Grecian Formula for Failure

My friend Greg emails to offer some interesting thoughts on the current economic crisis gripping Europe. The proximate cause of the crisis is the terrible state of the Greek economy which will need to be bailed out by its partners in the European Union, but who is up to the task?

Greg writes that:

Americans don't seem to understand the variety of epic implications this European crisis has. A few years ago I studied abroad in Athens, and ever since then I've followed Greek politics with interest, silently hoping their fiscal irresponsibility would catch up with them. Now it finally has, and in a big way. The situation can be viewed from a number of different angles. For my own part, I'd like to propose three.

The Greek Model: For fiscal conservatives, Greece is the poster-child for everything wrong in the world. One out of three Greek jobs is in civil service, and such jobs are akin to being a tenured professor in the US - great pay, lifetime state benefits, total job security. When I lived in Greece, it was obvious that "hard work" was a dirty phrase. From noon until 2pm every day - the heart of the working day - Greeks take a siesta to nap and relax. Banks close, shops shut down. Citizens expect the state to take care of their every whim, including full college tuition for every student. For decades they spent with abandon but refused to pay enough in taxes to cover their debts. Now, the joyride is over and the Greek government can no longer cover their debt. Why aren't American conservatives trumpeting this parable at every possible moment?

California: Maybe Greece is too far away for Americans to care about - California is closer to home. Like Greece, California has the worst credit rating of any US state and the largest deficit. For decades they spent money on social services and world-class education but refused to pay the taxes necessary to support their desires. Now, the joyride is over and they're broke, out begging hat-in-hand for the rest of the country to bail them out. And like the European Union, Washington DC will be forced to intervene, because we share a common currency. Letting California reap what they deserve - bankruptcy - is not an option since it devalues our shared dollar. The Europeans are facing the same dilemma with Greece.

The Germans Finally Conquer Europe: By far the most interesting angle to me, is this one. Germany is the only economy with enough gas in the tank to bail out Greece, but German voters don't want to send their taxpayer money to bail out the bumbling Greeks. Makes sense. I can sympathize. So in order to sell the bailout to their citizens, Berlin has to attach lots of strings and preconditions to the money so it doesn't look like a blank check. But now, countries like France are examining the strings and realizing that if Germany takes the reins, Berlin will be in dominant control of the European Central Bank. And who could blame the Germans for wanting such control, since it's their money in the first place? Economists expect Italy and Spain may soon need a German bailout as well. That leads to more German preconditions and more control over the European Central Bank. What irony. After two world wars, the Germans will finally be in control of Europe - not by force of arms, but because of the Euro.

These are the three angles I find most compelling as an American, but there are plenty of other consequences for the Europeans. Will the Euro experiment fail altogether if Germany doesn't bail out Greece? Is the refusal to bail them out even an option? Will German bailouts result in greater political integration of the EU, or will it drive them further apart? So many questions, but seemingly, so little curiosity from Americans.

Fascinating analysis, Greg. Either Germany becomes an economic hegemon or the Euro collapses and Europe is plunged into economic chaos (which may also result in Germany becoming an economic hegemon). I wonder if the big spenders in our own government are paying attention to the lessons European socialism is offering us.

RLC

The Battle for Marjah

Strategy Page gives us day by day summaries of the ongoing battle in Marjah in southern Afghanistan. The media have suggested that the slow pace is due to stiff resistance, but it seems from reading this article that it's due more to the difficulty of fighting in an urban environment under our current Rules of Engagement.

If you go to the link scroll to the bottom of the page for the earliest entry and work your way back up the column.

RLC

Condescension

Jason calls our attention to a column in the liberal Washington Post by University of Virginia professor of politics Gerard Alexander titled Why Are Liberals So Condescending?

Alexander observes that:

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government -- and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.

He goes on to discuss what he identifies as four major narratives about conservatives that fuel this condescension. The four are these:

• The belief that conservatives win, when they win, because of a "vast right-wing conspiracy, not the quality of their ideas."
• The belief that the people who vote for conservative candidates are fundamentally simple-minded.
• The belief that conservatives are racists and xenophobes.
• The belief that whereas liberals are motivated by reason and logic, conservatives are driven by their emotions.

Alexander makes an interesting case that liberals actually do believe these things about conservatives and that this mythology has not infrequently led to serious political setbacks.

Give the article a look. It's pretty good.

RLC

Dubious Data

Things keep going from bad to worse for the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) enthusiasts. Now it turns out that the former head of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia in England, Dr. Phil Jones, not only can't produce the data that led so many scientists to conclude that we are presently in the midst of a sharp uptick in global temperatures, but the man himself says that there's no conclusive reason to believe that global temperatures have risen since the mid 90s:

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is 'not as good as it should be'.

The data is crucial to the famous 'hockey stick graph' used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Moreover, Dr. Jones is now conceding that global temperatures may well have been elevated at several periods in the past. If that's so, claims that the current alleged "warming" must be due to human activity seem to be unwarranted.

Here's the relevant excerpt from an article in the Daily Mail Online:

Even more strikingly, [Dr. Jones] also sounds much less ebullient about the basic theory, admitting that there is little difference between global warming rates in the Nineties and in two previous periods since 1860 and accepting that from 1995 to now there has been no statistically significant warming.

He also leaves open the possibility, long resisted by climate change activists, that the 'Medieval Warm Period' from 800 to 1300 AD, and thought by many experts to be warmer than the present period, could have encompassed the entire globe.

This is an amazing retreat, since if it was both global and warmer, the green movement's argument that our current position is 'unprecedented' would collapse.

Moreover, British researchers have now come to the conclusion that the data that was relied upon to show that global temperatures were trending upward was tainted by local alterations in the microclimate surrounding the measuring devices.

After almost every country in the world has spent millions of dollars to ameliorate carbon emissions, after near panic has gripped many of the governments in the West over the impending doom of climate catastrophe, it turns out that it was all based on dubious data. Now the whole AGW project seems to be coming undone. Maybe it's just time to take a deep breath and start over with a whole new team of scientists, and perhaps Al Gore should just make himself scarce for the next decade or so.

RLC

Partisan Sniping

The game of "special pleading politics," which both Democrats and Republicans are playing with considerable zest nowadays, is getting more than a little tedious. The game consists in giving one's own guy a pass for doing something which was as bad or worse than what they are prepared to howl like a cage full of monkeys over when the other side's guy does it. It's one reason why so many people are disgusted with American politics.

Democrats, for example, indulged in spasms of hilarity recently when Sarah Palin was discovered to have inscribed some notes on the palm of her hand. Even the President's press secretary publicly poked fun at her for this apparent faux pas at a press conference. Yet a few weeks ago President Obama actually required the aid of a teleprompter to address a class of sixth graders, but none of the Palin bashers seemed to think this even a teensy bit bizarre. Can you imagine the liberal media reaction had Palin or George Bush done such a thing?

As wearisome as such petty attacks, like the one on Palin, are many on the political right also seem unable to resist them. Talk radio personalities like Sean Hannity, for example, make themselves look foolish and trivial when they criticize President Obama's Justice Department for mirandizing the Christmas Day bomber even though they never complained about previous terrorists being mirandized during the Bush years.

To be sure, it was a mistake to mirandize Abdul Mutullab, but it would be a far more decent strategy for conservatives to acknowledge that it was also a mistake when previous administrations did it, and to urge the current administration to change the policy rather than trying to make Obama look soft on terrorism by exploiting his decision to essentially follow the Bush precedent.

Mirandizing terrorists is indeed a bad idea. Closing Gitmo is a bad idea. Trying Khalid Sheik Mohammad in federal court in New York City is a terrible idea, but if Republicans were silent when their guys proposed or did similar things they shouldn't now be using these bad ideas as a club with which to clobber Obama. They'd be better served by pointing out why it was a bad idea (or not) in the past and why it's a bad idea now without attempting to impugn and discredit the President's commitment to keep America safe. It's simply unfair to pretend that the current policies were ushered in by the Obama people and were never in place prior to their taking office.

If conservatives make the argument that we need to avoid the mistakes of the past - and the American people voice overwhelming opposition to continuing the practice of treating terrorism as crime rather than as acts of war - but the administration nevertheless continues on its present course, then it will be appropriate to castigate them for it.

Meanwhile, we can argue for a change in policy without making it sound like so much partisan sniping. After all, the President's prosecution of the war abroad has been the most heartening aspect of his tenure. He should be encouraged to do even better at the things he's doing well rather than being condemned by Republicans for doing pretty much what his GOP predecessor did.

Not only would this elevate our political discourse it would also have the side benefit of elevating in the public esteem the credibility of our political figures.

RLC

Who Are the Tea-Partiers?

Law professor Glenn Reynolds whose blog Instapundit was one of the first and most successful attempts to exploit the new medium of internet blogging, has an article at The Wall Street Journal recounting his experience at the tea party convention a couple of weeks ago.

What he describes is nothing like the impression one gets of these people from, say, watching Keith Olbermann for 30 seconds or more. These are serious people - light-hearted, cheerful, and enthusiastic - but serious about implementing the agenda, or at least part of it, that Barack Obama promised he'd implement but hasn't.

Here's Reynolds' lede:

There were promises of transparency and of a new kind of collaborative politics where establishment figures listened to ordinary Americans. We were going to see net spending cuts, tax cuts for nearly all Americans, an end to earmarks, legislation posted online for the public to review before it is signed into law, and a line-by-line review of the federal budget to remove wasteful programs. These weren't the tea-party platforms I heard discussed in Nashville last weekend. They were the campaign promises of Barack Obama in 2008.

Mr. Obama made those promises because the ideas they represented were popular with average Americans. So popular, it turns out, that average Americans are organizing themselves in pursuit of the kind of good government Mr. Obama promised, but has not delivered. And that, in a nutshell, was the feel of the National Tea Party Convention. The political elites have failed, and citizens are stepping in to pick up the slack.

This response has brought millions of Americans to the streets over the past year, and brought quite a few people to the posh Opryland Resort (with its indoor waterfalls and boat rides, it's like a casino without the gambling) for the convention.

Pundits claim the tea partiers are angry - and they are - but the most striking thing about the atmosphere in Nashville was how cheerful everyone seemed to be. I spoke with dozens of people, and the responses were surprisingly similar. Hardly any had ever been involved in politics before. Having gotten started, they were finding it to be not just worthwhile, but actually fun. Laughter rang out frequently, and when ne w-media mogul Andrew Breitbart held forth on a TV interview, a crowd gathered and broke into spontaneous applause.

A year ago, many told me, they were depressed about the future of America. Watching television pundits talk about President Obama's transformative plans for big government, they felt alone, isolated and helpless. That changed when protests, organized by bloggers, met Mr. Obama a year ago in Denver, Colo., Mesa, Ariz., and Seattle, Wash. Then came CNBC talker Rick Santelli's famous on-air rant on Feb. 19, 2009, which gave the tea-party movement its name.

Tea partiers are still angry at federal deficits, at Washington's habit of rewarding failure with handouts and punishing success with taxes and regulation, and the general incompetence that has marked the first year of the Obama presidency. But they're no longer depressed.

Instead, they seem energized. And surprisingly media savvy.

If you've heard rumblings about the tea party but don't know who these people are or what they're trying to accomplish, Reynolds' column is a good place to find out.

RLC

Airborne Laser Shield

Back in the eighties Ronald Reagan was ridiculed for proposing that we could be made safer from a nuclear missile attack by developing the technology to shoot down incoming Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). The illuminati in the media and the scientific establishment in general enjoyed hearty guffaws at their Georgetown dinner parties at the expense of Reagan whose idea was derisively labeled the "star wars" defense.

The idea that we could essentially shoot a bullet with another bullet was exactly the sort of idea you might expect some rube like Reagan to come up with we were told in editorial after editorial. Scientists of various competencies were trotted out to declaim on the absurdity of doing what Reagan proposed, and besides, they opined, even if we could do it it would only provoke our enemies to strike first before the system was installed.

Reagan, however, was convinced that the technology would work and he kept at it through all the snickers and snide remarks. Even after he was gone his successors continued to pursue testing and development. The thinking was that the less sure an aggressor could be that a missile attack would succeed the less likely they'd be to try it.

Eventually, a number of systems were developed, successfully tested, and deployed on Aegis class cruisers. Land based anti-missile missiles have also been deployed which, like the Patriot system, target incoming missiles and collide with them in the air, achieving what the liberal "brights" thought impossible.

Now, however, another giant stride has been taken with the successful test of an airborne system that shoots down missiles in their boost phase using directed energy (laser) beams. This video shows how it works:

It's hard, perhaps, for today's young people to imagine the fear of nuclear missiles that many people lived under during the 60s, 70s, and into the 80s. Now with the rise of a nuclear armed Iran and North Korea the fear may well return. Fortunately, we're quickly developing the means to defend ourselves from an attack, at least an ICBM attack. The Left, which has always opposed American military might, no longer scoffs at the prospect of a missile shield. Indeed, they have no good argument against erecting one except the financial cost. Nevertheless, ideological inertia keeps them from conceding that Reagan has been vindicated. No one clings more tenaciously to the past, after all, than do progressives.

Anyway, President Obama, being the progressive's champion, has himself expressed dislike for the idea of a missile shield. Perhaps the fact that the airborne system is both more effective and cheaper than previous systems will persuade him to support it.

RLC

Heather Mac on Root Causes

A week or so ago we did a post titled Root Causes which discussed Heather MacDonald's column in City Journal about urban crime. In the piece she argued that crime is not a result of poverty, but rather a result of fatherlessness.

She was invited to appear on Journal Report with Paul Gigot where she elaborates on her thesis and what the most effective short-term means of reducing crime are. It's pretty interesting, especially if you grew up in the sixties and seventies and had your mind filled with the sociological theories that she dismisses:

RLC

Self-Refuting

Theology Geek NZ lists a dozen or so statements which are, in philosopher-speak, self-referentially incoherent - i.e. they're self-refuting. If they're true they must be false. Here are a few of them:

• Truth does not exist (Is that a true statement?)
• Nothing is absolute (Is that absolutely true?)
• I do not exist (You must exist to deny that you exist)
• Science is the only way to know (Can you scientifically prove that?)

There are more at the link. Meanwhile, here a couple of my all-time favorites:

A quote from the famous evidentialist William Clifford: "It is wrong always and everywhere for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence." If that's true then we shouldn't believe it for there's no evidence that warrants it.

Then there is the verification principle of the logical positivists: "Only those statements which can be empirically verified are meaningful." Since there's no way to verify this statement is it therefore meaningless?

HT: Dangerous Idea

RLC

Defying the Popular Will

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey discusses the latest results from a Rasmussen poll that show that overwhelming numbers from almost every demographic believe that the Obama administration must reign in spending. After showing that the President is continuing to lose ground with the American people in terms of his favorability rating. Morrissey offers this:

Part of the problem certainly springs from the massive deficits that the Obama administration has created. In a separate poll this week, Rasmussen shows that only 11% support deficit spending to fix the economy, while 70% believe that the federal government needs to downsize. Obama tried to get in front of that impulse by talking about the deficit in the SOTU speech, but the announcement of a $1.6 trillion deficit in FY2010 and another $1.35 trillion in FY2011 made a mockery of Obama's sudden deficit-hawk pose.

The internals of that poll should worry Obama and his team. Even a plurality of Democrats believe that the US needs to cut federal spending rather than splurge even more, 47%/21%. Republicans want to cut spending, 87%/6%, and independents are almost as adamant, 77%/6%. Even the normally safe demographics oppose Obama on his budget plans: a majority of black voters favor cuts, 58%/19%, women 68%/10%, young voters 68%/4%, and under-$20K earners 58%/14%.

It's as close to a consensus as anything seen in American politics - and Obama is taking the opposite direction. No wonder his approval deficit continues to grow.

These polls notwithstanding Mr. Obama continues to insist we need to spend more, and then he expects us to believe him when he tells us he's not an ideologue? In the past people would scoff at the characterization of the "tax and spend liberal." This characterization was, we were told, an unfair caricature. Well, the current Congress and White House have certainly done everything they could to ensure that that "caricature" lives on in the collective memory for another fifty years or more.

RLC

Ten Most Redeeming Films

Christianity Today lists their ten most redeeming films of 2009. They describe a "redeeming film" as:

... movies that include stories of redemption-sometimes blatantly, sometimes less so. Several of our films have characters who are redeemers themselves; all of them have characters who experience redemption to some degree-some quite clearly, some more subtly. Some are "feel-good" movies that leave a smile on your face; some are a bit more uncomfortable to watch. But the redemptive element is there in all of these films.

One of the films they list is the The Hurt Locker, a movie that certainly deserved its nomination for Best Picture. I won't bother to summarize the story since most are probably familiar with it, but it gives an excellent insight into what war in places like Iraq and Afghanistan has been like for the young men who are sent there to fight.

Perhaps the most significant point the film makes is how difficult it is for our troops to do combat under our rules of engagement. Early on a soldier sees a man holding a cell phone as his teammate is disarming an IED. Is the man an insurgent about to use the phone to trigger the explosive and kill his friend? Should he shoot? What if he's just an innocent civilian? What if he doesn't shoot and the man detonates the bomb? He has three seconds to decide what to do.

The Hurt Locker subtly poses those quandaries over and over - who are the bad guys? How can you tell? I don't see how any young man placed in those kinds of situations can be charged in a military court for making the wrong decision. Indeed, it boggles the mind that three Navy SEALs are currently on trial for simply punching a terrorist in their custody who had murdered several Americans and desecrated their bodies. Worse than getting punched happens in the midst of almost any football game on any given Autumn weekend in America. We need to hold our military to a high standard of conduct, of course, but we don't have to be fetishistic about it. Surely there are disciplines short of court martial for such breaches.

In any event, The Hurt Locker is apolitical and as realistic as a war movie gets. The realism, however, means that the language and violence are pretty raw, so I encourage anyone who has reservations about viewing such films to take a pass on this one.

RLC

Ultimate Causes

In a recent interview mathematician Granville Sewell makes the following interesting point:

A typical college physics text I read contains the statement "One of the most remarkable simplifications in physics is that only four distinct forces account for all known phenomena." Most people just haven't ever thought about things in this way, that if you don't believe in intelligent design, you must believe this claim, that the four unintelligent forces of physics caused atoms on Earth to rearrange themselves into nuclear power plants, spaceships and computers. When they do think about it, they may start to see things a little differently. This is part of the "broader view" that is often missed by biologists, but noticed by mathematicians and physicists.

He's right that most people never stop to think about this. Either human minds, libraries, computer software, and jet engines are ultimately the product of an intelligent designer or they're ultimately the product of blind, purposeless forces like gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces.

Why is it somehow more rational to believe the latter than to believe the former? Why is it thought to take more faith to believe the former than to believe the latter? Indeed, it's more than a little ridiculous that people who believe the latter often make fun of those who believe the former.

RLC

Who Is Ayn Rand?

There's a revival of interest in the work of the woman who was in many ways the philosophical fountainhead of modern libertarianism, Ayn Rand, and Cathy Young explains for a new generation who Rand was and why she's significant. Young highlights both the salutary lessons Rand has to teach we the living in this age of creeping collectivization as well as the toxic liabilities embedded in many of her ideas:

Ayn Rand, the controversial Russian-born American writer, would have turned 105 years old on February 2. This anniversary takes place amidst a Rand mini-revival, sparked by the Obama Administrations push to expand government and resulting fears of socialism on the march. There has been a spike in sales of Rand's books, particularly Atlas Shrugged, the 1957 novel depicting a quasi-totalitarian future America in which the best, the brightest and the most productive go on strike in protest. Some bloggers have bandied about the idea of such a strike under Obama going Galt, after John Galt, the leader of the revolt in the novel. Rand has recently appeared on the cover of Reason, the libertarian monthly (where I am a contributing editor) and of GQ where she was the target of a profane, vitriolic rant.

Who is Ayn Rand, and what does her renewed popularity mean? A refugee from Soviet Russia who fled Communist dictatorship in the 1920s, Rand called herself a radical for capitalism rather than a conservative. Her vision, articulated in several novels and later in nonfiction essays as the philosophy of Objectivism, earned her a sometimes cult-like following in her lifetime and beyond it.

Politically, Rand wanted to provide liberal capitalism with a moral foundation, challenging the notion that communism was a noble but unrealistic ideal while the free market was a necessary evil best suited to humanity's flawed nature. Her arguments against "compassionate" redistribution, and persecution, of wealth have lost none of their power and persuasiveness. In an era when collectivism was often seen as the inevitable way of the future, she unapologetically asserted the worth of individual and each persons right to exist for himself.

It's an interesting article and an excellent introduction, perhaps even an anthem, to a very complex and influential woman.

(My apologies to those of you familiar enough with Rand to have winced your way through this post. For some reason I just couldn't resist the temptation.)

RLC

Fallujah in Afghanistan

The news brings word of an impending attack on the Afghanistan city of Marjah. The tactical template for the assault is presumed to be the battle some five years ago for the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Strategy Page explains:

The battle of Fallujah, in late 2004, become something of a case study for military historians and doctrine ("how to fight") experts. Like Marjah, the residents of Fallujah were warned that an attack was coming, and advised to get out. Most did. The subsequent Fallujah fighting was quite intense, even by historical standards, and the media missed a lot of the important details. What was noticed was how quickly the army and marine troops blitzed through the city, clearing out the 4,000 very determined defenders. The speed and efficiency of the American attack was the result of some unique, in the history of warfare, factors. But the principal reason for the success in Fallujah was the high degree of training the troops had. Many also had months of combat experience in Iraq. These factors (training and combat experience) have long been key factors in combat success. But the American troops in Fallujah had some relatively new advantages, that were used aggressively. These included massive amounts of information on the enemy, and robotic weapons. The standard gear of the 5,000 attacking troops was also exceptionally good by historical standards. Especially notable was the improved body armor and communications gear.

The end result of all this was a two week campaign that resulted in some 500 American and Iraqi casualties, but the obliteration of the defending force (1,200 killed, 1,500 captured, the rest either got out, or were buried in bombed buildings). While the enemy were not, compared to the U.S. troops, well trained, they were motivated, and often refused to surrender. But the speed and violence of the American assault prevented any coordinated defense. The U.S. troops quickly cut the city into sectors, that were then methodically cleared out.

The terrorists that got out later all repeated the same story. Once the Americans were on to you it was like being stalked by a machine. The often petrified defender could only remember the footsteps of the approaching American troops inside a building, the gunfire and grenade blasts as rooms were cleared and the shouted commands that accompanied it. If a building was so well defended that the American infantry could not get in, they would just obliterate it with a smart bomb. They used smaller weapons, like AT-4 rocket launchers, many of which fuel-air explosive (thermobaric) warheads. These would use an explosive mist to create a lethal blast, capable of clearing several rooms at once. The defenders could occasionally kill or wound the advancing Americans, but could not stop them. Nothing the defenders did worked, and the American tactics developers want to keep it that way.

The speed with which intelligence information (from troops, electronic intercepts, and constant live video via UAVs and gunships overhead) was processed enabled commanders to keep the battle going 24/7. The defenders were not ready to deal with this, and many of them died while groggy from lack of sleep. When in that condition, you are more prone to make mistakes, and the attackers were ready to take advantage.

Compared to earlier wars, there has never been anything quite like Fallujah. The Pentagon saw this as a good example of how to clear a city of fanatical defenders, with minimal friendly and civilian casualties. Fallujah was seen as the future of warfare. How accurate that assessment is will be seen soon in Marjah.

The media hasn't had much to say about Afghanistan lately and very little to say about the coming operation in Marjah, but it's apparently going to kick off any day now.

RLC

Philosophy of Religion

Those readers with an interest in philosophy of religion and Christian apologetics will find William Lane Craig's site called Reasonable Faith an excellent resource. Craig is one of the foremost philosophers of religion in the U.S. and has appeared in numerous debates over the years defending traditional orthodox Christianity. He has also been addressing a different question submitted by readers each week and his answers are usually very lucid. There's an archive on the home page which lists the 146 questions he's addressed so far.

For those who have a graduate level interest in the subject I recommend The Prosblogion, but be advised that the material here is highly technical.

RLC

Pots and Kettles

I don't like to make fun of the intelligence of other people, and am the first to lament my own intellectual deficiencies, but when people who themselves are walking around under an empty attic enjoy ridiculing others for being dim then I think their stupidity should at least be pointed out. The video below features talk show host Joy Behar and Eve Ensler, author of the play The Vagina Monologues, enjoying a good chuckle at the feeble-mindedness of - who else? - Sarah Palin and the tea partiers.

Palin and her ilk are people who "play fast and loose with facts" - as if the current administration and Congress have been the picture of probity - and, according to Ensler, they're people whose intelligence simply has yet to "evolve." These Neanderthals - fascists, Behar calls them - believe in creationism and are dubious of man-caused global warming. Ms Behar interprets Sarah Palin's advice to President Obama to be tougher on national security to mean that Palin wants to start a world war. Ms Ensler chimes in that this is a consequence of Palin being an NRA member and "shooting animals from a plane," and also, somehow, a consequence of her wish to see us develop our domestic oil resources.

Don't ask me to explain any of this. I was as mystified by it as you are, but I really look forward to hearing Ms Behar expatiate on the creation/evolution debate, or Ms Ensler explain the logical connections between hunting, drilling for oil, and wanting to precipitate a world war. That'd be a show I'd be sure not to miss.

But more to the point: however dumb Sarah and her fans may be I'll bet even the most dull-witted among them knows that earthquakes and tsunamis have nothing to do with global warming, man-caused or otherwise. Perhaps one of these benighted tea-partiers might venture to enlighten Ms Ensler about the nature of tectonic shifts and their causes:

It's pretty funny listening to two people who lack any understanding of the rudiments of either logic or geoscience deriding others for being skeptical of what people like these two believe. It's just as amusing listening to two people who shouldn't be making fun of anyone else's intelligence doing just that.

RLC

Armageddon

Michael Goodwin of the New York Post argues that President Obama's failure to successfully pressure Iran to stop its manufacture of nuclear weapons, and his apparent unwillingness to use the American military to destroy the production facilities, is forcing Israel to take matters into its own hands. This is very unsettling, though not unexpected. What was surprising in Goodwin's piece, though, comes in the fourth paragraph.

Goodwin writes:

Here's the nightmare scenario. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel requests an urgent, private meeting with President Obama. At the White House, the two men sit alone and Netanyahu, looking grave, dispenses with pleasantries and gets to the point:

"Our intelligence services have determined that Iran is less than three months from making a nuclear bomb. Mr. President, as I have told you, no Israeli leader can let that happen because a nuclear-armed Iran is an existential threat to our country.

"You previously asked that I not surprise you with any unilateral action. Therefore, I am here to inform you that we have decided to take military action against Iran. Based on weather conditions, our air force will carry out the raids in the next week.

"Furthermore, my military advisers all agree that we do not have sufficient conventional firepower to accomplish the mission. We are compelled to use tactical nuclear weapons. It is the only way we can be sure of success. "Mr. President, I assure you that Israel fully appreciates the seriousness of this decision and the potential consequences. My Cabinet fully supports this decision. Opposition leaders also have been informed and they, too, agree this is the only responsible course."

If the scenario sounds too cinematic and far-fetched, consider this. It was suggested to me by one of Israel's top political insiders as the almost-certain outcome of the failed international efforts to get Iran to stop enriching uranium.

There's more at the link. Meanwhile, here's the dilemma for those who believe that we should keep our own military out of this affair: Given all the awful geo-political consequences that will ensue from allowing Iran to build weapons, and all the awful consequences that will follow upon any attempt to destroy their ability to build those weapons, which is worse, an American conventional strike, or series of strikes, that destroys Iran's nuclear weapons facilities, or an Israeli nuclear strike against those facilities? Take your time. You probably have a couple of months yet to decide.

RLC

Passing of a Hero

There aren't many politicians of whom we might say this, but Charlie Wilson was a great man. Wilson was a little known, hard living, skirt-chasing, party-loving former Congressman from Texas, but he was nevertheless a genuine hero. He passed away yesterday at the age of 76, an event which wouldn't be especially notable were it not for the fact that this particular Congressman, despite his many peccadilloes, was a savior to the Afghan people. He and a small coterie of CIA agents were, more than any other Americans, responsible for the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan in the late eighties. Wilson's story was made into an outstanding movie a few years ago (Charlie Wilson's War), with Tom Hanks as Wilson. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Julia Roberts also had starring roles.

Wilson freely confesses to his personal shortcomings, but he was truly an outstanding man. If you watch the movie you'll understand why.

RLC

9/11

ABC has a series of never before released aerial photos of the collapse of the second World Trade Tower here. They should serve as a reminder that the conflict with radical Islam may ebb and flow, but they will never stop trying to do it again. Evil is relentless.

RLC

Champion of Small Minds

In the spirit of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 this wonderful Knight of the Darwinian Faith intrepidly strides into bookstores and, hush now, surreptitiously moves intelligent design books from the science section and reshelves them in the religion section! Isn't that something? Don't you just admire the guy? Not only does he have the courage to do this great deed, but he proudly boasts of his mighty blows on behalf of the suppression of ideas on his blog.

It's not every day that we hear about such anti-intellectual heroics. It's not every day that people, scared to death of ideas and arguments that conflict with their own cherished convictions, manage to overcome their fears and their bigotry and actually rise up and do something to protect others from being exposed to those ideas. It's not every day that we're privileged to witness the glorious conjunction in one solitary man of a narrow mind and the impulse to extinguish uncomfortable and unacceptable ideas.

Our hats are off to today's champion of small minds everywhere, University of Montana grad student Michael D. Barton.

HT: John West at Evolution News and Views.

RLC

Philosophy Students' Lament

The author of the book C.S. Lewis' Dangerous Idea, is a philosophy professor by the name of Victor Reppert, who has apparently been hearing grumblings from his students about the value of studying philosophy. Everyone who teaches the subject (or any other subject, for that matter) has heard similar complaints. Philosophy students are often frustrated by the fact that philosophy seems to raise more questions than it answers and by the fact that few of the answers it does give are definitive. All of this is why I found Reppert's reply to his students very much on the mark.

He begins with this:

This is a response to some frustrations which a student expressed to me, and which are, I think, typical of a lot of people who are introduced to the subject. If you've taught philosophy for any length of time, you know where this student is coming from.

I know that philosophy, by its nature, can be frustrating, and it requires somewhat different skills than what you might be accustomed to using in other classes. I make no apologies for that; the discipline of philosophy is what it is.

There is a common conception when students come to philosophy classes that everything falls into two general categories, fact and opinion. If it is a matter of fact, we can settle it by some broadly scientific method. If it is a matter of opinion, then different people have different opinions, and we are all entitled to our opinions. Philosophical questions are all matters of opinion, and therefore there is something absurd and perhaps even offensive about grading a philosophy paper.

I think this neat division of everything into two boxes, fact and opinion, which we learned all the way back to fourth grade at least, is a distortion of the truth. Just because we cannot settle a question to everyone's satisfaction through a well-defined method doesn't mean that there can't be better or worse reasons for believing what we do, or that we shouldn't be aware of the reasons for and against what we believe. Whether it is worthwhile to spend time working through one's world-view and putting a lot of reflection into that, or whether there are other, more adequate uses for a person's time is not something I can answer for someone else.

If you've entertained the same musings as Reppert's student, or if you're a teacher, I encourage you to read the rest of his reply. It's quite good.

His book, by the way, is an excellent treatment of Lewis' argument in Miracles that the existence of human Reason is much better understood on the assumption that there's a God than it is on any naturalistic explanation.

RLC

Miss Me Yet?

The internet has been abuzz the last couple of days over a mysterious billboard in Minnesota that has a picture of George W. Bush with the words "Miss Me Yet?"

Michelle Malkin manages to resist nostalgia's seductive tug and lays out nine reasons why the thought of Mr. Bush's presidency fails to fill her with yearning for the old days:

President Bush put America on the proper war footing after 9/11 and deserves much credit for doing so, but he also:

1) joined with open-borders progressives McCain and Kennedy to try to force shamnesty down our throats;

2) massively expanded the federal role in education;

3) championed the Medicare prescription drug entitlement using phony math;

4) kowtowed to the jihadi-enabling Saudis;

5) stocked DHS with incompetents and cronies;

6) pushed Hillarycare for housing;

7) enabled turncoat Arlen Specter;

8) nominated crony Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court;

9) pre-socialized the economy for Obama by embracing TARP, the auto bailouts, the AIG bailout.

This is all true and cannot be gainsaid. At one point in his presidency I thought Mr. Bush had a chance to be a great president. Then came #1, 2, 3, 9 and his reluctance to explain and promote those of his policies which really were noble, and I gave up hope. I still think he's a classier human being than the men who preceded and succeeded him, but I'm afraid he let greatness slip through his fingers. It's really quite sad, actually.

RLC

Root Causes

Those concerned with the problems of our inner cities are forever talking about the "root causes" of the crime and educational failure besetting those, largely African Americans, who inhabit our urban areas. Usually, the proffered solutions involve spending money, but rarely does spending money do any good. The reason economic solutions fail, of course, is that the problem isn't really economic.

There's a column at City Journal that every person concerned about inner city poverty, educational failure, crime, illegitimacy and other dysfunctions should read. It's written by Heather MacDonald, and she puts her finger on the reason why people who are poor often remain poor, sometimes for generations. She lays the blame for crime, educational failure, and all the ills which plague the lower social classes on one single common denominator - fatherlessness.

It's an excellent article and MacDonald is very persuasive. Here are a few excerpts:

In 1984, Obama's first year in Chicago, gang members gunned down a teenage basketball star, Benjy Wilson. The citywide outcry that followed was heartfelt but beside the point. None of the prominent voices calling for an end to youth violence-from Mayor Washington to Jesse Jackson to school administrators-noted that all of Wilson's killers came from fatherless families (or that he had fathered an illegitimate child himself). Nor did the would-be reformers mention the all-important fact that a staggering 75 percent of Chicago's black children were being born out of wedlock. The sky-high illegitimacy rate meant that black boys were growing up in a world in which it was normal to impregnate a girl and then take off. When a boy is raised without any social expectation that he will support his children and marry his children's mother, he fails to learn the most fundamental lesson of personal responsibility. The high black crime rate was one result of a culture that fails to civilize men through marriage.

In 1994, two particularly savage youth murders drew the usual feckless hand-wringing. An 11-year-old Black Disciples member from Roseland, Robert "Yummy" Sandifer (so called for his sweet tooth, the only thing childlike about him), had unintentionally killed a girl while shooting at (and paralyzing) a rival gang member. Sandifer's fellow Black Disciples then executed him to prevent him from implicating them in the killing. A month later, after five-year-old Eric Morse refused to steal candy for an 11-year-old and a ten-year-old, the two dropped him from a 14th-story window in a housing complex, killing him. Eric's eight-year-old brother had grabbed him to keep him from falling, but lost his hold when one of the boys bit him on the arm. None of the perpetrators or victims in either case came from two-parent families.

In the early 2000s, the number of assaults reported in and around schools increased significantly, according to Northwestern University political scientist Wesley Skogan. School dismissal time in Chicago triggers a massive mobilization of security forces across the South and West Sides, to try to keep students from shooting one another or being shot by older gang members. Police officers in bulletproof vests ring the most violence-prone schools, and the Chicago Transit Authority rejiggers its bus schedules to try to make sure that students don't have to walk even half a block before boarding a bus.

In September 2009, that now-notorious cell-phone video gave the world a glimpse of Barack Obama's former turf. Teenagers-some in an informal school uniform of khaki pants and polo shirts, others bare-chested-swarm across a desolate thoroughfare in Roseland; others congregate in the middle of it, indifferent to the SUVs that try to inch by, horns blaring. Against a background din of constant yelling, some boys lunge at one another and throw punches, while a few, in leisurely fashion, select victims to clobber on the torso and head with thick, eight-foot-long railroad ties. Derrion Albert is standing passively in the middle of a knot on the sidewalk when one boy whacks him on the head with a railroad tie and another punches him in the face. Albert falls to the ground unconscious, then comes to and tries to get up. A boy walking by gives him a desultory kick. Five more cluster around him as he lies curled up on the sidewalk; one hits him again with a railroad tie, and another stomps him on the head. Finally, workers from a nearby youth community center drag Albert inside.

Needless to say, everyone involved in the Albert beating came from a fatherless home. Defendant Eugene Riley hit Albert with a railroad tie as he lay unconscious on the ground in his final moments. According to 18-year-old Riley's 35-year-old mother, Sherry Smith, "his father was not ready to be a strong black role model in his son's life." Nor was the different father of Riley's younger brother, Vashion Bullock, ready to be involved in his son's life. A bare-chested Bullock shows up in the video wielding a railroad tie in the middle of the street. As for Albert himself, his father "saw him the day he was born, and the next time when he was in a casket," reports Bob Jackson, the worldly director of Roseland Ceasefire, an antiviolence project.

In Chicago, blacks, at least 35 percent of the population, commit 76 percent of all homicides; whites, about 28 percent of the population, commit 4 percent, and Hispanics, 30 percent of the population, commit 19 percent. The most significant difference between these demographic groups is family structure. In Cook County-which includes both Chicago and some of its suburbs and probably therefore contains a higher proportion of middle-class black families than the city proper-79 percent of all black children were born out of wedlock in 2003, compared with 15 percent of white children. Until that gap closes, the crime gap won't close, either.

All the maladies associated with our inner cities occur everywhere and among all races wherever fatherlessness is the norm. Black crime is disproportionately high because black fatherlessness is disproportionately high. The solution to the problems of our cities isn't to throw more money at them, MacDonald argues, it is to get men of whatever color to learn to value monogamy and to be present in the home to nurture their children as they grow up. If that doesn't happen the future for the children of those who refuse to be real fathers will look increasingly violent and relentlessly bleak.

There's no quick fix for the social breakdown that has occured in our cities, but the path leading out of it is clear for anyone who wants to take it:

• Get all the education you can get.
• Don't have children until you're married and once you're married stay married.
• Get whatever job you can and be the most dependable, hardest worker on the job.
• Get involved in a church where you can get social and spiritual support.
• Stay away from drugs and alcohol.

This is the route to the middle class taken by generations of Americans. It's the route that has resulted in generations of Americans having a better standard of living than did their parents who walked that path so that their children could benefit from their discipline.

RLC

Calvin and Hobbes

Count me among those who were crushed:

In today's cult of celebrity, it's a rare phenomenon: an artist who produces much-loved work, wins the hearts of fans and critics, and then abruptly retires and attempts to lead a normal, sometimes reclusive, life.

We're talking about the likes of Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger and "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip creator Bill Watterson, who recently gave what's believed to be his first interview since 1989, to his hometown newspaper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Watterson, now 51, crushed millions of funnies readers around the world in 1995 when he suddenly retired Calvin, a 6-year-old, philosophical version of Bart Simpson, and Hobbes, the stuffed tiger who comes to life in his imagination. Watterson has never really talked about it publicly, until now.

Read the rest at the link. C&H may have been the funniest, most intelligent "cartoon" strip ever. I don't begrudge Watterson his desire to retire, but I wish he hadn't.

RLC

How the Climate Change Movement Died

Margaret Wente at The Globe and Mail looks at the state of the global climate change "movement" and finds it on life support if not altogether dead. After summarizing all the scandals, shoddy science, and unseemly suppression of dissent she notes that:

None of this is to say that global warming isn't real, or that human activity doesn't play a role, or that the IPCC (Intergovernmental on Climate Change) is entirely wrong, or that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren't valid. But the strategy pursued by activists (including scientists who have crossed the line into advocacy) has turned out to be fatally flawed.

By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they've discredited the entire climate-change movement. The political damage will be severe. As analyst Walter Russell Mead succinctly puts it: "Skeptics up, Obama down, cap-and-trade dead." That also goes for Canada, whose climate policies are inevitably tied to those of the United States.

The shame of this is that it seems undeniable that something is happening to the earth's climate, but the people tasked with determining what, exactly, it is have so discredited themselves that it will be very difficult to regain the trust necessary to take collective action if ever we do gain a comprehensive understanding of the problem.

Read the rest of Wentke's column. It's very good.

RLC

The Green Police

I don't know if the folks at Audi were intending this to be a parody of the brave new world to which modern progressivism is taking us, but they couldn't have done a better job if they were:

As funny as this spoof is I fear that there are a lot of folks who watched it and didn't see the absurdity of a "green police" force at all - and that's pretty scary.

RLC

John Murtha, RIP

Congressman John Murtha is dead at the age of 77. For those who don't know who Murtha was or why his passing is worth noting please read this.

Murtha represented almost everything that people find disagreeable about American politics, his name was sullied by his involvement in the Abscam scandal and he was one of the all-time champions of earmark pork (Do a Viewpoint search on John Murtha to find more on the controversies surrounding Murtha). On the other hand, he was also a man who served his country admirably, volunteering when in his thirties to serve as a combat Marine in Vietnam, winning two purple hearts and a bronze star. When he came to Congress he was perhaps the strongest advocate for the military on his side of the aisle.

His constituents loved him for the truckloads of federal largesse he brought to his district and those who campaign for virtuous husbandry of the taxpayers' money found him to be a major obstacle to their efforts.

He was a complex man in complex times. May God look favorably upon his soul.

RLC

No More Soup

Generations of biology students have been taught that life originated in a primordial soup of simple organic molecules that gradually combined to form amino acids, nucleic acids and ultimately proteins and DNA. The exact pathway for this miracle was never very clear which may have been because it turns out that it probably didn't happen that way in the first place.

Based on new research reported in Science Daily researchers inform us that we must now throw out the primordial soup and look instead to chemical reactions occurring around hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the oceans for the conditions under which the first life was spawned:

For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a 'primordial soup' of organic molecules before evolving out of the oceans millions of years later. Today the 'soup' theory has been over turned in a pioneering paper in BioEssays which claims it was the Earth's chemical energy, from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, which kick-started early life.

"Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form of ATP. We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won't work at all," said team leader Dr Nick lane from University College London. "We present the alternative that life arose from gases (H2, CO2, N2, and H2S) and that the energy for first life came from harnessing geochemical gradients created by mother Earth at a special kind of deep-sea hydrothermal vent -- one that is riddled with tiny interconnected compartments or pores."

Well, maybe so, but isn't it a bit disconcerting that just about everything that scientists have told us over the years about evolution turns out to be either untrue or questionable? Everything from the importance of natural selection and genetic mutation, to Haeckel's phylogenetic law, to the proof provided by finch beaks and peppered moths, to the crucial importance of the gene, to the junkiness of junk DNA, to the primordial soup, to who knows what next. The only belief about evolution that's remained undiminished over the decades is the dogmatic certainty that it happened, even though at the rate we're going everything we believe about it will be proven wrong by 2020.

This is not to say that organisms haven't evolved or that life didn't begin in some warm little vent. Rather it's to say that the details of evolutionary theory are a lot less settled than the confident pronouncements of the theory's advocates would have us think. And if the premises of an argument are uncertain how can anyone be expected to have any confidence that the conclusion is assured?

RLC

Rescinding Don't Ask

The Wall Street Journal features a column by Mackubin Thomas Owens in which he makes a case against rescinding the ban on open homosexuals in the military. At one point in his column he writes:

There are many foolish reasons to exclude homosexuals from serving in the armed services. One is simple antihomosexual bigotry. But as the late Charles Moskos, the noted military sociologist, observed during the Clinton years, this does not mean that we should ignore the good ones. And the most important is expressed in the 1993 law: that open homosexuality is incompatible with military service because it undermines the military ethos upon which success in war ultimately depends.

President Obama has promised on numerous occasions that he will work with Congress to overturn the ban and the media and gay organizations are holding him to that promise. Congress, though, has to pass the legislation and it's not clear what they're hearing from their constituents. Nevertheless, they'd do well to keep in mind Owens' concluding paragraph:

The reason for excluding open homosexuals from the military has nothing to do with equal rights or freedom of expression. Indeed, there is no constitutional right to serve in the military. The primary consideration must be military effectiveness. Congress should keep the ban in place. It certainly should not change the law when the United States is engaged in two wars.

Congress should think long and hard about the effects overturning the ban would have on unit cohesion and the ability of our military to carry out its mission as effectively and as efficiently as possible. That should be the overriding consideration. The decision should certainly not be based on considerations of political correctness, sociological fashion, or "equal opportunity."

RLC

Two Assumptions

Democrats, the WaPo's Charles Krauthammer observes, analyze their dismal performance in recent elections in the light of two guiding axioms:

(1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.

Krauthammer goes on to put flesh on these presuppositional bones and shows, in so doing, that Democrats seem to be completely wanting in the ability to see in themselves the faults they discern so clearly in others. He writes, for instance, that:

This belief in the moral hollowness of conservatism animates the current liberal mantra that Republican opposition to Obama's social democratic agenda -- which couldn't get through even a Democratic Congress and powered major Democratic losses in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts -- is nothing but blind and cynical obstructionism.

By contrast, Democratic opposition to George W. Bush -- from Iraq to Social Security reform -- constituted dissent. And dissent, we were told at the time, including by candidate Obama, is "one of the truest expressions of patriotism."

No more. Today, dissent from the governing orthodoxy is nihilistic malice. "They made a decision," explained David Axelrod, "they were going to sit it out and hope that we failed, that the country failed" -- a perfect expression of liberals' conviction that their aspirations are necessarily the country's, that their idea of the public good is the public's, that their failure is therefore the nation's.

The whole op-ed is worth reading, but let's tarry for a moment over the main implication of his column: Democrats are becoming increasingly divorced from reality. They'd sooner demonize their political opponents and disparage the intellectual abilities of the voters than to contemplate the possibility that maybe there's something wrong with themselves.

When Scott Brown won in Massachusetts Democrat spokespersons were all over the airwaves claiming with straight faces and apparent sincerity that this should be seen as a signal to Democrats to put the public option back in health care reform. Brown's election against a Democrat progressive candidate was interpreted, with an astonishing indifference to common sense, as a protest against the Democrats for being too timid, for not spending enough money, for not driving the deficits even higher.

President Obama, as Krauthammer points out, assures us in the wake of electoral setbacks in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Virginia that he's not an ideologue. Yet he insists that Democrats double down and get his agenda passed over the objections of the people no matter what the political cost. Isn't that exactly what an ideologue would do?

I'm reminded of Martin Luther's extraordinary affirmation of how, in his view, a Christian's faith should be impervious to evidence. He wrote that:

So tenaciously should we cling to the world revealed by the Gospel that were I to see all the Angels of Heaven coming down to me to tell me something different, not only would I not be tempted to doubt a single syllable, but I would shut my eyes and stop my ears, for they would not deserve to be seen or heard.

Substitute "progressive ideology" for "the Gospel" and Luther could have been talking about the modern Democratic party.

RLC

Is Religion Separable from Science?

It's a matter of entrenched conviction, I suppose, that religion has no place in science, but I wonder how it can be possible that the two be separated. I can see how Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam or any specific religion can be denied any role in scientific theorizing and data gathering, but what I can't see is how religion simpliciter could be excluded without the whole enterprise collapsing.

When we think of religious belief we almost always think of a belief in some sort of supernatural being, but religious beliefs need not be limited to supernatural entities for at least two reasons:

First, the meaning of the word "supernatural" is unclear. Usually it's intended to refer to that which transcends the laws and boundaries of our space-time world, but consider this possibility: Suppose there are other universes besides our own with different laws and even different forms of life, including intelligent life. This is the state of affairs scientists and philosophers who embrace the multiverse hypothesis believe is the case. These universes, and their inhabitants, would fit the definition of supernatural, but would we regard belief in their existence to be a religious belief? If so, should the multiverse hypothesis be excluded from science? Most scientists would say no.

Second, according to one popular text in the philosophy of religion (Reason and Religious Belief, Peterson, et al.) a religion is a "set of beliefs, actions, and experiences, both personal and corporate, organized around the concept of an Ultimate Reality which inspires worship or total devotion."

Based on this definition, is science itself, or at least scientific naturalism, a religion? The naturalist holds that nature is the ultimate reality and certainly many scientists are totally devoted to it.

In his Myth of Religious Neutrality, philosopher Roy Clouser identifies the crucial belief characteristic of all religions. This is the belief that there is something, some entity, that does not depend upon anything else for it's existence and upon which everything else depends. This is another way of saying that there is something which possesses necessary being. For the Christian this is God, for the materialist it's matter or the laws of nature.

But if this is true then naturalism, materialism, humanism, indeed every form of atheism found among modern scientists, is, in fact, religious, and any attempt to banish religious assumptions and influence from science would be like cutting out a vital organ. It would deprive it of its meaning and possibly entail the dissolution of science altogether. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to practice a meaningful science while somehow leaving one's total devotion to whatever constitutes one's ultimate reality at the door of the lab.

Attempts to exclude religion from science are as futile as attempts to exclude ideology from politics. Religion can no more be isolated from science than it can from morality. Indeed, the demand to banish religion from science is, in reality, an attempt to banish one kind of religion, theism, while privileging materialism and shielding it from all competition.

RLC

Eternal Recurrence

I remember as a boy growing up in the post-WWII years that it just seemed unthinkable and impossible that the same hatreds that led to the Holocaust would ever rear their ugly head again. How wrong I was. Mark Steyn gives us a glimpse of the recrudescence of anti-semitism that's infecting much of Europe today:

He writes:

In Scandinavia, "Jews Flee Swedish Town In Wake Of Anti-Semitism":

Last year, 79 crimes against Jewish residents were reported to the Malm� police, roughly double the number reported in 2008. In addition, Jewish cemeteries and synagogues have been repeatedly defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti, and a chapel at another Jewish burial site in Malm� was firebombed last January during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

In the United Kingdom, "Record Number Of Anti-Semitic Attacks":

They included an incident in which a Jewish man driving an electric wheelchair was rammed by a car after leaving a synagogue. The driver shouted "Jew, Jew" at him, but he escaped with minor injuries.

In Yorkshire, strips of bacon were arranged in the shape of a star of David and stuck the fence of a home where a Jewish family lived with the word "Jewboy" written underneath.

A 12-year-old girl, the only Jew at her school, was attacked by a mob of up to 20 fellow pupils who pulled her hair and chanted: "death to Jews, kill all Jews."

And in Germany, just because you got rid of all the Jews, why deny yourself the pleasures of Jew-hating?

The leader of Germany's opposition Green party, Cem Oezdemir, who has Turkish roots himself, calls it a form of "anti-Semitism without Jews."

"These young Muslims are often people who don't know any Jews in person," Oezdemir said. "Their radical views stem from an over-identification with the Middle East conflict, from parents who are willing to employ all the well-known Jew-related cliches, and from schools that don't know how to tackle the problem in classes full of students with migrant backgrounds."

Of course, hatred of Jews is rife in the Muslim world, but in Europe? Why? It seems so irrational. It's as if there's something buried deep in human DNA that programs people to hate the Jews. Like a cat which can't resist attacking a dangling string, for reasons it surely doesn't understand, human beings often seem unable to resist their compulsion to hate Jews. Why is that?

It's not irrelevant, I think, that this new wave of anti-Jewish hatred seems to be occurring in the one part of the world that, more than any other, combines a well-educated public with a determinedly secular worldview. This is significant because it suggests that prejudice is not just a function of ignorance - even the educated have their hatreds. The problem is that secular man has no particular reason to stifle his animosities toward those who are different from himself. On a continent full of people who absorbed relativism with their infant formula there's no reason to think anti-semitism is actually wrong.

Only a Judeo-Christian society has the moral and theological resources to suppress the soul's darkest impulses, and although historically Christians and Jews too often failed to live up to their calling, it's nevertheless only a Judeo-Christian society in which any minority can expect to be accorded the same rights and respect everyone else has, because it's only Christians and Jews who are under a moral obligation to treat others justly.

RLC

Zinn Again

The other day we linked to two remembrances of the late historian Howard Zinn. One was a paen to the man's benevolent influence and the other was an acerbic dismissal of Zinn as essentially a fraud. Which you think he was will depend largely on your ideological point of view, but what cannot be gainsaid is that the man exerted great influence on several generations of American students. His People's History of the United States is the most widely used history text in American public schools and colleges, having sold over two million copies.

I wanted to bring Zinn up again because I've come across a column at National Review Online which explains in more detail why conservatives see his influence as pernicious and leftists see it as salutary. Roger Kimball argues at NRO that the People's History is filled with distortions and misstatements of fact that give a very misleading impression of the history of the United States. In Kimball's words, reading People's History is like offering to take someone on a tour of Versailles but stopping at a ramshackle shed on the outskirts and saying, "See? Pretty shabby, isn't it?"

Anyway, read Kimball's essay. It's important.

RLC

Whackos

The lefty blogosphere and its media arm at MSNBC were all aflutter this past week over the results of a Daily Kos poll of Republicans that finds, astonishingly, that many of them hold views that Democrats don't. This, some commenters are saying, is proof that Republicans are, by and large, crazy extremists.

Bruce Bartlett, for example, says that, "I can only conclude from this new poll of 2003 self-identified Republicans nationwide that between 20% and 50% of the party is either insane or mind-numbingly stupid."

Chris Matthews on MSNBC calls these Republicans "lunatics" and "whack jobs."

Politico's Ben Smith writes, "A new poll from Research 2000, sponsored by DailyKos more or less with the goal of making Republicans look extreme, does a pretty good job of that."

Well, maybe, but what is it, exactly, that so many of these slobbering, lunatic extremist Republicans are believing these days? Here are the poll's results:

At the risk of being called an extremist whack job myself I have to say that I don't find these numbers all that surprising.

Progressive pundits are astonished, for example, that so many Republicans think President Obama is a socialist, but why is that surprising? What more would, say, Bernie Sanders, a real live socialist, have on his agenda were he President that Mr. Obama does not? Besides, why is it goofy to think that Mr. Obama is something that a majority of Democrats regard favorably? According to a recent Gallup poll 53% of Democrats and 61% of liberals overall have a positive opinion of socialism, so why should Democrats think it somehow weird that Republicans think Mr. Obama does, too.

The pundits are shocked that Republicans would think Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president than Mr. Obama, but that seems obvious, don't you think? Palin had administrative experience as a mayor and a governor of a state. Barack Obama brought no such experience to the White House. Unlike Mrs. Palin, he never ran a business, never met a payroll, never had to manage an administration of any sort. He never did anything that qualified him for the role he now finds himself in. He was a community organizer, a college instructor, an undistinguished state senator for a few years, and a U.S. Senator for less than two years before he began campaigning for president. What exactly was it about Mr. Obama that would lead anyone to think that he was more qualified to run the country than Governor Palin?

The pundits are dismayed that so many Republicans are unsure about where the President was born, but how can an intelligent person be anything but non-committal on the matter? No dispositive documentation of Mr. Obama's birth has been brought forward, and he refuses to allow the state of Hawaii to release the long form birth certificate that would set concerns about this matter to rest. This, despite the fact that similar questions about John McCain's status were submitted to court adjudication, and he was required to produce the necessary forms. Until Mr. Obama does likewise the most anyone can say is that they just don't know where he was born.

In any event, a couple of years back polls were showing that 61% of Democrats believed that George Bush knew ahead of time about the attacks on the World Trade Towers and nevertheless let them happen. Barack Obama even appointed a man who believed this, Van Jones, to a position in his administration. Surely, that's wackier than Republican agnosticism on Mr. Obama's place of birth.

The pundits are incredulous that so many Republicans would think that ACORN stole the last election, and, of course, that does seem a little paranoid. It also shows a failure on the part of the surveyed Republicans to draw the fine distinction between actually stealing the election and merely trying to steal the election.

The pundits are also outraged that so many Republicans think Mr. Obama wants the terrorists to win, and here I sympathize with the pundits, but, on the other hand, the numbers may reflect exasperation with the fact that Mr. Obama throughout his younger years hobnobbed socially with terrorists and seems of late to have made some very dubious decisions concerning how captured terrorists should be handled. This, of course, does not warrant saying he wants terrorists "to win," but those who say they believe he does may simply be venting their frustration with what many believe to be the President's poor judgment on the terrorism issue.

Finally, the pundits are angry that so many Republicans want President Obama to be impeached. I wonder if those who find this absurd were similarly angered by the incessant calls for the impeachment of President Bush, even from the highest echelons of the Democratic party. I doubt it.

In any event, impeachment is entirely inappropriate unless the President has been found to be engaging in illegal activity. Mr. Obama may be in over his head, but that's not yet illegal.

RLC

Even-Handedness

I suppose anyone can mispronounce a word, and I only allude to the President's gaffe at a speech at the Prayer Breakfast not to nit-pick over his lack of familiarity with the word but to ask a serious question: How much sneering and derision would George Bush or Sarah Palin have had to endure had either of them pronounced "corpsman" as "corpseman," not once but three times, and how much do you suppose Mr. Obama will have to endure? Probably about the same amount as he was forced to absorb for his claim to have campaigned in "57 states with one left to go."

What's that you say? You never heard him say that? Well, you've just made my point:

I wonder if the news and entertainment media don't sometimes think that it's just a teensy bit unfair of them to laugh uproariously at Palin and Bush as though they're complete dolts while giving Obama a pass on the not infrequent occasions when he makes his educational attainments seem somewhat overrated.

RLC

Where Do We Stop, Sarah?

I love Sarah Palin, but I'm afraid she's may be starting to sound like a politically correct speech nazi. I understand why she would not appreciate the way people use the word "retard" or "retarded," and I agree with her that "crude and demeaning name calling at the expense of others is disrespectful." I would add that it's also often cruel, but once we start calling for public figures to be fired for using such language where does it end?

Will the use, or misuse, of words like "moron," "idiot," and "imbecile" and all their permutations be the next reason to cashier someone? What about words like "crazy," "insane," and "nuts" which also describe mental disabilities? How about "lunacy" and "lunatic" and probably dozens of others we could think of?

It reminds me a little of the Newspeak in Orwell's 1984 where the language was pared down to the absolute minimum number of words needed to communicate. Orwell said of Newspeak that it was "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year." One of his characters, a man named Syme, says admiringly of the shrinking volume of the Newspeak dictionary: "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."

Despite her personal hurt when she hears people use the word "retarded" as an insult she really needs to ask herself where the logic of her position will take us should we start heaping social opprobrium on anyone who uses words we don't like in ways we think are rude. Better, says I, to simply point out the person's shameful lack of character and class and let it go at that.

For the record, I do think it was tasteless and vulgar of Rahm Emanuel to use the word in the context he did, just as I think it's usually tasteless and vulgar to use the "n-word" and the "f-word." Even more, it's often, depending on the context, moronic.

RLC

Dawkins' Non-Answer

My friend Mike comments that he recently read a quote by physicist Stephen Barr in response to Darwinians like Richard Dawkins who think that because Darwinism can explain (they believe) how things like an eye evolved that they have thus refuted the argument from design. You may recall that William Paley back in 1802 suggested that the existence of a complex device like a watch implies an intelligent watchmaker and that, by analogy, a complex device like an eye also implies an intelligent artisan.

Not so fast, says Dawkins. The processes of chemistry and physics and natural selection and genetic mutation can cooperate to produce an eye. These are, in Dawkins' famous phrase, a blind watchmaker.

Barr observes:

What Dawkins does not seem to appreciate is that his blind watchmaker is something even more remarkable than Paley's watches. Paley finds a "watch" and asks how such a thing could have come to be there by chance. Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley's point. But that is absurd. How can a factory that makes watches be less in need of explanation than the watches themselves?

Quite so. Dawkins thinks he refutes Paley by pointing out that there's a fully automated watch factory (the world) that churns out watches so we need not seek an intelligent explanation for the watch. As Barr notes, however, it's at least as difficult to imagine how such a factory, capable of producing information-rich artifacts, could have sprung up as it is to imagine how a watch could have arisen by chance.

Philosopher Angus Menuge uses a different metaphor to make the same point. He observes that one has hardly explained the complex pattern woven into a carpet by pointing to the loom upon which the carpet was fashioned.

What critics of the design argument seem to ignore is that the fact, if it is a fact, that the universe is the sort of place that could produce complex life and biological information is a state of affairs which itself cries out for explanation. When a naturalist like Dawkins, however, is asked how such a thing can be he offers little more than a shrug of his shoulders.

RLC

Saving the World, Saving a Presidency

Daniel Pipes argues that there's one way President Obama can rescue a presidency that looks everyday more like the swirling funnel of water about to descend down the drain. The move Pipes suggests would probably unite the country, unite Congress, and cause people to forget the bumbling, fumbling first year of Mr. Obama's term. It would also make the world a much safer place and forestall unimaginable future horrors.

Pipes advises that the President order the military to take out Iran's nuclear weapons facilities.

Will he do it? It's an order that he would seem psychologically incapable of issuing, an order that would gain him the enmity of his most ardent supporters on the left, just as LBJ gained their enmity by going into Vietnam. Yet he just might choose to do it because the alternatives of our failing to act are so unthinkable.

Read Pipes' essay to see why he thinks Obama should give the order.

RLC

Health Care Snowbirds

The Democrats are still determined to get health care reform passed by hook or by crook, and it's not hard to understand why. If they fail to get legislation on this they're not likely to get legislation on anything else - at least nothing else that's significant. If that happens they'll go down in history as perhaps the most ineffectual custodians of power in the history of the nation, having control of the executive and, until last month, a filibuster proof majority in the Senate and a huge majority in the House and unable to do anything with it.

The problem for the Democrats is that what they want to do is make our health care system more like that of the Canadians, but those Canadians who can are fleeing their system in order to use ours, as this article at National Review Online illustrates:

The decision by Canadian provincial premier Danny Williams to travel to the United States for heart surgery has provided conservative critics of Obamacare with a concrete illustration of a long-held talking point: as socialized medicine stagnates, America's dynamic free-market health-care system is the envy of the world.

And some critics north of the border agree.

"Think about the absurdity of Canadians spending their income on medical treatment outside the country because it's not provided here at home," Brett Skinner, president of the free-market Fraser Institute, told the Vancouver Sun.

Skinner said that Williams, who opted for surgery in the U.S. on the recommendation of his Canadian doctors, was among an estimated 41,000 Canadians who sought health care in the states in 2009 due to long waiting lists and poor access at home.

If the Canadians, who theoretically have access to free care, would rather incur the expense of using our system why on earth are we trying to make our system more like theirs? Are any Democrats out there asking that question?

RLC

Religious Stockholm Syndrome

There's a fascinating interview with atheist writer Christopher Hitchens at The Portland Monthly. Hitchens, you will recall is the author of the book God is Not Great, an antiChristian polemic noteworthy more for its hostility toward religious faith than for its logical coherence.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the interview are the responses to Hitchens' attacks on Christian belief by the interviewer, a Unitarian minister named Marilyn Sewell. She seems to concede throughout that, well, Hitchens is right, but she's still going to be religious in some vague sense anyway, and wouldn't it just be nice if Christopher were, too.

There are several illuminating exchanges in the interview (illuminating in the sense that they show how utterly vacuous liberal Christianity can be), but this is perhaps my favorite:

Sewell: The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I'm a liberal Christian, and I don't take the stories from the scripture literally. I don't believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make any distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?

Hitchens: I would say that if you don't believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you're really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

Hitchens is exactly right, of course. As the interview unfolds Sewell practically trips over herself in her attempts to convince Hitchens that she's not like those benighted Christians who take the Bible seriously and who are the object of his scorn. Like someone suffering from a kind of religious Stockholm Syndrome she sounds almost desperate to gain his approval. She insists that she has no real religious beliefs except that the Bible has some good stories and hopes that she will thus find favor in Mr. Hitchens' eyes.

It'd be comical were it not so sad. One wishes that The Portland Monthly had sought the services of an interviewer more willing and able to challenge Hitchens (see here, for example) and less inclined to be obsequious.

RLC

More on Stem Cell Research

A few weeks ago we posted a report on some amazing breakthroughs in stem cell research. Reader Kyle responds to that post with a link to an article put out by the American Association for the Advancement of Science that elaborates on this theme and catalogs some of the diseases that stem cells have the potential to meliorate or cure:

Here are some of them:

Type 1 Diabetes in Children. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease characterized by destruction of insulin producing cells in the pancreas. Current efforts to treat these patients with human islet transplantation in an effort to restore insulin secretory function are limited severely by the small numbers of donated pancreases available each year combined with the toxicity of immunosuppressive drug treatments required to prevent graft rejection. Pluripotent stem cells, instructed to differentiate into a particular pancreatic cell called a beta cell, could overcome the shortage of therapeutically effective material to transplant. They also afford the opportunity to engineer such cells to effectively resist immune attack as well as graft rejection.

Nervous System Diseases. Many nervous system diseases result from loss of nerve cells. Mature nerve cells cannot divide to replace those that are lost. Thus, without a "new" source of functioning nerve tissue, no therapeutic possibilities exist. In Parkinson's disease, nerve cells that make the chemical dopamine die. In Alzheimer's disease, cells that are responsible for the production of certain neurotransmitters die. In amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the motor nerve cells that activate muscles die. In spinal cord injury, brain trauma, and even stroke, many different types of cells are lost or die. In multiple sclerosis, glia, the cells that protect nerve fibers are lost. Perhaps the only hope for treating such individuals comes from the potential to create new nerve tissue restoring function from pluripotent stem cells.

Cancer. At the present time, bone marrow stem cells, representing a more committed stem cell, are used to rescue patients following high dose chemotherapy. Unfortunately, these recovered cells are limited in their capacity to restore immune function completely in this setting. It is hoped that injections of properly-differentiated stem cells would return the complete repertoire of immune response to patients undergoing bone marrow transplantation. Complete and functional restoration will be required if, for example, immune/vaccine anticancer therapy is to work. More importantly, success would permit use of very toxic (and effective) chemotherapeutic regimens that could not currently be utilized for lack of an ability to restore marrow and immune function.

Kyle adds that:

Much other miraculous potential is being researched as well, not to mention applications that may yet be discovered. The article also mentions that stem cells have the potential to treat almost any immunodeficiency disease. This includes AIDS and many other diseases, where the infected could experience "restoration of immune function and effective normalization of life span and quality of life."

I'm not one to gush about the future, but the current generation of twenty-somethings could well be looking at therapies that will within their lifetimes render many of today's most dread diseases as treatable as antibiotics rendered infection.

RLC

Haiti Update

My friend Andy is a missionary in Haiti and has been sending us regular updates since the earthquake. Here's his latest:

Haiti is a strange place. Stories (a.k.a. lies) are flying around this island. One story says that the Americans set off a bomb underneath Haiti. They want to take it over and occupy it because they saw on a computer somewhere that USA doesn't exist in 2012. That's funny.

Other stories aren't so funny. The news I sent about a nearby hospital falling over? A lie. Sorry I forwarded it without confirmation.

I heard a lady on the radio who lost her daughter when people took off running because a tidal wave was coming. There was no wave, but she still hadn't found her daughter. Not so funny.

Yesterday I visited our former teacher who lost his son in the quake. The details are so sad. The boy never came home from school that day. He was attending afternoon classes, so he should have been in the school when the quake hit. The school collapsed, and the father (our former teacher) went there two days later. He saw only parts of people sticking out of the rubble. The building was flat. We can only believe his son's body is in there.

Many, many buildings have yet to be 'cleaned up'. Who knows how long it will take. No closure for those poor parents. The boy's mother still holds a hope that somehow, someday.... I left some cash with them, and hope to send some more before long. Your gifts for this situation are blessing lots of people in moments of real need.

Then today we got word that Wilphar and Emmanuel's father died in Port yesterday. He had been sick before the quake. Since the quake he was living in the street. We sent him some money last week. He was being moved around in a wheel barrow since the quake hit. His other children called to inform Wilphar that they needed to bury him. After some 24 years of fatherly neglect, the other children reminded Wilphar that he's the oldest child, and the funeral weight is on him. We'll be able to help them because of gifts from folks like you.

More to come....

If you'd like to help Andy meet the needs of these suffering people you can send a check to Andy Stump c/o Christ Lutheran Church, 126 West Main St., Dallastown, PA 17313. Our church sponsors his work.

RLC