Leaving the Left

A feminist leftist named Meryl Yourish explains why she has become a feminist conservative. In a nutshell, she realized that the Left is hostile to most of the things she believes in.

Today, I will be voting in the blowout victory of Republican candidate for governor Bob McDonnell, and it's highly likely that I will be voting for pretty much the entire Republican ticket.

Only nine years ago, I voted for Al Gore and the straight Democratic ticket in New Jersey-line A all the way, as the slogan went. (Funny how even though the position of Line A was a coin flip, the Dems had Line A almost every single year I voted in NJ.)

The question is, who changed: Me, or them?

Well, I've changed. I have become more centrist, and less willing to part with my hard-earned dollars because a politician says he can spend my money better than I. I'm definitely tired of state-run charity programs for the perpetually unemployed. Or the state wanting to run my healthcare. (Or, for that matter, auto companies and banks.)

But there were two major turning points in my march towards the center. The first came on September 11, 2001. The second came in the bloody Israeli spring of 2002. That was when I realized that the left-leaning crowd that I ran with didn't think that Israel had the right to use military means against the Palestinians to stop the terrorists. That was when I realized that the left-leaning crowd that I ran with were justifying Palestinian suicide attacks against Israelis by using the excuse that the Palestinians were oppressed. That was when I realized that the left-leaning crowd I ran with was full of anti-Semites who call themselves anti-Zionists.

You can find the rest of her essay at the link. There really are two kinds of people. There are those who value individual liberty and will fight to keep it, and there are those who hold their liberty cheap and are eager to surrender it to a government whose design is to gain as much control over our lives as it can. Ms Yourish, evidently, belongs to the first group. Most of those in power in Washington today hope you belong to the second.

RLC

Of Course Converts Should Be Killed

Many in America seem to think that Islam is just one religious option among many and that we need to respect and even honor both the religion and those who embrace it. What these same Americans are sometimes unaware of is the systemic violence which saturates Islam and Islamic culture.

Those who live in Muslim societies but who are not Muslims are considered second class citizens, dhimmis, and are often persecuted and expected to pay tribute to their Muslim masters. If they don't truckle to their overlords they're often killed.

If one is gay in Islamic culture one is executed. If a girl gets romantically involved with a man of whom the father doesn't approve she is often killed.

Those who criticize or "blaspheme" the Prophet or the faith are subject to death, and those who wish to leave the faith are also subject to death. People who convert to Christianity often live in fear of their lives.

Byron forwards this article by former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum which offers a glimmer of hope that some of this may be changing and that Muslims may be beginning to realize that we're no longer living in the 7th century. Here's the lede:

Three Muslim students approached me after I had finished a speech at Harvard University. I was there to talk about the threat of radical Islam across the globe, as part of the Ethics and Public Policy Center's Program to Protect America's Freedom.

The students, one man and two women, wore Western-style clothes and spoke English with little or no accent. They disputed my description of Islam as it's practiced in the Middle East, maintaining that al-Qaeda's version of Islam in no way reflects the Islam that is practiced around the world.

So I asked them a question: Should apostates - Muslims who convert to another religion - be subject to execution?

One of the women quickly said no. She insisted that she was free to leave Islam if she wanted to, and that she knew other people who had done so without a problem - in the United States.

I said I wasn't talking about her and others' freedom of religion in this country. What if they lived in a Muslim-majority country?

Silence. Eventually, the young man blurted out, "That's different."

Why? I asked. I recall him saying, "Because in Muslim countries, Islam and the government are one, and converting from Islam is the equivalent of treason against the government, punishable by death." The two women agreed.

The glimmer of hope, obviously, comes later in the article.

It's hard for many Americans to imagine that people still think this way, but they do. To read something like this gives a deeper understanding and appreciation, perhaps, of what our Founding Fathers were trying to avoid as they crafted the Constitution and the doctrine of non-interference by the government in matters of personal religion. It also gives a deeper appreciation of the words of John 8:32.

RLC

Re: Inner Life

Many thanks to Beth for sending us a link to a site which features a frame by frame explanation of what's going on in the video titled Inner Life of a Cell. If you go to the link scroll down about a page or so to find the explanations.

RLC

Ending the Cycle of Poverty

Andrew submits a very thoughtful and perhaps provocative response to a post that appeared on Viewpoint last August titled Why No Supermarkets?. I thought it might be worthwhile to put his reply on the Home page rather than the Feedback page and invite your comments. Here are his thoughts:

Your [Viewpoint's] assessment that the lack of responsible fathers in the inner-city certainly hits on an element of the problem with inner-city populations, but I think that the largest part of the problem goes a little further. This is a tough topic for me because it raises feelings and thoughts that are hard to temper. I should point out that my observations may come off as leaning toward racist; however, I would like to state outright that for any observation I make about the inner-city population, it will almost wholly apply to certain population groups that are Caucasian. My gripe is not against any particular ethnicity, but about the sub-culture that propagates the cycle I am about to describe. Reader be warned, this could get hairy.

We can thank Lyndon Johnson for our society's current state of affairs with the inner-city population. His social programs and desire for a Great Society amounted to a Great Dependence on government for Americans everywhere. Following the lead of his predecessor, FDR, Johnson set forth and accomplished the goal of setting a precedent for the government to help "people in need." The only problem is, the system creates entire generations of people in need from their parents who were themselves people in need.

My wife is a counselor for a large organization that provides counseling for children in inner-city schools. I want to point two things out. The organization only operates in inner-city schools because that is where the kids who have government assistance go to school. Second, as a result of the former, her company does not provide services in non-inner-city schools; not because those children don't have needs but because it is not profitable to operate in a school where each individual insurance company has to approve therapy and certify the counselor. Translation, money for the state is easy to get.

Here is the great trap. No one wants to take from children. I completely understand. Children are the true victims here. But as soon as they cease to be children, they become propagators of the problem. If you get nothing else, walk away with this:

The cycle of systemic dependence hinges on the benefits paid for the continual irresponsible conception of children.

The children that my wife counsels have "diagnosed" disorders. These disorders range from ADHD to aggressive tendencies toward authority. Problem is, I would speculate that most of them are not the product of genetics or genuine medical conditions, but instead the product of being raised in an environment where the child is not nurtured and/or properly cared for.

It basically works like this. A non-working mother with a diagnosed child can get Supplemental Security Income in the amount of about $650.00 for the first child. Now, no one is going to get rich off of $650.00 per month, but a single mother who receives SSI is immediately eligible for Section 8 housing and an entire swath of other government programs from welfare and food stamps to cash assistance.

So the cycle operates like this. Woman has child (or children) before she even finishes high school. With no system of family support she cannot go to work so she goes on welfare and government assistance. Not knowing how to raise children, she treats them like [crap] because it is the only thing she has ever known. Naturally, the children are misbehaved, subsequently diagnosed [with a disorder], and she receives more money from the government. Her children follow her pattern and the cycle continues.

Now, you might be tempted to brush this off as an overly racist, broad stroke stereotype of the inner city. I will concede that, clearly, not all people in the inner city are like this, but I believe that the problem has reached critical mass and is now like a reaction that cannot be controlled... at least not in our current state of affairs. Let me throw out some real-life scenarios.

My wife has a client who has two brothers (all three receive services). The three of them have sixteen cousins from one daddy spread over seven mommies. The government is tossing money at these parents for having kids.

Children in the inner city are starving. My wife's greatest tool in positive reinforcement therapy is KFC. They eat like it's their last meal.

Women who walk their children to school typically drop them off wearing pajamas ... and pick them up six hours later wearing the same slippers and pajamas. Maybe they just work third shift, right?

The mommies who do actually get dressed look like someone you would expect to take 'cash for services'. Hey, let's not knock the hip-hop look... but let's do point out that they dress in designer clothes while their children wear what amounts to barely more than unwashed rags.

On the day before mandatory PA Act 80 half school days, every child has a big, round, bright orange sticker placed on his or her back alerting parents to the fact that the next day is a half day. When the school dismisses early there are anywhere from 50 to 100 children sitting in the hallway outside of the office. Most of them sit there until 3:00 pm.

Children get dropped off from cars with thumping bass and shiny wheels. They come to school hungry, unbathed, and with tattered clothing, [but] there's a playstation or xbox in almost every home.

Drive through any section 8 housing area and count the number of satellite dishes hanging off the side of the building.

If a woman plays her cards right and has children she can receive benefits well into her 50's if her last child is born when she is in her late 30's.

The bottom line is this. The inner city isn't producing fathers capable of raising children. Further, the inner city is systematically producing generation after generation of dependence on government programs.

I have a solution that guarantees that I'll never be elected to office. Here it goes:

For every man/woman [below the poverty line? RLC] that has a child, the government offers a $10,000.00 tax-free check (for each parent) to undergo reversible sterilization (tube-tie and snip-snip). Parents who accept government assistance will be required to be self-sufficient within 10 years. If they are not, their children are taken away. Men who father children but do not pay adequate child support are imprisoned in labor camps that produce certain resources needed for infrastructure (asphalt, etc). These aren't slave labor camps. They work 40 hours per week and receive compensation which is first dispersed to their children, then given to them. They stay in prison until their child turns 18. The 10 year period of government assistance will be accompanied by generous assistance for education or vocational training. The government will require insurance companies to pay for the reversal procedure for a person who becomes self-sufficient and wishes to have more children.

The idea here is to get the cycle below critical mass by causing a decline in the population that is misusing government funds. Only then can social programs function as they were intended. As it stands right now, a man and a woman can multiply themselves by factors of 10 or more causing the cycle of dependence to grow geometrically. By reversibly sterilizing willing participants and imprisoning men who recklessly procreate we can start to send this sub-culture into population decline.

My plan would take decades, but I think it would save money right off the bat. What do you think?

AD

Bad Omen

You know the Democrats are in trouble when self-described liberal journalists are voting Republican. That's what Jonathan Berr did Tuesday and he explains the desperate state of affairs that has brought him to this traumatic pass here. In short, Berr, who knocked on doors for Obama in 2008, is just fed up with high taxes, corruption, inefficient big government, and nasty campaigning, but if that's so, one wonders, why is he a Democrat? Anyway, if liberals are so disaffected that they're voting Republican in deep blue states like New Jersey, the mid-term elections a year from now will be to Democrats something like what the Highway of Death was to the Iraqi army in 1991.

Here's Berr:

The last thing this liberal member of the media elite -- as perceived by many of our readers -- ever expected to do was vote for a Republican like Chris Christie for governor and reject incumbent Jon Corzine. But in my home state of New Jersey, the Democrats are more often part of the problem rather than the solution. My disgust with the party of my registration is a long time coming.

Why should Republicans be the only ones to dislike high taxes, corruption and fiscal mismanagement? Taxes in New Jersey are unbelievable: My monthly tax bill is equivalent to half my mortgage payment. New Jersey's state/local tax burden of 11.8% of income is the highest in the country, well above the national average of 9.7%, according to the Tax Foundation, which says the state's business-tax climate ranks 50th, that is, dead last in the nation. The Star Ledger of Newark reports that the average property tax bill is now $7,045, which eats up about 10 percent of the annual income in the average New Jersey household. The state budget is projected to be $8 billion short for the next fiscal year.

Corruption is horrendous. Dozens of people were recently arrested in one of the biggest scandals in years. In July, former State Sen. Wayne Bryant, once one of the most powerful people in Trenton, was sentenced to four years in federal prison for trading his clout as budget chairman for a job at a state medical school that required little work to boost his taxpayer-funded pension.

Read the rest at the link. It's no wonder Christie won big.

RLC

New Edition of <u>Origin</u>

Ray Comfort is a writer who likes to engage atheists in debate. He has recently published an edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species that has thrown his opponents into a tizzy. They're not upset so much with the text of the book that he has had reprinted because that is left as Darwin wrote it, except for the omission of several chapters. Instead they're mostly up in arms over his introduction in which he quotes some of Darwin's beliefs about race and women.

Dan Gilgoff blogs at U.S. News & World Report and he's carrying a back and forth between Comfort and National Council on Science Education executive director Eugenie Scott, a stout Darwinian and atheist. Comfort's initial salvo is pretty interesting. Here he is on his provocative introduction to Darwin's famous work:

Why are many atheists so angry? Why are they talking about book burnings, threatening to resist the giveaway and rip out the Introduction, etc.? Why was richarddawkins.net encouraging people to collect copies and rip out the Introduction? Professor Dawkins himself said that even though "a lot of people seem to be very worried about this," he wasn't at all worried. Why did he then tell Toronto university students to tear out the Introduction? There have been more than 140 different editions of On the Origin of Species, many with special Introductions, so what's the big deal with this one? If I am (as Professor Dawkins says) "an ignorant fool," why are so many feeling threatened by what I've written? Surely, the Introduction will be ignorance and foolishness, and simply confirm the students' presuppositions that intelligent design isn't worthy of even a first look.

There's a reason that they are deeply concerned.

The Introduction quotes Charles Darwin saying that blacks are closer to gorillas than whites and that natural selection has left men more intelligent than women. It also has quotes from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf showing Hitler's undeniable links to evolution. Of course, Hitler also used Christianity to further his political agenda, but my point is that Nazi Germany was the natural outcome of what Darwin called "one general law." Darwin said the law of natural selection is "Let the strongest live and the weakest die" (Chapter Seven, "Instinct"). Adolf Hitler put the theory of Darwinism into practice.

The Introduction also defines an atheist as someone who believes that nothing created everything-which is a scientific impossibility. Professor Dawkins believes that nothing created everything, and his belief is a big intellectual embarrassment to his followers.

For her part Scott chastises Comfort for the aforementioned omission of several chapters and for misrepresenting evolution by overplaying the paucity of fossilized transitional forms in his Introduction. I think Scott's being a little misleading here, but read her for yourself, and let's wait for Comfort's reply to see how he answers her.

RLC

Inner Life

The visual titled Cell Size and Scale moved Dave Kurz to write to remind us of another fascinating video that we've featured in the past but which is worth running again. It's titled The Inner Life of the Cell (produced by Harvard University), and it's a computer sim of just a few of the processes that occur 24/7 in each of the trillions of cells in our bodies.

It's simply breathtaking to see on this incredibly tiny scale such exquisite complexity and organization. Notice especially the marvelous protein transport mechanism that looks and works like a stick-figure Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders.

Now that you've watched this you might need to be deprogrammed. After all, some find the temptation to think that this was all intentionally designed by an intelligent agent to be irresistable. So, to avoid falling prey to superstitious nonsense, close your eyes real tight and repeat ten times: "This all came about by chance. This all came about by chance...."

RLC

Religious Defamation

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance and nowhere is that more true than at the United Nations. Secretary Hillary Clinton deserves praise for giving what some described as a tough statement opposing a move in the U.N. to enact an anti-defamation resolution that would be binding on all member nations. This may sound like a good thing on the face of it, but in fact such policies would restrict freedom of expression and freedom of religion. The following is from a Christianity Today report:

The United Nations General Assembly is expected to vote soon on a pending anti-defamation resolution sponsored by the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

"Some claim that the best way to protect the freedom of religion is to implement so-called anti-defamation policies that would restrict freedom of expression and the freedom of religion," Clinton said at a press conference on Monday. "I strongly disagree."

"The protection of speech about religion is particularly important since persons of different faiths will inevitably hold divergent views on religious questions," Clinton said. "These differences should be met with tolerance, not with the suppression of discourse."

Experts consider the UN anti-defamation effort mostly a reaction to the 2005 publication of cartoons in a Danish newspaper that depicted the prophet Muhammad. Carl Moeller, president of Open Doors USA, is lobbying against the resolution this week because he fears people could be criminalized for converting from Islam or speaking against Islamic teachings.

Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom of the Hudson Institute, expressed concern over another Human Rights Council resolution on freedom of opinion and expression passed in early October: "[The council] expresses its concern that incidents of racial and religious intolerance, discrimination and related violence, as well as of negative racial and religious stereotyping continue to rise around the world ... and urges States to take effective measures, consistent with their obligations under international human rights law, to address and combat such incidents."

The resolution, proposed by the United States and Egypt, does not include the term "defamation of religion," but Shea worries that such language could criminalize preaching that another religion is false.

"They're introducing language about religious hatred or negative religious stereotyping that is quite new and immediately seized upon by some of the restrictive governments in the world," Shea said.

There's more at the link. We in the U.S. often take our freedoms for granted, but we need to realize that there are those both here and abroad who find the freedoms we treasure to be a decadent blight on society. We need to realize that the freedoms to discuss ideas and to practice whatever religion we choose are fragile and despised and could be easily lost should we cease to be vigilant.

If it ever came to pass that we allow ourselves to become apathetic about the what's going on in the world around us then we would be proven unworthy of those freedoms. Thomas Jefferson once observed that a nation that expects to remain ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be. He was right, and that's why we must never think that politics and world affairs are for other people to worry about.

RLC

Life's Solutions

Bradford at Telic Thoughts points us to a provocative article in the Sydney Morning Herald on biologist Simon Conway Morris. Morris is an interesting thinker, a devout Christian and committed evolutionist whose book, Life's Solutions, makes the case that evolution is not random or blind but that it's guided by principles we do not yet understand that make the emergence of conscious intelligent beings who can understand the universe inevitable. Here's a sample:

In a view considered almost heretical by ultra-Darwinists such as Richard Dawkins, Conway Morris suggests that evolution cannot explain everything in biology, that the idea of evolution as entirely random is flawed, and that convergent evolutionary processes had to produce intelligence - as they have, not only in humans but apes, crows and dolphins.

The usual mantra of evolutionists is randomness: mutations, catastrophes, virulent microbes, in which any particular outcome, including us, is a complete fluke. Not so, says Conway Morris.

"I ... suggest that evolutionary processes are endowed with a considerable degree of predictability, making humans inevitable. Sophisticated intelligence - where you can use imagination, think ahead, identify alternatives - has evolved independently a number of times, in the great apes, crows, and dolphins.

One of the reasons Conway Morris has proved controversial, perhaps, is that he is a Christian, a committed supernaturalist, though that plays no part in his biology. Another reason might be that he doesn't mind prodding the ardent atheists who have turned Darwinian natural selection into a virtual religion, finding in it the explanation for all sorts of human questions far beyond the development of species.

Conway Morris thinks that science and religion are more similar than most people realise, and that philosophical questions always accompany science.

[He] believes evolution follows a deeper structure, as do other sciences, such as physics. In quantum mechanics many things don't make sense, he says, but the suspicion is that when scientists understand what now baffles them there will be another level of understanding. "In biology, the constraints of evolution must point to a deeper level of arrangements." By this he does NOT mean God, but natural laws that transcend Darwinism. It is now legitimate to speak a logic to biology.

A particular mystery that eluded Darwin, and Darwinists ever since, he thinks, is consciousness, or mind. It is much more complicated than allowed by the "neuromythologists" (what philosopher Raymond Tallis calls those who say that mind is entirely reducible to physical processes in the brain).

"Attempts to provide a materialistic explanation haven't worked. If they had, the people who provided them would be in Stockholm getting their Nobel Prize."

We take self-aware matter (us) for granted, but in fact it's very peculiar, he says. One group, especially biologists, think consciousness is self-explanatory, emergent in some fashion; another, mainly philosophers, insist matter cannot explain minds. "Darwin's idea that the brain secretes mind as the liver secretes bile doesn't work. The roots of intelligence go much deeper than we realise, and go beyond animals. Slime moulds have something we can fairly call memory." Conway Morris pictures the brain as something like an antenna, embodied in a mind world.

In the Guardian, he suggested that if the universe is the product of a rational mind, and if evolution is the search engine that, in leading to consciousness, allows us to discover the fundamental architecture of the universe, then things not only make better sense but are also much more interesting.

What I remember taking from Conway Morris' book, which I read several years ago, is that he seems to endorse a kind of theistic evolution. This is the theory that God packed all of the biological potential for living things into the initial conditions of the Big Bang and that this potential unfolds according to laws established by the Creator to insure that what He wants to exist, will.

In other words, for Conway Morris, evolution is the means by which God produced the extraordinary diversity of living things. Perhaps he's correct, I don't know, I'm more inclined toward intelligent design myself, but I'm quite sure he's closer to the truth than are the materialists who hold that the marvels of living things are all just a grand coincidence produced by the blind accumulation of millions of highly improbable accidents.

RLC

Cell Size and Scale

The University of Utah genetics department has a fascinating illustration of the relative sizes of biological structures. To view it go here and move the slide at the bottom of the picture to the right. Notice how the size grid in the upper left corner changes as you zoom in on these tiny structures. Very cool.

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the tip.

RLC

Bad Advice

Our local paper ran a column on Sunday by Philadelphia radio talk show host Mike Smerconish that produced a few smiles at the breakfast table.

Smerconish, a Republican, I think, is of the opinion that the GOP needs to move toward the political center because polls show that only something like 20% of voters self-identify as Republicans. The party is losing membership, we're told, so the solution lies in becoming more like Democrats. The problem with Smerconish's analysis is that his cure for what ails the party is exactly what is producing the ailment. The majority of people in this country self-identify as conservatives regardless of which party they associate with, which suggests to me that, contrary to Smerconish's claim that the residuum left over from the recent exodus are not conservatives but rather people who don't much care. Many of the defectors from the GOP are conservatives who've left in disgust with a party that insists on playing the Washington Generals to the Democrats' Harlem Globetrotters.

A good recent example of this was the selection by the New York Republican poobahs of Dede Scozzafava to run in the New York 23rd congressional district. Ms Scozzafava is a Nancy Pelosi Democrat cross-dressing as a Republican, proof of which came when she dropped out of the race and promptly endorsed the liberal Democrat candidate. Conservative Republicans are completely turned off by the sort of political pragmatism that led the GOP to put Scozzafava up for election in the first place.

Perhaps Smerconish and those who share his view don't think that principles should matter in politics. Perhaps they think that being in the winning party is the only thing that's important. Most conservatives are not so concerned about Republican party success, however. In fact, many conservatives really don't much care for the party that has betrayed its principles repeatedly since George Bush senior promised he wouldn't raise taxes and then promptly did. They don't much care for a party whose leadership betrayed their principles on earmarks, as Tom DeLay did in the 90s, or which betrayed their principles with massive entitlement and bailout programs as George Bush the younger did during his tenure.

Conservatives' relationship with the GOP is strictly a marriage of convenience. They vote Republican because that's where candidates are most likely to be found who share their values of personal freedom and small government, but if the party is going to nominate people who when elected will govern no differently than the current crop of Democrats who seem determined to tax and spend us into abject bankruptcy, why should anyone who opposes this remain in the Republican party?

Smerconish insists that Republicans have to end their infatuation with the right and, astonishingly enough, he names Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Mitch Romney as the sort of extremist ideologues the GOP should eschew. Now I ask any fair-minded Republican to explain to me what it is about these three that makes them ideologically distasteful, or puts them outside of the party mainstream. You may not like their personalities, you may not like their religious commitments, but what, exactly, is it about their ideology that Smerconish finds too extreme? He doesn't say. One wonders who Smerconish would hold aloft as an exemplar of Republicanism. Olympia Snowe? Arlen Specter?

It's always amusing to me that in a time when we're being governed by the most radical Democratic party in history - a cohort of radical progressives which controls both Houses of Congress, the White house, much of the judiciary, almost all of the entertainment industry, the educational establishment, and much of the traditional media - we're informed that it's the GOP that's too extreme. We're admonished to avoid the likes of terrifying fringies like Palin, Huckabee and Romney. Meanwhile, the extreme Left is pulling us so far to their end of the spectrum that we teeter on the brink of socialism, and Smerconish is abetting this calamity by urging Republicans to abandon their principles and jump on board the Democrats' train. Why aren't we reading hand-wringing exhortations calling upon the Democrats to at least toss a glance in the direction of the American mainstream as they undo 200 years of prosperity and 100 years of world leadership?

I'm sure Democrats are resting a little easier today knowing that the GOP is getting advice from people like Mr. Smerconish.

RLC

Election Eve

Tomorrow is an election day and there are three races that have garnered considerable national attention among the political punditocracy. First is the congressional race in upstate New York pitting Conservative party candidate Doug Hoffman against Democrat Bill Owens. This started out as a three party race, but liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava dropped out over the weekend. Hoffman is currently ahead by 15 points despite the fact that Scozzafava has endorsed Owens.

Another big race is the New Jersey gubernatorial contest between incumbent Democrat mega-millionaire Jon Corzine, his Republican challenger Christopher Christie, and Independent Chris Daggett. Corzine, who made his fortune on Wall Street, will have spent as much as $30 million of his own money to win this election, but Jersey politics are so soaked in the stench of corruption that on election eve Corzine and Christie are neck and neck. If Daggett weren't in the race Christie would probably win handily. President Obama has stumped for Corzine, but it's not clear yet whether that has made any difference.

The third key race is for the governorship of Virginia. Here the Republican Robert McDonnell enjoys a comfortable lead over Democrat Creigh Deeds. McDonnell is a moderate, but is also pro-life and is attracting a lot of independents to his campaign. As of this writing he's up by 11 points.

So what, if anything, is the importance of these races? Perhaps their greatest significance lies in the fact that they give the lie to those who say that Republicans are in trouble if they keep running pro-lifers or fiscal conservatives. That's a myth not borne out by the facts. The shame of it is that so many Republicans seem to believe it.

RLC

Clarification

It seems that a number of readers understood me to be saying in the recent post on teacher training that prospective secondary teachers should take course work only in the discipline they intended to teach. This is, however, not what I meant to say. I believe that anyone who stands in front of a classroom should have a well-rounded education and know much more than just history or just science or just math. My point was that many of the education courses in methods, theory, and techniques that education majors are required to take, to the extent that they're helpful at all, would be more meaningful to teachers after they've been in the classroom for a while.

The best way to learn to teach is to do it, and to do it under the guidance of an accomplished professional. That's why I think student teaching should be a two semester internship. Young secondary teachers need three things to be successful in the classroom: They need to have a love for what they do, they need to have a knowledge of their field, and they need to have the kind of personality that enables them to develop positive relationships with kids. The only one of those that can be taught is the second. Everything else a teacher needs to excel in his or her profession comes with experience.

RLC

Taking Pity

Last Tuesday night the American Freedom Alliance sponsored a debate as part of its Darwin Debates series. The evening featured an exchange between David Berlinski, an anti-Darwinian agnostic and author of the book The Devil's Delusion and a prominent California atheist whose performance must have been so inept that David Klinghoffer, a journalist covering the event, chose out of kindness not to mention his name in his report. Klinghoffer is an intelligent design advocate but he was so embarrassed for the atheist presenter that he couldn't bring himself to add to the man's discomfiture by further publicizing it. Here's Klinghoffer:

Tuesday night at the Beverly Hills Library, with David Berlinski debating an atheist before a mixed crowd of friends and foes of religion, I experienced a lifetime first.

As a journalist writing about people and events, I've often had occasion to change or withhold someone's name or otherwise disguise his identity. Almost always this is because the person in question never asked to be part of my story, is not a public personality and never sought to be, did nothing seriously blameworthy, but would be embarrassed by having his words or actions reported in public. So I don't identify him. On Tuesday, listening to the debate, for the very first time in my experience I encountered a situation where someone was indeed seeking to make a name for himself but I felt nevertheless it would be cruel to give his name or institutional affiliation in my account of the event.

David Berlinski's atheist opponent is that person. The poor guy! He was so hopelessly outgunned and outmanned as a thinker, debater, and speaker that I just can't bring myself to give you his identity. He probably has his name on a Google Alert. Who doesn't? Even though it was entirely his free choice to put himself up against Berlinski in defense of his non-belief, I don't have the heart to worsen his embarrassment.

The rest of Klinghoffer's account is here.

It turns out that the guy Klinghoffer's compassion would not permit him to name is no rookie to the culture war. He's a leader in the California atheist community. If you're curious you can go here to read about him.

Pretty soon it should become apparent that the problem for atheists isn't that they keep putting up second stringers against intelligent design's (or Christianity's) varsity in these debates. The problem is that these people are trying to defend a position, atheistic materialism or naturalism, that is extremely difficult to defend. When the opposition has all the best arguments even a Demosthenes would struggle to sound persuasive.

As more talented young theistic intellectuals enter the fray roiling the marketplace of ideas, and more debates like this one take place, it'll eventually dawn on the public and the media that advocating atheistic materialism is like trying to promote belief in a geocentric universe. You can try it, but you better not do it in front of an educated audience.

RLC

Cultural Literacy

Sol Stern at City Journal has written an excellent article that's a must-read for everyone concerned about education in this country. Stern writes about the career of E.D. Hirsch whom those of a certain age will remember for his best-selling Cultural Literacy, written back in the late 80s. Hirsch pointed out to a nation in thrall to the ideas of progressive education "experts" that the approach we were following in educating children was all wrong. We had bought the progressives' idea that what was important was that students be taught not facts, but rather how to learn. Teaching the process of learning was believed to be more important than teaching any particular content. Subsequently, achievement scores plummeted.

Here are the first few paragraphs from Stern's essay:

At his Senate confirmation hearing in February, Arne Duncan succinctly summarized the Obama administration's approach to education reform: "We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn't work." Since becoming education secretary, Duncan has launched a $4.3 billion federal "Race to the Top" initiative that encourages states to experiment with various accountability reforms. Yet he has ignored one state reform that has proven to work, as well as the education thinker whose ideas inspired it. The state is Massachusetts, and the education thinker is E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

The "Massachusetts miracle," in which Bay State students' soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature's passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards. And those standards, Massachusetts reformers have acknowledged, are Hirsch's legacy. If the Obama administration truly wants to have a positive impact on American education, it should embrace Hirsch's ideas and urge other states to do the same.

Hirsch draws his insights from well outside traditional education scholarship. He started out studying chemistry at Cornell University but, mesmerized by Nabokov's lectures on Russian literature, switched his major to English. Hirsch did his graduate studies at Yale, one of the citadels in the 1950s of the New Criticism, which argued that the intent of an author, the reader's subjective response, and the text's historical background were largely irrelevant to a critical analysis of the text itself. But by the time Hirsch wrote his doctoral dissertation-on Wordsworth-he was already breaking with the New Critics. "I came to see that the text alone is not enough," Hirsch said to me recently at his Charlottesville, Virginia, home. "The unspoken-that is, relevant background knowledge-is absolutely crucial in reading a text." Hirsch's big work of literary theory in his early academic career, Validity in Interpretation, reflected this shift in thinking. After publishing several more well-received scholarly books and articles, he received an endowed professorship and became chairman of the English department at the University of Virginia.

Hirsch was at the pinnacle of the academic world, in his mid-fifties, when he was struck by an insight into how reading is taught that, he says, "changed my life." He was "feeling guilty" about the department's inadequate freshman writing course, he recalls. Though UVA's admissions standards were as competitive as the Ivies', the reading and writing skills of many incoming students were poor, sure to handicap them in their future academic work. In trying to figure out how to close this "literacy gap," Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students. Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could. Hirsch had discovered "a way to measure the variations in reading skill attributable to variations in the relevant background knowledge of audiences."

Stern's account of what followed makes fascinating reading, especially if you're in education, planning to enter the profession, or have young children or grandchildren in school. It would also be a great article to share with any teachers you might know. Here's one more graph to give you sense of where he's going with the piece:

More powerfully than any previous critic, Hirsch showed how destructive these instructional approaches were. The idea that schools could starve children of factual knowledge, yet somehow encourage them to be "critical thinkers" and teach them to "learn how to learn," defied common sense. But Hirsch also summoned irrefutable evidence from the hard sciences to eviscerate progressive-ed doctrines. Hirsch had spent the better part of the decade since Cultural Literacy mastering the findings of neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics on which teaching methods best promote student learning. The scientific consensus showed that schools could not raise student achievement by letting students construct their own knowledge. The pedagogy that mainstream scientific research supported, Hirsch showed, was direct instruction by knowledgeable teachers who knew how to transmit their knowledge to students-the very opposite of what the progressives promoted.

The tragedy is that at least two generations of students have been "educated" to think that learning facts is unimportant. Perhaps future generations will not be so badly cheated.

RLC

CAIR

Frank Gaffney at Big Government.com gives us the lowdown on the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR):

The Council on American-Islamic Relations bills itself as a "civil-rights advocacy group," much like the NAACP, but for Muslims. However, the FBI says that far from being a benign nonprofit, CAIR is a front group for Hamas terrorists and the radical Muslim Brotherhood in America. And the bureau recently cut off formal ties to CAIR's national office in Washington and all 30 of its branch offices across the country.

At the same time, the Justice Department has blacklisted CAIR as an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator in the largest terror finance case in U.S. history, the Holy Land Foundation trial. It ended in convictions on all 108 counts.

Prosecutors have also connected CAIR to the Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide jihadist movement that seeks to institutionalize Shariah law (think: Taliban) in America and the West through immigration, coercion and political infiltration. "From its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists," said assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg in a court filing.

The FBI last year severed ties to CAIR, citing court evidence that its leaders were participating in an "ongoing" conspiracy to support terrorists. Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York has requested that the FBI's anti-CAIR ban "should be government-wide policy."

CAIR has proven ties to terrorists. No fewer than 15 CAIR officials have been convicted or caught up in terrorism investigations since 9/11 - including its founding chairman, Omar Ahmad, and acting executive director, Nihad Awad.

As with Muslims worldwide CAIR's ultimate aim is to Islamicize the United States:

CAIR insists it has no agenda other than protecting the rights of Muslim Americans. However, the words of its own leaders reveal a hidden subversive agenda:

CAIR Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper: "I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future."

CAIR Founding Chairman Omar Ahmad: "Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Quran should be the highest authority in America."

There's much more on this group in Gaffney's article and everyone should read it.

There's nothing wrong with the desire to advance one's religion, of course, but when one considers the rather unorthodox means Muslims often employ to proselytize, and when one examines the tenets of shariah, one might be forgiven for feeling a bit squeamish about CAIR's aspirations. If Muslims do succeed in turning America into an Islamic nation then it's certain that we'll no longer enjoy the freedoms we now have, we'll no longer be a democratic republic, and anyone who dissents from the teaching of the Prophet (PBUH) will be relegated to dhimmi status, a kind of second-class citizenship even worse than that of ex-slaves during the Jim Crow era.

It's time to take the blindfolds off and open our eyes to the fact that we're engaged in a generational struggle for the survival of our culture and values, not just with extremist Islamists, but with much of what passes for the moderate Muslim world. They'll never rest until they have prevailed or until they're too weak to continue the fight. We, on the other hand, seem eager to latch on to any excuse to deceive ourselves about their intentions so that we can retreat into our cocoons of personal peace and prosperity. Unfortunately, Islamists will not leave that escape open to us. The moment we declare that we're tired of fighting those cocoons will cease to exist.

RLC

What Are They Afraid Of?

Anyone who believes that there is no culture war in this country just isn't paying attention. To be sure, the "war" rarely manifests itself in overt violence but it certainly does result in an alarming amount of intolerance, name-calling and malicious vandalism. One recent example occurred in Colorado where a group trying to promote a film critical of Darwinian explanations of evolution has been the target of a concerted, coordinated effort to suppress their freedom of speech. Anika Smith at Evolution News and Views explains:

Earlier this month the Shepherd Project Ministries website was breached using a "brute force attack" to break the password. The hackers then deleted webpages containing information about an upcoming conference featuring Discovery Institute speakers Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe, David Berlinski, and John West.

"No question whatsoever about whom they were targeting," said Shepherd Project Executive Director Craig Smith. "That was brazen. We were a little stunned, to be perfectly honest. We had seen some hostile language about the conference, but honestly we just assumed it was cyber-flaming. We didn't really expect or anticipate any kind of actual attack."

The pages were quickly re-posted and security protocols fixed to prevent further mischief being done, but since then a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack crippled and even crashed the Shepherd Project website, preventing many from registering for the intelligent design conference. These attacks involve multiple people coordinated in an attempt to make a website unavailable, shutting down access to information in a form of modern-day book-burning.

These attacks reveal how even having a discussion about intelligent design is threatening to those who can't countenance free speech on evolution.

In today's ID the Future podcast interview, Craig Smith said, "It's stunning to me how threatened they seem to be about the conversation that is taking place. It's not a matter of, 'I disagree with the content' or 'I disagree with the conclusion,' it's 'I disagree that the conversation should be allowed.'"

That same sentiment was behind the recent canceling of the Darwin's Dilemma by the California Science Center, and you can read it for yourself in the New York Times as Daniel Dennett's recent letter blasted them for daring to be respectful to those who doubt evolution!

When a certain class of people realizes that the theory upon which their entire worldview rests is under serious assault and when there are no good intellectual arguments to summon to its defense, it's not surprising that some of these people will resort to any means they can to protect their worldview from the challenge.

For some, the battle is not a struggle to find the truth. Rather, it's a desperate attempt to preserve the myth of atheistic materialism upon which they've staked their lives, and in such a conflict there are no rules of engagement. Whatever works is right even if it means violating a fundamental principle of intellectual integrity in a free and open society - allowing all sides to express their position. Those who seek to prevent the other side from being heard are tacitly admitting that they know their own side is intellectually inferior. They know they've committed themselves to a loser.

RLC

Pertinent Questions

Hannah Giles, the young woman who masqueraded as a prostitute (Go here and scroll down to ACORN Story Resources if you haven't seen the videos) to uncover the absolutely reprehensible behavior of ACORN representatives notes that in all the media hubbub about whether she and her "pimp," James O'Keefe, will be sued by ACORN and whatnot, a number of significant matters are being ignored.

She wonders, for example, why the media is not more interested in the following questions:

Baltimore: Why no mention of the toddlers that were in the room while James and I were being counseled on how to manage our underage prostitution ring?

San Bernardino: The content of this video was largely ignored except for the part where Tresa Kaelke mentions she shot her husband. What about when she told us not to educate our sex-slaves because they won't want to work for us? Or when we talked about making more money off clients who are permitted to physically abuse the girls? What about the whole transport-the-girls-in-a-school-bus-to-avoid-suspicion discussion?

Washington, DC: Why were we counseled by ACORN during a first time homebuyer's seminar, while 30-40 other first time homebuyers sat crammed in a hot room?

Brooklyn: This office was swarmed with people, busy staff members and a full waiting room. Did we take our number and wait in line? Nope. Why were we given the private attention of three ACORN staffers, when more deserving and less intrusive clientele patiently waited?

San Bernardino: What happened to the list of politicians that Ms. Kaelke rattled off when she spoke of her ACORN office's community involvement and influence? Has anyone set out to uncover just how close these politicians' relationships are with the San Bernardino ACORN? Does anyone even remember the names?

San Diego: Has anyone questioned why Juan Carlos would want to help smuggle girls across the Mexican border right after an ACORN-sponsored immigration parade???

Philadelphia: Why did the Philly office go into damage control mode as soon as the Baltimore story first broke? What do they have to hide?

Ms Giles concludes by saying:

I would hate to be known as the journalist who never saw the bigger picture, lacked the creativity and ambition to approach a story from a fresh perspective, and contributed to the apathy of an entire nation. And I honestly, from the bottom of my heart, think every wannabe and professional journalist has the same attitude.

So why aren't they behaving accordingly? Fear? Comfort? A false sense of purpose? I don't know about the rest of the press corps but all of the above scenarios scream scandalous to me. They'd be worthwhile news.

Well, yes, but we have to keep in mind that this is a story fraught with potential for embarrassing Democrats who've enjoyed very cozy relationships with ACORN over the years, including our President. Most of the media don't find stories embarrassing to Democrats newsworthy or worth investigating. Now if Ms Giles and Mr. O'Keefe had walked into, say, the offices of the Chamber of Commerce and gotten similar advice, well, you can bet that we'd be asphyxiated by non-stop news coverage deploring the depravity of it all, and Giles and O'Keefe would be awarded Pulitzer Prizes for investigative journalism.

As it is they have to contend with being sued by ACORN for exposing the incompetence, both intellectual and ethical, of their staff.

RLC

Government Can

This must be the third version of this we've posted in the last year but it's still pretty funny (unless you're in government):

RLC

Thoughts on Teacher Training

John Miller at National Review Online offers a thougght on contemporary teacher education:

I've always thought that the biggest problem with teacher education is that prospective teachers spend too much time listening to professors talk about pedagogical theory and not enough time learning their core subjects. In other words, a lot of students who go on to become 10th-grade history professors actually take fewer history courses than ordinary history majors.

Miller's right about this, I think. Prospective teachers (at least secondary teachers - elementary teachers may be in a different situation) would be much better served if colleges would simply dispense with all the education courses they require of their students (except student teaching, which should be extended over two semesters) and just have them learn the subject matter they'll be teaching. It's not that education courses aren't valuable. Some are, I suppose, but they become more valuable and relevant to teachers after they've been at the job for a while and see first-hand the need for whatever skills those courses impart. Before someone has been in front of a classroom for a couple of years all that pedagogical theory really makes little impact and is easily forgotten. After one has been teaching for a while, however, it becomes much more meaningful.

Teachers should get their Bachelor's degree in the discipline they'll be teaching, not in education, and then, after they've accumulated some experience, and if they wish to pursue an MEd, or want to take courses to move up the pay scale, those education courses might prove worthwhile for them.

RLC

Why Democrats Won't Fix Health Coverage

Read this brief but disturbing article in the New York Post and you'll understand all you need to know about the disingenuousness of the Democrats' health care reform proposals:

Dr. Jacquelline Perlman, who's helped deliver hundreds of Brooklyn babies in her 12-year OB-GYN career, is calling it quits -- and citing sky-high malpractice insurance and plunging income.

"I've decided to retire from obstetrics," said Perlman, 42. "It breaks my heart. Malpractice costs are a big part of it. It's a very sad story.

The last straw, she said, came last spring when her insurer, the Combined Coordinating Council, noting the high risk of covering obstetricians, canceled her policy and those of doctors she practiced with at Brooklyn Women's Health Care, a New York Methodist Hospital affiliate.

She found a new insurer, but the damage was done. Her annual malpractice premium now runs about $160,000 -- for a doctor against whom no malpractice case or even so much as a settlement has ever been upheld. And, she said, in the last five years, as her malpractice-insurance costs have risen, her income has dropped by 20 percent.

The reason doctors have to pay so much is not simply because of extortionist insurance companies which, as we've seen recently, operate on very slim profit margins, but because of tort law that allows doctors to be sued for exorbitant amounts of money. Suing doctors is profitable business for trial lawyers and because settlements are often very high insurance companies have to charge a high premium for their coverage. Not only does this drive doctors like Perlman out of the profession it causes those who stay in to charge their patients more which means that patient insurance becomes more expensive as well.

What's the solution? Tort reform. Is tort reform in any of the Democratic plans? No. The reason is, as DNC chairman Howard Dean admits, trial lawyers are among the biggest contributors to Democrat politicians and as such they hum the tune to which the Dems dance.

It's pretty clear that Democrats are not really interested in making health care cheaper and keeping doctors in the business. If they were they'd defy their lawyer friends and include genuine reforms in their legislation. No, the health care reform Obama and the Democrats are pushing, it seems plausible to conclude, is not about reforming health care at all. It's about turning more control over individuals' lives to the government and making us all wards of the state.

RLC

Puzzlement

President Obama told a gathering of military personnel the other day that he "would never rush the solemn decision of sending [them] into harm's way." Neither does he seem inclined to hurry the decision to send reinforcements to their brothers in arms struggling to stay alive in Afghanistan.

Which makes me wonder. At the same time the President counsels prudence and patience in Afghanistan, he's insisting that we absolutely cannot wait another month to pass health care reform. It's a matter of the highest urgency that it be passed now because thousands are losing their jobs and thus their coverage every day. It's so urgent, in fact, that we cannot even delay long enough to allow legislators and the public to study the bill. Yet even if one of the plans currently before Congress passes tomorrow the reforms won't really kick in until 2013, so why the rush?

Why must we wait month upon month before deciding whether we'll send reinforcements to our troops in Afghanistan who are in critical need right now of more men and equipment, but trip all over ourselves in our hurry to pass legislation that won't take effect for another three years? It's a puzzlement, at least for those who believe Mr. Obama is being honest about his desire to do what's best for the country. For those more cynical, I suppose, it's perfectly understandable.

The cynical view is that Mr. Obama is dithering on Afghanistan because he's simply waiting for a justification for pulling out even though he has declared that conflict to be a "war of necessity." Meanwhile, he's trying to rush health care reform because he knows that the longer his party's proposals are scrutinized the more odious they'll look to both voters and lawmakers.

That's the cynical view, mind you, not necessarily our view here at Viewpoint.

RLC

Bumper Sticker Ads

An anonymous New Yorker has forked over $25,000 in order to place ads in city subway stations stating that "A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you?"

I think this is great, actually. It should afford numerous opportunities for intelligent theists to ask in all sorts of venues what such a claim means and to call attention to those who may not be aware of it the utter moral bankruptcy of the atheist worldview.

It would be great fun, for example, to ask someone who agrees with the ad what they mean by the phrase "good without God." What makes an act "good," anyway? Why, exactly, is kindness good and cruelty bad? Why, if atheism is true, is it good to preserve resources for future generations and why is squandering them on ourselves bad?

When all the smoke is blown away from the flustered and confused responses the atheist would make to these questions what remains is the claim that what's right is just whatever feels right to him or her. In a world without God there's nothing that makes kindness or conservation good and nothing that makes cruelty and profligacy bad. The preference for one rather than the other is simply a biochemical reaction occurring in our brains. It has no real significance and no authority. It can certainly impose no obligation upon us to live one way rather than another.

Listen to a few atheists on the matter of whether there's any moral good or bad in their world:

"If God is dead everything is permitted." - (Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov)

"One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life...only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best." - Charles Darwin (Autobiography)

"Ethics is just an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate." - biologist E. O. Wilson and philosopher Michael Ruse

"Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear .... There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death....There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will...." - Will Provine, professor of biology at Cornell

"There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it." Voldemort (Harry Potter)

"There is no good or bad there is only the law." Inspector Javert in Les Miserables (Movie, 1980)

I rather doubt that the organization placing the ads in the Manhattan subway stations will put up any of these quotes among them. Better to stick to bumper sticker slogans and hope that no one thinks too deeply about them.

RLC

Collapsing Icon

An article in the Wall Street Journal documents the continuing collapse of one of Darwinism's favorite missing links. Ever since the 19th century the fossilized remains of a creature named Archeopteryx have been touted as an intermediate animal between dinosaurs and birds, but accumulating evidence is casting grave doubt on whether Archaeopteryx qualifies as a bird at all. Indeed, intelligent design advocates of various stripes, including both young and old earth creationists, have been saying for decades that Archaeopteryx could not have been the ancestor of modern birds, but so much had been invested in this creature as an example of a missing link that few in the mainstream press would listen. Now it seems that the scientific community itself is moon-walking away from their earlier claims of iconic status for Archaeopteryx:

The feathered creature called Archaeopteryx, easily the world's most famous fossil remains, had been considered the first bird since Charles Darwin's day. When researchers put its celebrity bones under the microscope recently, though, they discovered that this icon of evolution might not have been a bird at all.

When the fossils of Archaeopteryx were found in 1861, it helped prove Charles Darwin's new theory of evolution. The creature that had both bird-like and dinosaur-like features has long been thought of as the archetypal bird. But a new study shows Archaeopteryx might not have been a bird at all.

An examination of its bone cells revealed for the first time that the 150-million-year-old creature had the slow growth rate of a dinosaur, not a bird, an international research team reported this month. Comparing it with other early fossils, the researchers concluded that the telltale physiology of modern birds likely didn't emerge until 20 million years or so after Archaeopteryx flapped its broad wings across primordial lagoons.

Newly discovered fossils have prompted scientists to revamp their assumptions about Archaeopteryx's distinguishing features over the last decade. A cornucopia of fossil finds in China demonstrated that feathers coated many dinosaur species, not just birds. Other surprises still may be concealed in trays of unexamined museum specimens. The first and most complete fossil of Archaeopteryx, found in 1855, was misidentified as a flying pterodactylus for 115 years. The newest finding, though, demonstrates that our understanding of even well-studied fossils like Archaeopteryx -- scrutinized, measured, modeled for 150 years -- can still be upended.

The cell structure showed that Archaeopteryx developed one-third as quickly as a typical bird today, more like a normal dinosaur, the researchers reported. Bone cells from the two other bird-like creatures also showed a similar, dinosaur-like growth pattern. The researchers concluded that the first physiologically modern bird was a species called Confuciusornis, which lived about 130 millions years ago -- about 20 million years after Archaeopteryx. Unlike Archaeopteryx, this species didn't have teeth or a reptilian tail.

Modern birds usually mature in a few weeks, but it might have taken Archaeopteryx two years or more, the scientists said. When fully grown, it was the size of a raven and weighed about 900 grams, three times as heavy as previous estimates. "We are going to have to revisit a lot of things on this creature," says Dr. Erickson. "This is not the final word on rewriting its biology."

It might not be a bird, but Archaeopteryx remains a key exhibit in the history of science, as the first step toward understanding avian evolution. All told, researchers have identified 100 anatomical features that birds share with theropod dinosaurs, such as tyrannosaurus or allosaurus.

There are lingering doubts that birds today are descendants of dinosaurs. Researchers at Oregon State University recently argued that the distinctive anatomy that gives birds the lung capacity needed for flight means it is unlikely that birds descended from dinosaurs like Archaeopteryx and its kin (We wrote about this last June)

There's more to this article at the link, but the upshot is that a lot of the stuff you learned in high school biology about evolution ... just isn't true.

RLC

New Feature

Jason writes to commend us for our new feature on Viewpoint. Other keen-eyed readers will note that our tech support has added a nifty innovation to our page. Brother Bill, my technical guru, has inserted a "share this" function at the bottom of each post that will enable readers who are so inclined to share posts in a number of different vehicles with their friends and acquaintances who might be interested in what we talk about on Viewpoint.

I'm excited about the opportunities this gives our readers to expose others to our site, and I encourage you to use it liberally. We like the traffic.

RLC

The Enemy in Afghanistan

Strategy Page offers an informative analysis of the nature of the enemy we face in Afghanistan. Contrary to what some might think, it's not just militant insurgents like the Taliban. The greater long term problem is posed by drug gangs:

The enemy in Afghanistan is a many headed beast. American intelligence has compiled a list of nearly 500 Taliban and drug gang leaders. If all these guys were to suddenly disappear, the violence would swiftly change to internal battles within the gangs, as lower level men fought for control of dozens of leaderless Taliban and heroin producing gangs. While you can't destroy the gangs, you can greatly reduce their effectiveness. This is particularly true of the ones that chiefly carry out terror attacks. The drug gangs have the incentive of money, which constantly brings in more ambitious people. This has been the experience in places like Colombia, where the only successful strategy has been to interrupt drug production, and deny the drug gangs actual control of territory. For Islamic terrorists like the Taliban, killing the leadership is the key, because these leaders (who include those with technical skills) are difficult to replace. Thus groups like the Taliban have been destroyed in many other countries in the last two decades. But in Afghanistan, the Taliban are not the main enemy; the drug gangs are. Without the drug money, the Taliban become a troublesome Pushtun faction, not a mercenary military power that seeks to run the entire country again. That's never going to happen, as the non-Pushtun majority would go back to the civil war (that the U.S. intervened in during its late 2001 invasion).

The lower level of foreign troop casualties in Afghanistan is largely due to the lower skill levels among terrorist leaders. Despite much money and effort, the roadside bomb campaign in Afghanistan is not nearly as lethal as the one in Iraq was....But in the long run, foreign governments have a more troublesome problem with Afghanistan, and that's the growing quantity of heroin coming out of there. This is causing more and more grief in the West. Leaving Afghanistan alone means doing nothing about the heroin supply, and this will eventually become politically unacceptable. Most Western politicians are aware of this, even if the media that reports on them is not (or, at least, is not admitting it yet.)

The drug gangs are protected by four large Taliban coalitions....Inside Afghanistan, there are field commanders for the Pakistan based organizations, as well as several drug gangs based in Helmand province (and other parts of southeastern Afghanistan). Helmand has become a difficult area for drug gangs to operate in, and they are trying to establish new operations farther north. But the locals are resisting this. Not because they don't want the cash the drug business can bring, but because they don't want the cheap opium and heroin, which they know, from experience, creates widespread addiction, especially among the young. For these tribal societies, such addiction is a poison that causes severe physical and social damage. While some Pushtuns down south have become addicted to the money and power of heroin, most Afghans want nothing to do with it. That's why most of the heroin production has been concentrated in one province - Helmand.

Russia is very concerned about how things turn out in Afghanistan. That's because Russia has become the main transportation route for Afghan heroin headed for the most lucrative markets in Western Europe and North America. The heroin is cheaper in Russia (because it gets more expensive the farther you have to smuggle it) and there are nearly three million addicts there (out of a global total of 16 million). This is a growing problem for the government, and attempts to seal the Afghan border have failed. The smugglers have a tremendous monetary incentive to get the heroin into Central Asia and thence to Russia. The heroin creates a trail of corruption and addiction as it makes its way across Eurasia. But the largest consumer of heroin, and its raw material, opium, is Iran (which lies astride the lucrative export route to the Persian Gulf). With nearly as many addicts as Russia (and less than half the population), the religious dictatorship in Iran is beside itself over the drug problem (which produces lots of crime and anti-social behavior). Pakistan also has an addict problem but not as bad as in Iran (where there is lots of oil money for drug purchases, and lots of upper class addiction).

Interesting stuff.

RLC

More Bad News

The U.K. Daily Express gives us a heads up on a report on a World Health Organization study due out later this year that links cell phone use to brain tumors. We've seen and posted other similar reports and although I don't know what to make of them, it certainly seems that the unanimous verdict has been that excessive use of these devices is not good for your brain's health.

The question I have is if the signal produced by these phones has enough energy to reach a cell phone tower what is it doing to your brain cells as it passes through your skull? Is the signal any more potentially ionizing than normal radio waves? I don't know. Anyway, here's the article:

Long-term mobile phone users could face a higher risk of developing cancer in later life, according to a decade-long study.

The report, to be published later this year, has reportedly found that heavy mobile use is linked to brain tumours.

The survey of 12,800 people in 13 countries has been overseen by the World Health Organisation.

Preliminary results of the inquiry, which is looking at whether mobile phone exposure is linked to three types of brain tumour and a tumour of the salivary gland, have been sent to a scientific journal.

The findings are expected to put pressure on the British Government - which has insisted that mobile phones are safe - to issue stronger warnings to users.

Have a nice day.

RLC

Rare Bird

This handsome little sprite is a Black-throated Gray warbler, a bird normally found in the west and southwestern U.S. I've seen them in Arizona but never east of there and in fact, it only occurs in Pennsylvania a few times in any decade. This week, though, a Black-throated Gray turned up near Carlisle, PA and was seen by dozens of observers.

It was a great find and a special treat for those us lucky enough to have the chance to enjoy it.

RLC

Why It's Hard to Build an Afghan Army

We often hear of the difficulties our troops face trying to get Afghan forces to fight their own war, but less often are we told what those difficulties actually are. This piece at Strategy Page gives us an idea. Essentially they are two: Not enough military trainers supplied by our allies and a largely illiterate pool of Afghan recruits:

Efforts to expand the Afghan army to 134,000, hopefully by 2011, are running into a lot of problems. One of the key ones is a shortage of foreign trainers. The government wants a force of 200,000, but first foreign allies must be convinced to donate enough money and trainers. The training center NATO has set up is reorganizing so that it can up the number of soldiers trained from 4,000 a month, to 5,000. This is being done by condensing the training and cutting the course length from 10 to 8 weeks for enlisted troops, and 25 to 20 weeks for officers. But there is a persistent shortage of foreign trainers. There should be about 8,000, but there are only about half that many.

The shortages are made up by using (often inexperienced) Afghans, which lowers the quality of the training. Then there is the illiteracy problem (most recruits, like most Afghans, can't read). Afghanistan is finding that illiteracy is a growing problem in the army. Only about 25 percent of recruit are literate. While this can be ignored for the lower ranking troops, NCOs need to read. Illiterate recruits also take longer to train, and more effort to work with. The U.S. has provided an intensive literacy course for troops, which gets most of them to basic ("functional") literacy within a year.

In addition to being able to read signs and maps, the newly semi-literate troops are taught to sign their names, and write out the serial number of their weapon. Illiterate troops selected for promotion to sergeant (NCO), are given more literacy training. That's because being able to read and write has long been a critical asset for any army. The Roman Empire, at its height 1800 years ago, had an army over 100,000 troops, a third of which were literate. But with modern armies, an abundance of technology makes literacy even more necessary. The Afghans can get by without it, but can do a lot better with it.

The article mentions a third problem as well:

The shortage of foreign trainers has meant that many troops get sub-standard training. But by Afghan standards, it's a pretty effective force. Nearly tripling its size will take several years, if the same training methods are used. That's because of the high desertion rate. Most Afghans see their tribe as their highest loyalty, while recognizing Afghanistan as something they are part of, but not necessarily fond of. The Afghans want a larger force to deal with the Taliban insurrection, the growing power of the drug gangs, and possible trouble with Pakistan or Iran. None of these issues are of any great concern to most Afghan soldiers, unless they are problems that affect their own tribe.

Afghanistan's a mess, and how President Obama handles it will largely decide how historians judge his foreign policy.

RLC

The Endgame

It has often been said that poverty needs no explanation. It's the natural state of humanity to be poor. What needs an explanation is why, at rare points in history, a society emerges in which a significantly large fraction of its people are economically well-off.

Any explanation for this phenomenon that credits governmental policies such as are espoused by our current political leadership, however, is a non-starter. The reason can be illustrated by a glance at a basic difference between economic conservatism and economic liberalism. Simply put, conservative policies are designed to make everyone wealthier whereas liberal policies ultimately make everyone poorer.

I don't say this to score a cheap political point, but rather to highlight an obvious truth. Liberal nostrums such as high debt burdens, high taxes, burdensome regulations on commerce, and heavy disincentives for taking economic risks - the very fuel of the entrepreneurial system - all have the inevitable result of stifling productivity, reducing jobs, and diminishing net income.

It makes one wonder why anyone would favor policies which have such baneful effects. I suspect the answer, in many cases, has to do with the liberal notion of social justice. As long as there's a disparity between the top and bottom classes in a society then that society is, in their minds, ipso facto unjust, and the greater the disparity the greater the injustice. Liberals tend to assume that if you have wealth you must have gotten it by taking it from someone else and therefore it's the role of government to take it away from you and return it to those you have exploited.

The most just society, in their minds, is one where the distribution of wealth is relatively uniform. This is certainly Barack Obama's view and he has said as much on several occasions. In this view, wealth is static. There's only so much to go around. The notion that wealth can be created and multiplied is outside their ken. So their goal is to redistribute what wealth there is so that everybody has roughly the same amount.

Conservatives, on the other hand, argue that the better solution is to give everyone the opportunity to become wealthier by, in part, inculcating in people a set of values that includes getting an education, staying away from alcohol and drugs, not having children outside of marriage, getting married and staying married, having a strong work ethic, etc. Nevertheless, such disciplines are hard and liberals think it basically unfair to expect people to impose such severe restraints upon themselves. It's much easier to simply take the wealth from those who have it and give it to those who don't, and this is the path that liberals almost always endorse.

Of course the easiest way is often the most foolish way. As soon as the upper classes realize that their hard work, sacrifice, and deferred gratification is being exploited to subsidize those for whom such exertions are anathema, they'll soon enough decide there's no point in subjecting themselves to those ascetic rigors any longer. Indeed, why should they toil when they can't keep but a small portion of what they earn anyway? Eventually, the goose will die and the golden eggs will stop flowing. There'll be no more wealth to redistribute, and the U.S. will become a giant second or even third world nation.

That's the likely end result of the President's policies whether he intends it for us or not, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to think that he doesn't.

RLC

Woman to Watch

Among conservatives there's a great deal of love for Sarah Palin. Even if they don't think she'd make a good Presidential candidate, most think she'd make a fine President, but the reality is that it's hard to imagine her getting through a campaign without being so savaged by the media that she becomes unelectable.

In the last year, however, another strong woman has emerged who, many conservatives believe, would someday make both an outstanding candidate and an outstanding President. She's bright, articulate, and principled, and so the Left, unsurprisingly, is beginning to turn the same guns on her that've been trained on Sarah Palin for the past year. The harder they try to destroy her, however, the better she looks.

To find out who this impressive woman is go here, read the article about her written by Noemie Emery, and remember her name. I think we'll be hearing a lot more about her in the years ahead.

RLC

Atheist Delusions

Theologian David Bentley Hart has favored us with a wonderful book which he has titled Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies, a takeoff from Richard Dawkins' God Delusion, the basic argument of which is the target of Hart's book. Hart doesn't spend much time deconstructing Dawkins' book itself but rather addresses himself to the larger genre of atheistic tomes which have flooded the marketplace of late.

Hart takes their main premise that religion generally, and Christianity specifically, have been toxins in the bloodstream of human civilization and with an eloquence that's often lapidary, exposes such claims as utterly lacking in significant historical foundation. By way of christening his rebuttal Hart launches in chapter one a witheringly eloquent assault on the thinking of such as Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and their epigones which is worth the price of the book all by itself.

Subsequent chapters take us on an excursis of the ancient world into which Christianity was introduced. It was a world of unbelievable brutality, violence, and superstition, a world in which women and slaves were property and newborn children were often left along roadsides to die from exposure. He then chronicles how Christianity changed all that, not all of a sudden and certainly not perfectly, but inexorably nevertheless. Along the way he puts to rest all sorts of myths about the history of the Christian church.

For instance, everyone has heard how Christianity oppresses women, but the history of Christianity simply doesn't support this myth and, in fact, shows that Christianity has done more to elevate women to equal status with men than any other belief system or culture had ever done. Consider how the status of women in the Roman world changed under the influence of the Christian church.

...there can be little question regarding the benefits that the new faith conferred upon ordinary women - women, that is, who were neither rich nor socially exalted - literally from birth to death. Christianity forbade the ancient pagan practice of the exposure of unwanted infants - which is almost certainly to say, in the great majority of cases, girls - and insisted upon communal provision for the needs of widows - than whom no class of persons in ancient society was typically more disadvantaged or helpless. Not only did the church demand that females be allowed, no less than males, to live; it provided the means for them to live out the full span of their lives with dignity and material security. Christian husbands, moreover, could not force their wives to submit to abortions or to consent to infanticide; and while many pagan women may have been perfectly content to commit their newborn daughters to rubbish heaps or deserted roadsides, to become carrion for dogs and birds or (if fortunate) to become foundlings, we can assume a very great many women were not. Christian husbands were even commanded to remain as faithful to their wives as they expected their wives to be to them; they were forbidden to treat their wives with cruelty; they could not abandon or divorce their wives; their wives were not their chattels but their sisters in Christ....Christians had been instructed by Paul that a man's body belonged to his wife no less than her body belonged to him, and that in Christ a difference in dignity between male and female did not exist....

Christian emperors instituted laws which, though we today might wish went further than they did, were nevertheless unprecedented among prechristian pagans:

Constantine decreed laws that eased the hardship of widows, shielded women from prosecution in public, forbade divorce on trivial grounds, made public accusations of adultery against women illegal, and protected girls against marriage by abduction and forcible proleptic "consummation."

Theodosius and his successors went even further....A wife abandoned by her husband simply on the grounds of domestic unhappiness was now entitled not only to reclaim her dowry but to retain her husband's betrothal gifts to her as well....inheritance law was made more equitable in general by assuring that the estates of deceased women passed uncontested to her children. A girl whose father prostituted her was entirely liberated from his authority, and (more remarkably) a slave girl similarly abused by her master ceased to be his property.

In other words, rights and protections were conferred upon women and slaves under the aegis of Christianity that had no parallel in any pagan culture, which is probably why the Faith had such a strong appeal to so many who had been historically disenfranchised and marginalized.

There's much more in this excellent book which would make a fine gift for someone you know who perhaps labors under the benighted delusion that Christianity has been a pernicious blight on human history. To the contrary, Christianity was the engine that produced the modern understanding of human rights, dignity, and the value of every person.

RLC

Confused Freedom Fighter

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a very brave woman. She lives under the threat of death because she dares to criticize the Islamic religion in which she was raised, yet she persists, and her courage has inspired millions. Unfortunately, she's as philosophically naive as she is courageous. An interview with her that appears in the LA Times suggests why. Here's part of the Times' story:

For five years Ali has lived under the threat of death from Islamic radicals, and in those five years, she has become an acclaimed and provocative author on matters about Islam and the West. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born into a Somali Muslim family and eventually made her way to the Netherlands as a refugee.

There she wrote a screenplay for a short film about women's treatment under Islam. Just over two months after it aired, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh was assassinated. A letter threatening Ali's life has meant she has lived under guard ever since -- most recently thanks to a fund set up by private donors.

Controversy follows her: In 2006, she resigned from the Netherlands parliament under fire for lying on her asylum papers; the complex charges and countercharges precipitated a Dutch political upheaval.

She now works for the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which is headquartered in Washington. She established her AHA foundation to defend the rights of women in the West against militant Islam. Her autobiography, "Infidel: My Life," which detailed her own genital mutilation in Somalia, was a bestseller, and her next book, "Nomad," is to be published in February.

Your own grandmother oversaw your genital mutilation when you were 5, even though your father opposed it.

That's why I keep hammering on principle. My grandmother was convinced she was doing something right. She was brainwashed. She was doing it out of love. She had done it to all her daughters; it was done to her, to her grandmother. She didn't know it was possible not to be, as she called it, "cleansed." Yes, education helps, but it had everything to do with the conviction that what she was doing was right.

Will any country ever go to war for rights and women's safety?

It looks like it will not happen. But I am very, very optimistic -- not about going to war but about human beings changing their minds. You'll remember how communism was stigmatized. The big problem is [how] to define the protection of women's rights as the problem of the 21st century. If the world does that, [women's inequality] will become like the eradication of apartheid -- people will insist that it's wrong, it's wrong, it's wrong, and that's when change happens.

And here's why Ms Ali, for all her courage and ideals, is quite confused. Ayaan, you see, is an atheist:

Do you regard yourself as an atheist?

Did God create man, or did man create God? I belong to the group who say man created God. I am comfortable to live without an outer force telling me what to do. I'd rather believe in human beings.

Ayaan has rejected the God of both Islam and Christianity, but if she's correct that there's no God upon what does she base her strong belief that her grandmother was wrong and that she is right? If there's no God then there's no reason why anyone should care about anyone other than themselves, no reason not to think that might makes right, and no reason for thinking that those who have the power to oppress women are doing anything wrong if they exercise that power.

Ms Ali doesn't like what they do, of course, nor should she, but if there's no "outer force" to act as a moral authority, if morality is just a matter of one's subjective intuitions, she has nothing upon which to base an assertion of the right of women not to be mutilated other than that such treatment offends her own personal sense of morality. If there is no God, if morality is nothing more than an expression of individual taste, like one's preference for Coke over Pepsi, then no one's morality is any better or worse than anyone else's.

Ms Ali doesn't think women should be reduced to chattel, others think they should. Neither side is right nor wrong any more than those who prefer Coke are right and those who prefer Pepsi wrong. Ayaan has no authority to which to appeal to support her asseveration that those who disagree with her are "wrong, wrong, wrong." It's all based on her preferences which are no more binding on others than is her preference in soda.

Only if God exists does the claim that something is morally wrong make any sense. Only if right and wrong are grounded in an objective transcendent moral authority can the claim that oppression and abuse are wrong rise to anything more substantive than the equivalent of "I don't like oppression." Only if practices such as genital mutilation violate the objective moral law of the Creator of the cosmos can we say that someone is wrong to do it. Otherwise, we are just emoting when we say something is wrong.

Anyway, despite the philosophical inadequacy of the foundations of her convictions she is a heroic woman. Read the rest of the interview with her at the link.

RLC