching and short sighted. Russia is indicating that it is separating itself from the West by co-opting the theocratic regime of Iran.

Russia's myopia is clear: they do not recognize the interrelated threat from Islamist states and terrorist groups. The murderers of Beslan ultimately receive support from the Iranians via their tacit support of al Qaeda and Hezbollah. The net of the Islamic terrorist groups is cast far and wide.

In light of Russia's defection, the United States must think long and hard about finding a new and powerful strategic ally in Asia. India is that natural ally.

India is a large, democratic, developing nation strategically positioned in Asia, bordering on Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and close to other nations in Southeast Asia where terrorists operate. Pakistan is a nuclear power that is potentially susceptible to an Islamist takeover. No doubt any operation to secure or destroy Pakistan's nuclear weapons in the event of an Islamist takeover would be conducted in cooperation with India. Bangladesh is becoming a haven for radical Islamists.

India has a longstanding problem with Islamist terrorists, most notably in Kashmir. These Kashmiri terrorists work in close conjunction with al Qaeda and its International Islamist Front. Denying Kashmir as a base of operations for al Qaeda is a strategic goal in Asia.

The Indian people also are supportive of an Indian-American alliance. A recent poll was conducted in India about America, and the results are encouraging. Americans were viewed in a positive light by a large majority of Indians. The main reason cited was terrorism.

The time is right to actively pursue a strategic relationship with India. The loss of Russia as an ally on the war on terror is both disappointing and difficult to offset, but a strong relationship with India can mitigate the damage and improve our odds in fighting against the enemies of civilization.

As terrorists find the room in which they can freely move about shrinking, Pakistan will look increasingly necessary to the Islamists, especially given the prize of access to nuclear weapons. If an American attack on Iran occurs, an Islamist uprising in Pakistan would seem likely as the jihadis seek both refuge and nukes. India would be indispensable in countering such a dangerous move.

The Pirate-ization of Social Security

I just don't get it...or... maybe I do.

President Bush wants to "fix" Social Security by privatizing it, i.e. allowing people to divert a portion of their Social Security contributions into stocks and bonds. If Social Security will be in trouble down the road, such a maneuver would have no impact on the solvency of Social Security whatsoever.

The problem, if it exists, is that the population of the future that will be contributing to Social Security will not be making sufficient contribution to cover the demand of payouts to a retiring baby-boomer generation.

It is a classic bait and switch scam. First, communicate that the plan is in trouble. Then claim that the "fix" is to change the program to guarantee solvency yet the recommended change has absolutely no impact on the problem.

Then we hear from Dr. Alan Greenspan in this article who "embraced President George W. Bush's vision of an "ownership society" on Thursday, saying private accounts could foster feelings of wealth among poor Americans."

Read those words carefully. It's classic Greenspan speak.

How and why does a privatized Social Security account make an "ownership society"? The individual has no more "ownership" of the account than they did of the Social Security account.

Such private plans have already been tried in Britain and Chile among other countries and have resulted in net losses for the participants.

While the plan to privatize Social Security might foster "feelings" of wealth among poor Americans, it won't do anything to actually increase the wealth of poor Americans. The only Americans who's wealth will increase are the fund managers who manage the private accounts and take a cool 1.5% of the total value of the account each year for providing the "service" to those poor Americans for "managing" their private accounts. 1.5% might not seem like much but consider that if the personal account gains 3% for the year, the account managers get 50% of the profit. If the account breaks even or loses money for the year, the account managers still get their percentage. In other words, President Bush's idea of an "ownership society" creates an opportunity for "poor Americans" and every other American (unless you're a congressman who has doesn't have to participate in Social Security because we fund a better retirement plan for them) to pay a previously non-existent load on their retirement account.

In fairness to Dr. Greenspan, the article says:

While he did not specifically endorse Bush's plan and admitted private accounts, in and of themselves, would not improve Social Security's shaky finances.

Yet he goes on about the silly wealth effect:

"These accounts, properly constructed and managed, will create ... a sense of increased wealth on the part of middle and lower-income classes of this society, who have had to struggle with very little capital," Greenspan told the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee.

"While they do have a claim against the Social Security system ... as best I can judge, they don't feel it is personal wealth the way they would with personal accounts," he said as he took questions from the panel.

"It's crucial to our stability that people all have a stake in this system," he said. "I don't perceive that Social Security is conceived that way and I think it is very important to people to have a sense of ownership."

This is cacca doodle. Just ask any AARP member if they don't believe they have ownership of their Social Security benefits and are entitled to them because they've paid into the system all of their working lives.

Ownership is not a promise, it is tangible property in hand. It's about directing ones affairs as they see fit.

If their words of an "ownership society" are sincere, then we should be able to allocate our private accounts in a way we choose. The acid test for the rhetoric of President Bush and Dr. Greenspan is simple...can I allocate the contributions to my private Social Security account to the acquisition of gold?

The quick answer is No. Why? Read this link for an explanation from Dr. Greenspan himself.

So much for an "ownership society".

The Moral <i>Sine Qua Non</i>

Dennis Prager has been writing an excellent series of columns on the indispensibility of Judeo-Christian faith as the only realistic ground for a vigorous moral sense in our culture. This link will take you to his archive where you can open each essay starting with the first (There are five).

In Part I of the series Prager examines the current moral confusion in our culture and explains the need for grounding morality in the God of Judeo-Christian belief:

Chesterton was right. The collapse of Christianity in Europe led to the horrors of Nazism and Communism. And to the moral confusions of the present -- such as the moral equation of the free United States with the totalitarian Soviet Union, or of life-loving Israel with its death-loving enemies.

The oft cited charge that religion has led to more wars and evil than anything else is a widely believed lie. Secular successors to Christianity have slaughtered and enslaved more people than all religions in history (though significant elements within a non-Judeo-Christian religion, Islam, slaughter and enslave today, and if not stopped in Sudan and elsewhere could match Nazism or Communism).

In Part II he argues that without God all morality is purely subjective:

If there is no transcendent source of morality (morality is the word I use for the standard of good and evil), "good" and "evil" are subjective opinions, not objective realities.

In other words, if there is no God who says, "Do not murder" ("Do not kill" is a mistranslation of the Hebrew which, like English, has two words for homicide), murder is not wrong. Many people may think it is wrong, but that is their opinion, not objective moral fact. There are no moral "facts" if there is no God; there are only moral opinions.

Part III is a case against relying upon reason to yield moral guidance. Reason, Prager maintains, is a wholly inadequate ground for morality:

Another example of reason's incapacity to lead to moral conclusions: On virtually any vexing moral question, there is no such a thing as a [missing] purely rational viewpoint. What is the purely rational view on the morality of abortion? Of public nudity? Of the value of an animal versus that of a human? Of the war in Iraq? Of capital punishment for murder? On any of these issues, reason alone can argue effectively for almost any position. Therefore, what determines anyone's moral views are, among other things, his values -- and values are beyond reason alone (though one should be able to rationally explain and defend those values). If you value the human fetus, most abortions are immoral; if you only value the woman's view of the value of the fetus, all abortions are moral.

Part IV addresses the dehumanizing consequence of a thoroughly secular ethics. In a Godless cosmos man is nothing but a flesh and bone machine, a herd animal different from others of the kind only in being relatively more intelligent:

The second reason that the breakdown of Judeo-Christian values leads to a diminution of human worth is that if man was not created by God, the human being is mere stellar dust -- and will come to be regarded as such. Moreover, people are merely the products of random chance, no more designed than a sand grain formed by water erosion. That is what the creationism-evolution battle is ultimately about -- human worth. One does not have to agree with creationists or deny all evolutionary evidence to understand that the way evolution is taught, man is rendered a pointless product of random forces -- unworthy of being saved before one's hamster.

Part V looks at what Judaism and Christianity have in common and argues that together they are chiefly responsible for America's greatness:

Both religions are based on the Old Testament, which Judaism and Christianity hold to be divine or divinely inspired. Clearly, then, they will share values -- unless one holds that the New Testament rejects Old Testament values. But that is untenable since, in addition to Christianity believing the Old Testament is God's word, Jesus was a believing and practicing Jew. He would not practice a religion whose values or Bible he rejected.

One way to understand Judeo-Christian values, therefore, is as values that emanate from a Judeo-based Christianity. Christians have always had the choice to reject the Jewish roots of Christianity (which, when done, enabled Christian anti-Semitism), to ignore those roots, or to celebrate and embrace them. American Christians have, more than any other Christian group, opted for the latter.

One point that bears elaboration, perhaps, is that if there is no God then the categories of moral Good and Evil are empty. Unless there is a God to provide us with moral sanction then anything we do, as Nietzsche is at pains to convince us, is neither good nor evil. It just is. A wolf kills a young elk or our cat torments a mouse before thrashing it to death. Neither behavior is evil. There is no crime committed nor any offense against morality. Likewise, if we are just animals, when one man slays another there is no evil in the deed. There are only acts of which we approve and acts of which we disapprove, but our disapproval is no reason why someone should refrain from doing them. Nor does our disapproval make them wrong.

If there is no God then there is no reason why those who have the ability or the power should not impose their will upon the rest. A Godless world is a world of might makes right and there is no escaping it. That we haven't devolved into that hellish circle of the Inferno yet is due only to the fact that there is still a significant Judeo-Christian presence in this country and because those who have embraced secularism simply don't think the moral implications of their convictions through to their logical endpoints. If, as time goes by, secularism continues its advances then this state of affairs will inevitably and gradually deteriorate, and the weak will fall prey to the strong. We will see history reprise the Europe of the twentieth century.

Dennis Prager has given us an outstanding series of articles, and we urge all of our readers to take the time to read his columns with close attention. His message is as important as any message could be.

Redefining the Judicial Mainstream

President Bush has renominated twenty judges whose confirmations the Democrats had blocked in his first term. Some Dems are all aflutter that the President would have the temerity to bring them back for reconsideration now that he has a stronger position in the senate, but he has, and he appears to have every intention of seeing them confirmed. Here are a couple of snips from the LA Times' story:

"The President is at it again with extremist judges," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). "Last year, the Senate worked to confirm 204 of the president's judicial nominees and rejected only the 10 most extreme."

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said the judges who were filibustered last year and have been renominated "are out of the mainstream and will not be confirmed by the Senate, unless they have drastically modified their views and ideologies."

Because the Republicans now have 55 of the Senate's 100 members, their hand is stronger in attempts to break a filibuster. It takes 60 votes in the Senate to cut off debate. Senate Majority leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has indicated that if Democrats again attempt filibusters, he might seek a ruling from the Senate that 51 votes, not 60, would be needed to stop a filibuster on a judicial nomination.

What the story doesn't tell us is exactly what it is about these judges that offends Senators Reid and Schumer. Why do they say the nominees are "extremists"? Is it because they believe judges should interpret the law, not make it? Is it because they are practicing Christians? Is it because they are pro-life? Is it that they are conservative? Any of these, of course, would place a candidate far out on the edge of the political solar system as far as Senator Schumer is concerned, but the article doesn't help us understand what their extremism consists in.

We suppose we'll have to wait till the hearings to find out and to see if the nominees have had the good sense in the meantime to have "drastically modified" their Christian beliefs and other distasteful radicalisms enough to veer them back into the "mainstream". It's important that these prospective judges conform to the high standards of such as Senator Schumer and make themselves acceptable to Lefty Democrats who, of course, have been hunkered down in the mainstream for forty years.

Nature v. Nurture

John Derbyshire at National Review Online lists thirteen candidates vying for consideration as the cause of homosexuality, discusses which he thinks to be the most likely, and explains what the implications of all this might be for our views of homosexuals and homosexuality. Several excerpts from Derbyshire's piece follow:

My own inclination, therefore, is to believe that most homosexuality is inborn, or acquired early in life, possibly by infection, or by biochemical imbalances in the womb, perhaps helped along by some genetic predisposition. As I have said, the human personality is a thing of fantastic complexity and mystery, and I am sure there are cases of socialization, "imprinting," and conversion (in both directions), too. These are, however, fringe phenomena, occurring in small numbers. Most homosexuality is, I believe, inborn, or acquired very early in life.

The issue is confused by the fact that homosexualists, who obviously have the biggest axe to grind here, are the most vocal proponents of the can't-help-it school of thought. "We are born this way," they say. "Therefore it is mean of you to discriminate against us!"

As to what the consequences for our attitudes and public policies should be, supposing I am right about the causes of homosexuality, I offer the following.

I don't think that the fact of a predilection's being inborn should necessarily lead us to a morally neutral view of the acts it prompts. If you could prove to me that pyromania is inborn, I should not feel any better disposed towards arson. On the other hand, I should have a somewhat more sympathetic attitude towards arsonists than I had before. In that spirit, I favor a tolerant attitude towards homosexuals. I certainly do not believe, as around 40 percent of Americans say they do, that homosexual acts ought to be illegal.

Further, homosexuality is offensive to many believers in all three of the major Western religions, who form a large majority of the American population. I think that while minority rights ought to be respected, civic majorities ought not be asked to endure offense for the sake of abstract metaphysical or juridical theories, unless dire and dramatic injustices like slavery are in play. Majorities have rights too; and while I want to see minority rights respected, I don't think that every minor inconvenience consequent on being a member of a minority should be raised to the level of an intolerable injustice requiring drastic legislative or judicial remedy.

Tolerance is not approval; and while I do not agree with the pope that homosexuals are "called to chastity," I do think that they are called to restraint, discretion, reticence, and a decent respect for the opinions of the majority. I certainly do not think that they ought to be allowed to transform long-established institutions like marriage on grounds of "fairness." Nor do I think they should be allowed to advertise their preference to high-school students, as they do in some parts of this country. Nor should they be strutting about boasting of "pride." (How can you feel pride in something you believe you can't help?)

Its worth reading the whole article at NRO.

Poker At Its Finest

Here's an interesting article on a new bill before congress.

From the link:

It will be introduced hopefully tomorrow or in the coming days and would require China to abide by international trade agreements and stop manipulating the value of its currency," said Klein, speaking on behalf of New York Democrat Senator Charles Schumer, who is spearheading the proposed legislation.

This statement tends to support my statements in previous articles that there is nothing "fair" about the fair trade pact we have with China.

I'm not a gambling kind a guy but if I had to wager, I'd place my bet on the bill mentioned in the linked article never seeing the light of day, not because it might make sense, and not because it might even be the right thing to do but simply because the politicians of this country have demonstrated for way too long that they simply don't have the intestinal fortitude to make the tough choices.

And here are some snippets from the commentary on the article linked above:

Now we come to the third point, the big one. As is usual in situations like the one facing the US and global financial system at present, this one is political - it is geo-political in fact. To see the background, here is a link from Yahoo news dated February 2 and titled US Senate to mull deadline for China to revalue yuan.

Yep, it's political alright. Not even economists are that stupid.

According to the report, a dozen Senators, from both parties, agreed to "co-sponsor" a bill which gives China "a window of 180 days" to stop fixing its currency to the US Dollar and "revalue" it. If China does not comply, the bill states that all Chinese manufactured goods exported to the US will face a tariff barrier of 27.5%!! Breathtaking, isn't it?

...

There is NOTHING that we can think of - and we are fairly knowledgeable and have well functioning imaginations - which could better illustrate the true nature of the fiscal and financial dilemma now facing Washington than this bill. There is NO WAY that the US government can be ignorant of the potential effects on their own economy of slapping a 27.5% tariff on Chinese manufactured goods. In addition, there is no way that the US government can be ignorant of the fact that by setting a deadline on a LARGE Chinese currency revaluation, they are setting a deadline on China realising a HUGE loss on the mountain of $US based assets they now own - or are expected to acquire in the future to go on offsetting the effects of the US trade/budget deficits.

No matter, as this link from the "Carolina Channel" titled: Graham Wants Big Tariffs On Chinese Products illustrates. The bill imposing the 180 day deadline for the Chinese revaluation and the 27.5% tariffs if they do not revalue was introduced on February 3. The introduction of legislation does not automatically mean that it will be passed, but this bill has bi-partisan support and is expected to pass, according to its two sponsors Senator (R-SC) Lindsey Graham and Senator (D-NY) Charles Schumer.

...

China is present at this weekend's G-7 meeting in London on an "observer" basis. The Chinese government has already made known its "displeasure" with the introduction of this bill on the floor of the US Senate. Financially, the passage of this bill would not be a case of the US government shooting the US economy in the foot, the bullet would go straight between the eyes. To threaten the nation which stands between you and financial apocalypse with tariff retaliation if it does not revalue its currency, thereby taking HUGE losses on its purchases of your debt paper and almost guaranteeing it will not only stop buying more but start selling what it has, is an act of political lunacy.

And THIS is the situation in which the US Dollar price of Gold is going down. Truly, the Gold "reverse barometer" has never worked this well. The true state of the US financial system has never been so starkly, if unintentionally, brought to light. Only those who see financial calamity straight ahead would propose a measure which guarantees financial calamity - in six months time.

Things are starting to heat up. Stay tuned for further developments.

Bill Maher on Religion

Joe Scarborough had Bill Maher on his Scarborough Country last night on MSNBC, and the discussion turned to religion. Scarborough's guest did not shrink from sharing his feelings.

Maher's views are probably representative of a lot of people in the "Democratic wing of the Democratic party", although most of them would never be so frank as is Maher in articulating those beliefs. Listening to Maher one can't help but hear in his words the fundamental difficulty facing the Democrats as they seek to entice red staters into the Democratic fold. On the one hand, they have to try to convince those voters that they are sympathetic with their deepest convictions while, on the other, they hold those same convictions in utter contempt.

Maher states that religious people are "unenlightened". Religion is "a neurological disorder" that "stops people from thinking". The only reason religious people believe what they do is because they were "frightened into believing it when they were children". Religion is "a crutch for the weak-minded". Maher claims that he is "embarrassed that America has been taken over by evangelicals", people who "don't believe in science and rationality". He claims that he is "disgusted by religion" and that "it is arrogance parading as humility". The future, he asserts, "does not belong" to the religious.

The dominant feeling I had watching and listening to this was a kind of sadness. Maher apparently has known very few Christians personally, and the ones he has known have evidently not been what one may have hoped they would be. Nor has he seemed to have read much from the extensive intellectual literature that has been produced by Christians throughout history, but especially in the last one hundred years. Maher comports himself as informed and enlightened, but he is, on this topic at least, a pathetically ignorant man in the most precise sense of the terms.

Listening to Maher state his opinion of Christianity should remind Christians and other devout theists that they have a profound responsibility to be all that he is convinced they are not. They cannot be content to be just like everyone else, either morally or intellectually. Just as Blacks and women often believe they have to be better than their competition in order to get a fair shake, so, too, must those who claim to be followers of Christ strive to reflect Him as accurately, clearly, and compellingly as they are able to a skeptical and disdainful world.

The segment of Scarborough Country featuring Maher can be viewed here. The video takes about a minute to load and the relevant portion begins about two minutes into it.

Gazing West

Wretchard at Belmont Club directs us to this snippet in Jane's International Security News in January:

According to JID's intelligence sources, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is considering plans to expand the global war on terrorism with multi-pronged attacks against suspected militant bases in countries such as Lebanon and Somalia. In a week in which Israel launched airstrikes against Hizbullah positions, our regional correspondent reports from Beirut.

Sending US troops into lawless Somalia would not be new, nor is it likely to cause serious diplomatic waves. Covert US forces have periodically infiltrated the country over the past two years to conduct surveillance and even snatch suspects wanted for the November 2002 suicide bomb attacks in Mombasa, Kenya: an incident in which suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists bombed a hotel and mounted an unsuccessful attack on an Israeli airliner with shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles.

However, sending US special forces into Lebanon - and in particular an area like the Bekaa Valey (which is virtually Syrian territory) and where the bulk of Damascus' military forces in Lebanon are deployed - would be an entirely different matter. Deployment of US forces in the area would almost certainly involve a confrontation with Syrian troops.

That may well prove to be the objective, since the Bush administration is currently stepping up pressure on the Damascus regime in a bid to force it to cut off all support for radical Palestinian groups that have been targeting Israel during the three-year-old intifada. Washington also wants Syria to abandon its weapons of mass destruction and to withdraw all its forces from Lebanon, a virtual satellite since Syria moved in with tacit US support in 1990 as part of a strategy to end Lebanon's civil war.

The US administration has long considered Damascus as a prime candidate for 'regime-change' (along with Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and possibly even Saudi Arabia). Syria, once a powerhouse of Arab radicalism that could not be ignored, has been seriously weakened, both militarily and politically. Washington may feel that the time is coming to oust Bashir Al-Assad and the ruling generals. Targeting Syria via Lebanon, the only concrete political influence Damascus has to show following decades of radical diplomacy, could prove to be a means to that end.

Recalling our ambassador was a provocation and escalation. It sent a clear message to Damascus, in the wake of the car bomb murder of the former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafiq Hariri, in which crime the Syrians were no doubt complicit, that our patience with them is near the end. As the Iraqis reach the point where they are able to handle most of their security burden by themselves, American troops will be freed to liberate Lebanon from an unjust, oppressive occupation, and maybe also Syria itself.

Bashir Assad, the Syrian prime thug, has exploited our preoccupations in Iraq for the past year. He knew that as long as we were tied down there we would be ill-disposed toward adventures further abroad. Now circumstances are changing, and the Pentagon may have set its gaze westward of Iraq. Events of the next couple of months will tell.

Sunni Triangulators

The news from Iraq continues to be encouraging, at least for those who wish for success in that harsh land, and bitterly disappointing to terrorists, the American secular Left, and miscellaneous Bush haters everywhere. The Guardian reports that the Sunnis have recognized that their non-participation in the election was a serious mistake and are seeking now to get involved in the process of building a government in Iraq:

Iraq's Arab Sunnis will do a U-turn and join the political process despite their lack of representation in the newly elected national assembly, Sunni leaders said yesterday. Many Sunnis protested that the election was flawed and unfair, but in the wake of Sunday's results, which confirmed the marginalisation of what was Iraq's ruling class, their political parties want to lobby for a share of power. "Our view is that this election was a step towards democracy and ending the occupation," said Ayad al-Samaray, the assistant general secretary of the Iraqi Islamic party. He said unnamed Sunni leaders blundered in depicting the election as a deepening of the occupation.

The insurgency ravaging Iraq is based in Sunni areas, and there were fears that the violence would escalate if the once-dominant minority was further alienated. A call by clerics for a boycott, and threats by insurgents meant very few Sunnis voted in the January 30 poll. Having endured the brunt of US attacks in towns such as Falluja and Ramadi, many derided the ballot as an attempt to legitimise a foreign occupation. The consequent landslide for the Shias and Kurds means that they will drive the new government and the drafting of a constitution.

An alliance of cleric-backed Shias won 48% of the vote, which could give it a wafer-thin majority in the 275-seat assembly. Kurds won 26%, and a slate headed by the outgoing prime minister, Ayad Allawi, won almost 14%. All three blocs have promised to reach out to the Sunnis, who comprise a fifth of the population but won just a handful of seats because of low turnouts in their areas. This will soon be tested as parties forge alliances and tussle for government posts, including that of prime minister and president.

Secular Sunni leaders yesterday accepted the victors' invitation to participate, potentially draining support from the insurgency. "We can't say it was wise or logical to not participate; it was an emotional decision," said Mr Samaray. "Now the Sunni community faces the fact that it made a big mistake and that it would have been far better to participate." His party, the main Sunni group since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, was in talks with Kurds and Shias. He added: "The Sunni community will accept to share this country with others. They do not need to dominate."

Adnan Pachachi, a Sunni elder statesman, also predicted Sunnis would join the political process. "They missed an opportunity to participate and want to make up for it," he said. Mr Pachachi's was one of two Sunni parties that did stand in the election. It won 0.1%; the other got 2%.

That grinding sound you hear is left-wing molars being gnashed to powder.

Not Going Gently Into That Dark Night

Matt Drudge has an interesting news flash concerning CBS executive Josh Howard who was one of the three execs to have been fired in the wake of the Dan Rather fiasco at 60 Minutes. Rather, you will recall, proffered documents to his television audience purporting to show that George Bush's National Guard service was tainted. The documents were obvious frauds and CBS chose to sever ties to Howard and several others whom they deemed responsible. The big suits, however, went unpunished, and three of the cashiered scapegoats have refused to leave. Now Howard is raising the ante.

According to Drudge:

THE NEW YORK OBSERVER will report tomorrow: 'Former 60 Minutes Wednesday executive editor Josh Howard has told colleagues that before he resigns, the 23-year CBS News veteran will demand that the network retract remarks by CBS president Leslie Moonves, correct its official story line and ultimately clear his name'...

In the event of a lawsuit, Mr. Howard has told associates that he would like to see Moonves put under oath to talk about his own roles in the network's stubborn, hapless defense of the flawed segment on President Bush's National Guard service.

Howard has also indicated to colleagues that he would subpoena specific CBS documents, including the e-mails of top executives.

The towering edifice that is the Main Stream Media is swaying like a drunk on the verge of abject collapse. Their credibility has been severely undermined as a result of their obvious Left-wing bias and their willingness to bend, distort, and suppress news according to the demands of their political agenda. The events Drudge describes above are not likely to help them regain credibility with the American people.

Kennedyites v. Clintonites

NewsMax.com (no link available) maintains that the intramural squabbling in the Democratic Party is being resolved in favor of the Kennedy/Kerry far left wing to the detriment of the somewhat more moderately liberal Clinton wing:

The apparent selection of Howard Dean as chairman of the Democratic Party indicates the party does not want to learn from its ways. That's good news for Republicans. The Dean ascension also indicates that when it comes to grassroots Democrats, it's the liberalism of Dean, Kerry and Ted Kennedy that still holds sway among party cadres.

For some time, NewsMax has reported that Hillary Clinton has long had her guns set on Dean. During the bitter primary campaign last year, we noted that a source close to Dean's mother blamed Hillary and Bill for all of her son's campaign woes. Now it is no longer an open secret that Hillary dislikes Dean.

But it is clear that a larger civil war has long been under way in the Democratic Party that ironically has pitted Hillary and Bill as the "moderates" against Dean and his faction - which is still controlled by the Kennedy-Kerry circle.

Kennedy's recent bellicose speech to the National Press Club spit in the face of moderation and said the party should stick to its core positions: pacifism, higher taxes, more abortion rights, more gay rights, etc. The reasoning for this positioning is that the Kennedy faction does not believe the Democrats have lost elections because of their liberal views.

They believe that the 2004 election was lost solely on national security and the "war on terror." An associate of Kennedy recently told NewsMax the view is simple: "Stand firm, and the Iraq war will turn into such a disaster, the Democrats will win big in 2006." The source added, "The Democrats won't have to do a thing but remain opposed to the war."

The war and growing body count will feed angst, the source said, among the right wing, who will soon demand an end to the war. Perhaps so. But the recent relatively calm elections in Iraq suggest the insurgency may be abating rather than increasing.

The Kennedy faction is quite likely correct that the Republicans won last year on the basis of the war on terror, but that doesn't mean that if the Democrats just stick to their position of negativism and obstructionism that it will carry them to victory in 2008. Many voters are beginning to suspect that they "misunderestimated" George Bush in a number of important ways, and the Republicans are beginning to convince many minorities that they don't belong in the Democratic party any more. If the economy continues to improve, and if democracy in Iraq continues to flourish, the Democrats are going to need more than the same threadbare liberal platitudes if they hope to keep the blue states from wandering out of the corral.

The Strange Case of Ilario Pantano

The desk jockeys in the United States Marine Corps are determined to see to it that re-enlistments in the Corps plummet. As counterintuitive as that sounds, it's the explanation which comes closest to making sense of the facts of the case of Marine 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano. It is only the possibility that there is more to this case than Rowan Scarborough reports that prevents us from concluding that one of the qualifications for membership in the Marines' legal affairs office is an IQ that would freeze water.

More Biology Profs Weigh In

Our local Sunday paper yesterday carried an open letter signed by sixteen biology instructors at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and directed to the school board of Dover Area School District. The letter urged the board to reconsider their plans to incorporate into the biology curriculum a statement recognizing Intelligent Design as an alternative to Darwinian evolution. The letter contained a number of assertions that should be clarified or corrected. The Shippensburg biologists write, for example, that:

With this change in the curriculum, instead of science, students are given fringe beliefs and unsubstantiated speculations.

That living things are designed is hardly a fringe belief in our culture. Indeed, it is the view that life is the product of undirected, mindless forces that is the "fringe" belief if anything is. Perhaps the professors meant to say that belief that organisms are purposefully designed is a fringe belief among scientists, but if so, even this claim is exaggerated. It may be true that it is a minority view among scientists, but that hardly makes it a "fringe" belief unless one defines "fringe" as any view held by less than 50% of a population.

The concept of ID is not scientific. ID cannot be investigated using the scientific method.

The crux of the controversy between proponents of ID and proponents of Darwinian evolution is this question: How can we best explain the multifarious design that we find at every level of biological organization? Is it best explained as a product of nothing other than blind, unguided, purposeless forces or as the product of natural processes plus intentional agency? This is the central question, but it cannot be answered by peering into a microscope. It is not the sort of question that is amenable to empirical investigation. Thus neither answer to the question is scientific. They both fall into the category of metaphysics. Why then should the first be acceptable in a science classroom but the second regarded as illicit? Either they should both be admitted (my view) or they should both be prohibited.

ID is not based on objective evidence.

Intelligent Design is based on evidence available to anyone who wishes to examine it. It's based on the same evidence that led a materialistic, atheistic biologist like Richard Dawkins to exclaim that nature gives "the appearance of having been designed for a purpose". It is not the evidence, however, that is relevant in this controversy. The relevant question concerns which interpretations or explanations of that evidence are to be permitted, and which are to be excluded, in public school classrooms.

ID is a veiled strategy to teach religion instead of science.

This is a confusion based upon a misconception. Some ID proponents have indeed stated that ID leads to the conclusion that there is a God, but such a conclusion, even if true, no more constitutes teaching religion than does reciting the pledge of allegiance every school day. The conclusion that there is more to reality than mere nature is not in itself a religious claim and affirming the possibility of its truth is hardly an instance of teaching religion. It would only constitute "teaching religion" if the teacher were to advocate some sort of human obligation or responsibility to the intelligent designer, and if they did that they should be reprimanded.

ID cannot be falsified through experimentation or realistic predictions...Science is based upon...the scientific method [which] requires falsifiable hypotheses and objective and accepted testing methodology.

That there is any such thing as a "scientific method" is very much in dispute among contemporary philosophers of science, but even if the above claim is accurate, and even if it is true that ID is not subject to falsification (which is also in dispute), the problem is that Darwinian versions of evolution fall victim to the same requirement. As suggested above, the central claim of Darwinism is that the design of life's structures and systems is the product solely of random, unguided, purposeless processes, or, alternatively, there is no purposive, intelligent force responsible in any way for the emergence of living things. This claim is no more easily falsified than is the central claim of ID. If ID is to be excluded from science classes because it is not falsifiable, then this fundamental postulate of Darwinisn should be accorded similar treatment.

The concept of ID implies a...supreme being,[an] all mighty deity.

Despite the hopes of some and the fears of others, this is simply not correct. ID implies only that one of the causes of life on earth is intelligence. The intelligence could be an alien life form that arose under completely different conditions than living things on earth experienced. To assume that the designer of life must be a "supreme being" or an "all mighty" deity is to stretch ID beyond its theoretical limits.

If scientists ever succeed in creating living organisms from scratch in a laboratory no one would suggest that it would follow from that accomplishment that those scientists are "supreme beings", regardless of what the scientists may think of themselves. The most we could say is that the creators of life were a species of intelligent being which itself developed in a different set of circumstances and in a different physico-chemical environment than did the nascent life forms in the lab.

The Shippensburg biologists close their letter with the exhortation to Let science be science, but this is not as easy as it sounds. It belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of philosophy in science. The two are very nearly inseparable. If science teachers cannot introduce philosophical concepts into their classrooms then they cannot talk about the nature of the scientific enterprise, the scientific method, the principle of cause and effect, the principle of sufficient cause, the principle of uniformity, the law of parsimony, the criteria of a good scientific theory, and the laws of logic. Indeed, if we are to banish all philosophical thinking from the science class then we must also exclude the falsifiability criterion itself since it is not falsifiable. All of these concepts, and much more that might come up in an intellectually vivacious science class, (some of the claims of string theory and speculations about other universes come to mind) are philosophical topics.

Eliminating philosophy from science classrooms is neither possible nor desirable. As soon as we start talking about interpreting data and explaining facts we find ourselves awash in philosophical assumptions and predilections. If it were possible to eliminate philosophy from the science classroom doing so would only create a sterile and stifling learning environment for students.

In light of this it's strange that all manner of philosophy is admitted into our classrooms without raising alarm, yet the simple philosophical hypothesis that there might be an intelligence responsible for the complex structures which comprise the biosphere sends half the population into a panic. Very strange.

More on Vioxx

Recent news on the status of Vioxx and other Cox-2 inhibitors is here. It is our hope that these drugs are put back on the market unless the risk of heart attack turns out to be very high. It is not clear at this point that it is.

There are a lot of people in terrible pain who would surely be willing to accept a moderately elevated risk of heart trouble in the future in order to live whatever days they have left in relative comfort. Perhaps it will be determined that there are ways to mitigate the risk.

In any event, it is unfortunate that these drugs are no longer available to those who find the possibility of a distant heart attack much more acceptable than the certain prospect of immediate chronic pain and who are prepared to live with the hazard.

Jordan's End

For those of you who have been following the Eason Jordan imbroglio (not Jordan Eason as some dyslexic blogger who shall remain nameless had it on this site last week) and wondering perhaps whether his offense should really have caused him to resign at CNN, PowerLine lays out Jordan's options and shows succinctly that he didn't leave CNN much choice but to force the issue, if, in fact, that's what they did:

Now that Eason Jordan has resigned, folks are eager to defend him instead of trying to ignore his situation. The defense comes in two forms: first, that he made a mistake but that the mistake should not have cost him his job; second, that he is the victim of McCarthyism, sacked for expressing unpopular views.

The answer to both defenses is essentially the same. Once strong evidence emerged that Jordan had accused the U.S. military of systematically murdering journalists, his legitimate options were the following: (1) he could try to show, through the tape of his remarks, that he made no such accusation, (2) he could present evidence to support his charge, (3) he could retract his charge and apologize, or (4) he could modify his charge and present evidence to support the new charge.

Jordan opted for none of the above. At that point, the question became whether CNN would be led by a monger of vicious and unsupported anti-American rumors. CNN, hoping to remain distinct from Al Jazeera at least for the time being, apparently answered that question in the negative. Where's the injustice to Jordan in this scenario?

Of course, this assumes that Jordan's resignation was demanded by CNN. If it was purely voluntary, which we doubt, then the decision to resign was his and there is no question of injustice done him by CNN or anyone else.

Why the Left Loves Osama

Nelson Ascher has a good piece titled Why the Left Loves Osama at Front Page Mag.

Ascher argues that the ideological Left was orphaned by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and bereft of a powerful sponsor in its protracted quest to destroy the United States and its system of democratic capitalism, both of which they heartily despise. Some excerpts:

Now, [since the demise of Soviet communism] whatever [the Left] wanted to defend or protect doesn't exist anymore. They have only things to destroy, and all those things are personified in the US, in its very existence. They may, outwardly, fight for some positive cause: save the whales, rescue the world from global heating and so on. But let's not be deceived by this: they choose as their so-called positive causes only the ones that have both the potential of conferring some kind of innocent legitimacy on themselves and, much more important, that of doing most harm to their enemy, whether physically or to its image.

This newly ever-growing Western left, not only in Europe, but in Latin America and even in the U.S. itself, has a clear goal: the destruction of the country and society that vanquished its dreams fifteen years ago [when the Soviet Union collapsed]. But it does not have, as in the old days of the Soviet Union, the hard power to accomplish this by itself. Thanks to this, all our leftist friends' bets are now on radical Islam. What can they do to help it? Answer: tie down America's superior strength with a million Liliputian ropes: legal ones, political ones, with propaganda and disinformation etc. Anything and everything will do.

In the same way as the murderers of 9/11 used the West's technology against itself, the contemporary left will do its best to turn democracy into a suicide pact. This is already being done, obviously. The fight for Guantanamo Bay is, in many ways, as important as that for Baghdad. And, whenever a British born terrorist is released and sent back to the UK, to be joyfully acclaimed by the pages of "The Guardian", "The Independent" or through the waves of the BBC, that fight is being lost. Radical Islam is being given one more tactical victory and the left's strategy is being vindicated.

There has been some talk recently about the probable inevitability of a nuclear attack on the mainland U.S. in, say, the next ten or fifteen years. The Berlin Wall's orphans are already busy creating the slogans, formulating the dogmas, writing down the articles and books that will allow them, when the worst happens, to lay all the blame on the victims, making retaliation as difficult as it can be. They're carefully preparing their case and the court is already in session.

Ascher's point is well-taken. It doesn't matter how noble the cause the U.S. undertakes in the world or how odious the foe it confronts, the Left will invariably align itself in opposition to American policy. It will tenaciously resist anything America does that will strengthen its image around the globe and redound to its credit. The Left is engaged in a kind of cold war with the very idea of America. Nothing it stands for, does, or has ever done, short of self-immolation, could ever gain their approval. They have nothing but contempt for the mass of American people and for their values, a contempt, one suspects, spawned by their own self-loathing and miserable childhoods.

Leftist theorists have written much about the necessity of a long march through the institutions. It is only, they write, by means of a generational movement to take over and undermine the traditions and institutions upon which the social and economic health of the nation are based that the United States, as we have known it, can be toppled. Marriage, family, church, schools, language, the military, news media, the entertainment industry, government, the courts, and business are each glues that in different ways hold a disparate nation together. Dissolve these, or take control of them so that they may be used for their own purposes, and America will collapse like the World Trade Towers on 9/11. The longing to bring about this reckoning is what animates the Left. It is why they agitate so obsessively for and support so ardently any measure or movement which would cripple these institutions.

Their project is far advanced. They have pretty much gained a monopoly of influence in the news media (until recently), in the entertainment world, and in the universities. They have managed to severely undermine the bonds of marriage and family through radical feminist ideology, relaxed sexual mores, cohabitation, and easy divorce. Gay marriage would create even more cracks in the foundation of marriage itself and is therefore vigorously promoted by the Left. Religious belief and expression is being pushed into ever smaller corners of relevance in people's lives as they find fewer affirmations of its validity and importance in cultural and public spheres. For much of the last fifty five years government and courts of law have been largely in the hands of liberals and could be counted on to support and implement the Leftist agenda. Bilingualism and multiculturalism could be employed to drive wedges between people by celebrating what makes us different rather than focusing on what makes us alike and by eroding the unifying power a single language exerts on a culture. And, of course, any scandal at all involving the military, even if it must be fabricated, as Eason Jordan's was, will be milked for every drop of propaganda value to discredit this last outpost of character, values, and ideals in our culture.

They have suffered setbacks along the way, of course. The collapse of world communism, as Aschler describes, deprived the Left of a major resource and sponsor and left them severely shaken. Leftists were shaken and disillusioned not by the successes of the former Soviet Union nor by their crimes, but ultimately by their disappointing failure to squeeze their own people into the Procrustean bed of a materialist ideology.

They were also stymied by the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and of the coming to political power of Republican conservatives in general. They could wait out these reactionary administrations if need be, but the long term threat they pose to the Left is in their appointments to the judiciary. A conservative federal bench and Supreme Court would be an unsustainable blow to Left-wing aspirations and must be resisted with every weapon that can be mustered for the fight. We will no doubt witness this fight in all its ugliness when President Bush announces his first Supreme Court nominee.

Military successes in Afghanistan and especially Iraq are also a setback to the Left who miss no opportunity to minimize those successes by finding the cloud in every silver lining. In their view the U.S. must be prevented from achieving any more such triumphs. The new champions of the Left are the Islamo-fascists, and they must not be thwarted in their struggle to paralyze the American Satan. They are a force which threatens the United States with great harm, and Leftists are hopeful that they'll succeed, at least in part. That's why people like Ward Churchill have justified their attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and people like Michael Moore pooh-pooh the extent of the terrorist threat. The Left believes America deserves to be punished, if not to die, and those who struggle to bring about this blessed outcome must be given every encouragement.

It might be comforting to think that if we do defeat the Wahhabis and other radical Islamists that that will bring peace and security, and that the Left will slink away in utter despair, but it won't and they won't. China and North Korea are looming on the horizon, and, if the Islamists fail, the Left will doubtless turn to them with hope that they will prove to be worthy rivals to the American colossus. In these tyrannical states the Left will invest their dreams and ambitions of an America brought low.

A Victory for One World Government

From the link:

Sovereignty-sapping U.N. accord gets new life

This accord would constitute the most egregious transfer of American sovereignty, wealth and power to the U.N. since the founding of that 'world body.' In fact, never before in the history of the world has any nation voluntarily engaged in such a sweeping transfer to anyone.

...

The first "Battle over the LOST" was in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan flatly rejected the treaty because it undercut American sovereignty. LOST II was in the mid-1990s. In 1994, then-U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright signed a supposedly amended version of the treaty and President Clinton sent it to the Senate for the constitutionally mandated advise and consent. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., who headed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was able to keep the treaty in a state of suspension.

Unfortunately, true American patriots like Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms are no longer in a position to defend the sovereignty of the United States and it seems the inmates have taken over the asylum. Today, we find ourselves left with leaders of far lesser stature who are apparently totally lacking and clueless when it comes to the qualities of statesmanship and patriotism.

I can recall a speech Jesse Helms gave to the U.N. where he told them in no uncertain terms to keep there hands off of U.S. sovereignty. He left no doubt that the America would not stand for a U.N. power grab. The then Secretary of State, Madeline Albright followed up immediately with a communication to the U.N. that "Senator Helms doesn't necessarily speak for the American people".

Now it appears President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind have picked up the ball determined to score a touchdown for the U.N.

Isn't it odd that relinquishing American sovereignty is not considered a treasonable offense?

Favorite Movie of 2004

Christianity Today is surveying readers of its web site to determine their favorite movie of last year. Being cultural recluses we saw too few movies to make an intelligent choice ourselves, but maybe some of our readers would like to cast a vote. If so, you can do it here.

New Virulent HIV

An article in Bloomberg.com reveals that a new and extremely virulent strain of HIV has been found in a New York man. Following are excerpts from the article:

New York City doctors have discovered a man with a previously unseen strain of HIV that is resistant to three of the four types of anti-viral drugs that combat the disease, and progresses from infection to full-blown AIDS in two or three months, the health department said.

"We've identified this strain of HIV that is difficult or impossible to treat and which appears to progress rapidly to AIDS," said New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden. "We have not seen a case like this before. It holds the potential for a very serious public health problem."

The case was diagnosed in a New Yorker in his mid-40s who reported multiple male sex partners and unprotected anal sex - often while using the drug crystal methamphetamine.

"It is likely there are others infected with this strain and this individual has infected others," Frieden said. The case is "extremely concerning and a wake-up call," he said.

Frieden said the one drug the HIV strain isn't resistant to is Enfuvirtide, sold under the trade name Fuzeon....The drug, which costs a patient an average $20,000, is the first in a class called fusion inhibitors that work by preventing HIV from infecting healthy cells.

The normal time of progression from infection to full-blown AIDS in an untreated patient is about nine years, with death following within 18 months, said Karlie Stanton, a spokeswoman for the CDC in Atlanta. For someone treated with anti-viral drugs, the average progression to disease from infection is 11 years, with death occurring within an average six years, Stanton said.

Persons diagnosed and living with HIV/AIDS in New York City totaled 88,479 out of a total population of 7.3 million in calendar year 2003, the last year in which statistics are available.

This is certainly chilling news, especially to the homosexual community. Whether it will place a chill on the incredibly promiscuous lifestyle that many of them maintain, however, remains to be seen.

Follow up

While surfing the 'net, I came across this must read article:

These paragraphs hit me right between the eyes as they, and the rest of the article, articulate the point I was trying to make in my previous post very nicely...

They export to the US but they want to strengthen the other Asian countries in order to have strong neighbors that will depend in the future more and more on the Chinese economy as an engine of growth and less on the US. Chinese imports from South East Asia are growing at a very rapid pace.

In the process of industrialization, energy needs go up. China consumes 1.7m barrels of oil a day; India 0.7m barrels. The whole of Asia has 3.6bn people including Japan and it consumes 20m barrels of oil a day. The US has 295m people and consumes 22m barrels of oil a day. For sure oil demand in Asia will double to 40m barrels of oil per day. Whether it takes six years or 15 years, I don't know, but it will double. In your lifetime you won't see oil at US$12 a barrel again - ever. The Chinese used to take 6% of the world's copper market in 1990, 12% in the year 2000; now they're the largest copper user, 21%. For Iron ore they consume up 27% of total production in the world.

The incremental demands from industrialization do not come from China only, but also from India, from rising standards through this wealth transfer from the Western World to Asia, and this will lift commodity prices.

Keep your eye on China

I don't know if this is article is credible but if it is, it's not good.

http://www.321energy.com

From the link:

Despite what Washington may say about Iran, China is the primary number-one national security threat for these reasons: China and the United States are the largest users and competitors for the world's rapidly diminishing oil reserves. Going forward, the US and China's projected requirements will consume 60%-70% of the world's production. This demand cannot be met and one country will experience brown outs, gasoline shortages, factory shutdowns as a result of having a lack of energy.

China has aligned itself with Iran, cited by Bush as the world's leading terrorist exporting nation and nuclear threat. Military alliances with Iran coupled with a massive naval build up have Washington concerned.

The Chinese have the United States in a dollar and Treasury note trap which could put the economy in a tail spin with one news announcement that they are no longer buyers of U.S. debt.

The war for final resources is the ultimate global showdown. The People's Liberation Army Colonels have developed a blueprint to destroy America. Actions, not words, seem to be bearing out this fact. China is merging financial, economic, political, and military forces together in a pursuit to dominate the world's resources, particularly oil.

The article also mentions that China has signed a deal with Venezuela for most if not all of their oil. I wouldn't be surprised if we don't start hearing about the need for military action in Venezuela soon.

I find it extraordinarily odd that given the text of the link, the country we are most indebted to is China. Something very strange is going on here. It appears that the very plan of U.S. dollar hegemony to exploit and dominate the world is going to backfire on the U.S. because China is using it as a means to our undoing.

Today, the U.S. is the world's largest debtor nation. We must borrow $2.6 billion dollars each and every day to finance our society's addiction to consumption. The lion's share of this borrowing is done with China which is going through their own industrial revolution just as we did 100 years ago. They lend us billions of dollars so we can continue to purchase goods from them creating demand which in turn fuels their growth. We are consuming and they are producing. We are now in a dangerous downward spiral.

This is not a symbiotic relationship. We have everything to lose and China has everything to gain and they are in total control of the situation. The danger is that if they were to stop lending to the U.S., we would be economically devastated. China on the other hand, would only have to open new markets for their goods. This might not be particularly easy but it could be done.

Perhaps the bigger problem is that while we fuel their economy (to the detriment of our own) we are promoting their demand for oil and other natural resources. So the side effect of our policies are creating a serious competitor for the very life blood of our country. This demand can only lessen availability and pressure the cost of these resources upward, something we can ill afford.

I wonder if all of this has something to do with my rant from the other day about the latest wave of corporate insiders selling their shares.

It would be interesting to examine the stock portfolios of our congressmen. I suspect we would see large holdings in companies involved in defense, energy and natural resources. They are directly responsible for the predicament we are in today and one can count on them "getting theirs" on the way down. Kinda' like the crew of the Titanic raiding the ship's wine cellar after hitting the iceberg.

I'd like to write more on this if time permits.

The Loopy Logic of Hate Speech Law

Viewpoint posted a report a couple of months ago on the case of a Swedish pastor who was convicted of hate speech and sentenced to a month in prison for preaching against homosexuality. Now that conviction has been overturned on appeal. Here are excerpts of the story from an English language Swedish newspaper called The Local:

The Swedish pastor sentenced to prison for a sermon that was said to spread hatred against gay people has had his conviction quashed on appeal, in a verdict that a Swedish gay rights group has called "disturbing".

Ake Green, a pentacostalist pastor from Borgholm on the Baltic island of Oland, was convicted last year by a court in Kalmar under Swedish laws banning 'agitation against minority groups'.

In the original verdict, the court ruled that certain phrases in his sermon amounted to an attempt to stir up hatred of homosexuals. During the sermon, copies of which were later distributed by Green to local media, the pastor called homosexuality a "cancer on the face of society", and said that homosexuality could lead to bestiality and pedophilia. The court sentenced him to one month in prison.

Overturning the earlier ruling, the appeal court in Jonkoping said that there was "no evidence that the pastor was using his preaching as a cover to attack homosexuals," arguing instead that Green was clarifying his beliefs and his interpretation of biblical passages.

Green's conviction had also been attacked by the Swedish press ombudsman, Olle Stenholm, who said that Green should be made to defend his statements in a "free and open debate".

The appeal court agreed, but it is unlikely to be the end of the matter: prosecutors see this as an important test case. Before the appeal, Kjell Yngevesson said that he intended to take the case to the supreme court if he lost.

Gay rights groups have declared their disappointment. RFSL spokeswoman Maria Sjodin said in a press release that the verdict was "disturbing", when hate crime is "on the rise."

"Agitation, whether it is based on religious or neo-Nazi beliefs, legitimizes violence," she continued. "The verdict would have been very different if Ake Green had agitated against black people or Jews."

Of course, it probably hasn't occurred to this spokeswoman that homosexual behavior is categorically different from race or ethnicity. Behavior is, or should be, legitimately subject to moral criticism. Race and ethnicity, being matters which are not chosen by individuals, are not.

Leaving aside the question of whether the pastor's judgments were correct, the idea that moral criticism constitutes hate speech and should therefore be illegal is self-refuting. After all, if it is hate speech to make public moral judgments then the public judgment that hate speech is wrong, being a moral judgment, is itself a form of hate speech and should be illegal. Thus, to condemn the pastor's behavior on the grounds that his moral objections to homosexuality constitute hate speech, is itself an expression of hate and should be prosecuted.

Closer to home the free expression of opinion about the moral standing of homosexuality and dissent from the current orthodoxy lead, perhaps, an even more precarious existence than in Sweden. Consider the case of four anti-gay protestors in the City of Brotherly Love.

During Philadelphia's annual homosexual "Outfest" rally, 11 Christians were herded into a police truck for refusing to obey a police order to relocate, and for using signs and megaphones to proclaim Scripture verses during the gay-pride celebration. The Christians are members of the evangelistic group Repent America.

Repent America director Michael Marcavage, 25, is facing three felony charges and five misdemeanors. The felonies include conspiracy, inciting to riot, and ethnic intimidation-a charge filed under the state's hate-crimes law, which specifically mentions sexual orientation as one object of hate speech. Charges against seven of the Christians were dismissed. The others are now known as the "Philadelphia Four."

"This is the first time in this country where singing hymns, praying, and reading biblical passages have been described as 'hate speech' and 'fighting words,'" said Brian Fahling, senior trial attorney for the American Family Association Center for Law and Policy. Fahling has filed a federal suit to stop his clients from being tried by the Philadelphia courts.

Cathie Abookire, spokeswoman for the Philadelphia district attorney's office, said the case was "not about content of speech" but "conduct and behavior."

During the incident, which happened in October, several of the Christians were calling out, "Sodomists repent. You're going to hell," a police officer testified.

Marcavage said the case is about free speech. "The hate-crimes legislation is being used to target Christians who call homosexual behavior sin."

On January 21, Judge Pamela Dembe dissolved an order prohibiting the accused from gathering within 100 feet of any gay-rights event, calling the order "an unreasonable restriction on a person's right to speak."

In Philadelphia speech is free and unfettered as long as it conforms to politically correct norms and does not offend members of a legally privileged group. Marcavage and his friends could have stood on the corner shouting obscenities and they probably would've received a slap on the wrist from the Philadelphia police, no matter how offensive their behavior may have been to average citizens, but calling gays to repentance turns out to be beyond the pale of acceptable behavior in the City of Brotherly Love.

Frankly, we were surprised that anything was beyond the pale in Philadelphia.

The Eason Jordan Scandal

By now anyone who gets their news from the new media has heard of the Eason Jordan disgrace. The problem is that if you get your news from the old media you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. To catch up see here. The short version is this:

Last week CNN executive Eason Jordan addressing an audience in Davos, Switzerland, accused American troops of deliberately targeting journalists for death. He offered no evidence, of course, because there is none. In the audience were Massachusetts representative Barney Frank, and Connecticut senator Christopher Dodd, both of whom are liberal Democrats not particularly friendly to the military. Both reported that Jordan did indeed say what he is alleged to have said. Also in attendance serving as moderator was David Gergen who confirmed that Jordan made these outrageous charges. Jordan claims he was misunderstood, but a videotape was made of the event, and Eason does not want it to be released.

The scandal here is not just that a CNN executive has played fast and loose with the truth. This is, after all, the same guy who stifled coverage of Saddam's atrocities in order to retain access to Iraq. Nor is the scandal merely that a lefty would libel American troops. That's a quotidian occurrence. The scandal is that few major news outlets, except the Washington Times and perhaps FOX, has carried the story. It's been spiked everywhere else, evidently to protect the reputation of CNN as a trustworthy news organization and perhaps also to protect the career of yet another dishonest leftist in the MSM.

The MSM gives the impression of being comprised largely of members of a liberal Liars Club with Pulitzers promised to whomever can get away with telling the biggest whopper. Journalistic ethics in this association require members to form a protective ring around any brother who has been wounded, to protect him from scrutiny by the hoi-polloi out here in red state territory who are still naive enough in this post-modern age to believe that truth is something more than whatever you feel most strongly about. A curtain of silence must fall down around the Jordan episode lest he be made to suffer for proclaiming his "truth".

The po-mo philosopher Richard Rorty once wrote that "truth is whatever my peer group will let me get away with saying." By that standard Jordan's asseverations of murderous American soldiers assassinating journalists is true beyond any doubt.

UPDATE: Drudge is reporting that Jordan has resigned today from CNN. Maybe now the story will get reported.

Dust in the Wind

I noticed that Mark Roberts uses the 1978 Kansas song Dust in the Wind as a jumping off point for a post on Ash Wednesday. This was an interesting coincidence since just a few days before I had played that song for my philosophy class, as I do each semester, to illustrate how the death of God manifests itself in the culture in expressions of despair.

For those who may not recall the lyrics they go like this:

I close my eyes, only for a moment and the moment's gone; All my dreams pass before my eyes a curiosity; Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind.

Same old song, just a drop of water in an endless sea; All we do crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see; Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind.

Don't hang on, nothing lasts for ever but the earth and sky; It slips away, and all your money won't another minute buy; Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind.

The forlornness of this song reflects an inevitable and melancholy consequence of the denial of a personal, transcendent deity. Modern man lives under an illusion that he can revolt against belief in God, declare Him to be a dead issue, and that the whole experience is bracing and liberating. He has led himself to believe that God is a burdensome, unnecessary, superstitious anachronism that we are much better off to put far behind us.

This is quite a distance, however, from the truth. Everything in life that really matters is ontologically dependent, directly or indirectly, upon the existence of God. To consider just one important example, if atheistic naturalism is correct and there really is no transcendent creator then there is no ultimate meaning to our existence. Our lives are purposeless and we are insignificant. As the biologist Theodosious Dobzhansky put it, the only meaning we can hope for "is to live, be alive, and to leave more life", but if this is what it's all about our life is no more purposeful than that of a bacterium. Famous trial lawyer Clarence Darrow saw life as nothing more than "an unpleasant interruption of nothingness." Historian Will Durant claimed that man's only significance lay in the fact that he can "look out upon the universe and it can't look back on him." These men recognized that the modernity they embraced ultimately strips us of the only thing that can put genuine meaning into a person's life, and that realization left them without hope of any but the most superficial meaning.

Jean Paul Sartre writes in Existentialism is a Humanism that man without God is forlorn, abandoned, alone in the cosmos (as Walker Percy puts it). Woody Allen claims in Hannah and Her Sisters that "the only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless." Albert Camus compares life to the crushing futility of Sisyphus condemned by the gods to eternally push a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down each time.

Notwithstanding the cries of existential despair from writers such as these, if there really is a God who made us then we can assume that He had some purpose in so doing, and we can assume that there is some underlying point to our lives. We may not know what that point is, but we can assume there is one. If, however, there is no God, then we in fact just are the product of eons of blind, purposeless forces, which somehow by chance accidentally spit us up out of the darkness. There's no reason why we're here, we just are, and after a relatively brief moment we'll return to the dust from which we sprang. For most of us, whatever we accomplish in that exquisitely brief span we call life will perish with us so that after we're gone we and all our deeds will be just as anonymous to our descendents as most of our great great grandparents are to us. It will be as if we never lived at all. What meaning can there be in this?

Even so, man can't live without purpose. Despite the fact that most people are only dimly aware of their predicament, they still often have a vague sense that something is wrong, that something is missing, something is out of whack, yet they have no idea what it is. They convince themselves that they can alleviate this sense of dis-ease with material things, or a new romance, a new job, drugs or alcohol, but nothing works for very long. Some turn to politics and ideology seeking in these a substitute religion to make their lives significant and to do for them what only trust in God can actually do. Others fill their lives with work, a ploy that occupies the mind so as to keep it from focusing on the futility of it all. None of this fills the emptiness, though, none of it satisfies the hunger, so most people continue to live out lives, as Thoreau puts it, of quiet desperation.

Augustine declares that "Thou hast made us for Thyself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee." Nothing else can give our lives meaning and fulfillment except that for which we were made in the first place. Unless life is eternal it ultimately comes to naught, but it can only be eternal if God is truly there, and this is the one solution to his situation that the modern materialist refuses to consider.

The rock group Smashing Pumpkins articulated the bleak darkness of modern man's circumstance with more cynicism and despondency, perhaps, than even the thinkers cited above: "We're nowhere," the lyrics of Jellybelly go, "We're nowhere. Living makes me sick. So sick I want to die." The lives of the characters in the movie American Beauty vividly illustrate this "nowhere-ness" of modern, secular life. Their daily existence is so tawdry, empty, and inane that the viewer can almost feel the ache in their souls himself. The characters in that movie were untypical of men and women without God only, perhaps, in the astonishing and depressing depth of their shallowness.

The modern atheist revels in his Promethean rejection of God. He proclaims himself free. He's thrilled by the audacity of his deed and excited by the prospects and promises his new-found liberation hold out to him. Yet all he has accomplished by spurning the true ground of his being is to condemn himself to a life of utter meaninglessness, and, as he discovers if and when he truly reflects upon it, a life of nihilistic emptiness and existential hopelessness.

So much for the exhilarating joys of being an intellectually consistent atheist.

News From Iraq

Strategy Page gives us this report in its daily briefing:

February 10, 2005: Terrorists in Iraq have resumed their terrorist campaign of suicide bombings, murders and threats. But there's been a change since the January 30th elections. In many mixed neighborhoods (where Sunni Arabs live next to Shia Arabs and/or other minorities), the amount of tips to police regarding terrorist activity has increased. It's uncertain if this is because of the morale boost from the election turnout, the growing use of Iraqi commandos and SWAT teams for raids against terrorists, or the growing availability of cell phones. It's probably all three. As a result, American and Iraqi security officials are more confident that American troops will be able to start leaving this year. While details are not given, there is apparently better security on the Syrian and Iranian borders. There are dozens of new border guard bases (actually small forts) being built on those borders, and more aircraft and UAVs patrolling there as well.

The economy is booming. The terrorist attacks are too few to paralyze the entire country, and seem to stage their operations mainly for the foreign media friendly to their goals (the return of a Sunni Arab dictatorship). The number of cars on the roads has nearly tripled in two years and sales of consumer goods continues to grow as electricity is more widely available. Because it takes so long to build oil refineries, Iraq must import most of its vehicle fuel. That, with the growing number of personal and commercial vehicles, creates frequent fuel shortages.

But then you probably knew all this from watching CNN and reading the NYT.

Nothing New Under the Sun

From the link:

The gap between US exports and imports hit an all-time high of $671.7bn (484bn euro) in 2004, latest figures show.

The deficit with China, up 30.5% at $162bn, was the largest ever recorded with a single country.

Democrats claim the administration has not done enough to clamp down on unfair foreign trade practices.

Absolutely. For once, the Democrats get something right. Foreign country corporations don't operate under the same conditions as those in the U.S. They don't have to deal with the taxation, environmental regulations, labor laws, or labor unions that raise the cost of doing business astronomically.

So while the Dem's have the right argument, it's for the wrong reason. They maintain:

For example, they believe China's currency policy - which US manufacturers claim has undervalued the yuan by as much as 40% - has given China's rapidly expanding economy an unfair advantage against US competitors.

The gist of this statement is correct except that there's nothing "unfair" about a country establishing a policy that maintains the value of its currency in direct proportion to that of the U.S.

The following may be absolutely the most inane statement uttered in recorded history...

Meanwhile, the Bush administration argues that the US deficit reflects the fact that America is growing at faster rate than the rest of the world, spurring on more demand for imported goods.

Duh! Why doesn't America's fast growth rate spur demand for domestic goods?

Now, here's a question to ponder...why is it that the U.S. government ONLY allows foreign countries to return their dollar surplus to the U.S. by purchasing U.S. treasuries?

Answer: Because they would own this once great country lock, stock, and barrel. But since they can only use their U.S. dollars to by our debt (Treasury bonds), they continue to finance our current life style of manic consumption. Can you say "dollar hegemony"? It is truly a house of cards.

Lastly, there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that the major Medicare reform isn't going to cost the estimated $400 billion to implement.

The bad news is the latest figures just released are estimated at $700 billion to $1 trillion and they haven't issued dollar one for a prescription yet.

Check out this link for an audio interview with Laurence J. Kotlikoff. Scroll down to the Real Player or MP3 links on the left side of the page to listen to a shocking discussion. Truly a voice in the wilderness.

Wake up America!

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

From CFO.com:

In January, insiders bought a mere $34.1 million of their own companies' stock, little more than a third of the $95 million for December, according to MarketWatch, which cited data from Thomson Financial. The January number was the lowest since July 1993, when insiders bought just $26.3 million, according to MarketWatch. That month, however, insider purchases still accounted for roughly 5.5 percent of all dollars spent on insider-trading activity; in January 2005, purchases accounted for a mere 1.8 percent of the total dollars spent by insiders.

Hmm. So if the company insiders don't have any confidence in their own companies to do well going into the future, why should I or anyone else be buying their shares? More importantly, why is President Bush pushing for a privatization of Social Security where the proceeds are placed in the stock market while the insiders are cashing out? It would seem that the insiders would be buying shares with both hands in their companies and others to position themselves to capitalize on the imminent influx of hundreds of billions of dollars.

One can only speculate on the answer to these questions and since neither the insiders nor the President confide in us all we can do is "follow the money". I suspect the insiders are persuaded that the chances that the stock markets and economy in general are headed for a firestorm are high and the chances of Bush getting his privatization plan through congress are low. Given these probabilities, they don't want to be among the bag holders when the expletive hits the fan...and either should any other thinking person.

The Face of the Secular Left

Jacob Laskin and Ann Coulter limn portraits of Ward Churchill on Front Page Mag, and they are not pretty pictures. Churchill's is the face of the contemporary secular left: mendacious, fraudulent, violent, and hate-filled, a superannuated hippie from the halcyon and hallucinogenic sixties who languishes in a permanent state of arrested development. It gives us a feeling akin to nausea to reflect that his pathetic existence is being subsidized by taxpayers.