If trying to figure out what's going on with the current fighting between Russia and Georgia has you puzzled Strategy Page has a succinct primer on the situation there. Read it, and in four minutes you'll know more about the conflict than 99 out of 100 of your fellow Americans.
UPDATE: This letter from the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, on the genesis of the conflict there is a must read. Read it and you'll know more than 499 out of 500 Americans.
RLC
I'm occasionally asked if maybe Viewpoint isn't a little too hard on liberalism. Many good people are liberals, I'm reminded, and maybe I'm being needlessly offensive in hammering away at them.
Yes, I reply, this is so, but we need to see clearly what is at stake. To help us, let's make a distinction similar to the Christian distinction between sin and sinner (no offense intended by the analogy). Just as we should abhor sin but love sinners, we need to abhor liberalism even as we try to love those who embrace it - even when those who embrace it are exceedingly difficult to love.
An article in the Washington Times a week ago offers an example or two to illustrate the point I wish to make:In one case, a Georgia counselor has filed a federal suit against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), saying that she was fired after she found someone else to counsel a lesbian about her sexual relationship. In the other, a Los Angeles police officer is suing the department, saying it has denied him promotions and pay raises because of a sermon that he gave at a church that cited a biblical verse on homosexuality.
In the first case, the counselor, a woman named Marcia Walden who worked for an agency contracted by the CDC to counsel its employees, was asked to take on a client who needed help with her same sex relationship. Ms Walden, who had counseled lesbians and homosexuals in the past but not about their relationships, felt that her beliefs about homosexuality precluded her from being able to give the client the care she wanted and so she obtained for her another counselor from the same firm who was better suited to address the client's problems.
Ms Walden apparently followed all the proper protocols and the client said she received exemplary advice from the substitute.
Nevertheless, according to the complaint, Ms Walden was subsequently accused of homophobia and extensively questioned about her Christian faith by her supervisor. Within three days of her referring Ms. Doe [the lesbian], Ms. Walden was suspended without pay by Computer Science Corp. and fired outright three weeks later.
In the second case a LA police officer who works as a minister when off-duty was presiding at the funeral of a fellow officer he had once supervised:
Sgt. Holyfield quoted a passage from Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians that says "the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God" before going on to list such unrighteous people: adulterers, homosexuals, thieves, drunkards and others.
Sgt. Holyfield was off-duty and in clerical garb for the funeral, which was not LAPD-sponsored, and was giving the sermon at a private chapel at the invitation of his colleague's family.
But several senior police officers were in attendance, leading to complaints that the sergeant had made comments disparaging homosexuals and adulterers.
Consequently Sgt. Holyfield has been demoted and passed over for promotion numerous times.
It's hard to believe that this is happening in the United States, but it is, and these certainly aren't the only instances. There's a cancer of persecution and oppression metastasizing throughout our society and it will continue to grow until enough people stand against it.
But what do these travesties have to do with liberalism? Let's ask ourselves a question. How many of the people who are responsible for the firing of the counselor and the demotion of the police officer do you suppose are conservative Republicans? I don't have the facts so I admit I'm speculating, but I'm willing to bet that the number is zero.
Liberals are, in the name of tolerance and diversity, often the most intolerant and conformist people in our society. Ever since the progressives co-opted the word liberal at the end of the 19th century, liberalism has featured a prominent fascist strain (Don't take my word for it. Read Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism). Like all fascisms it promises a bright utopian future, but in fact, under liberalism, our future is likely to be similar to that of farmer Jones' livestock in Animal Farm. You recall that in the name of freedom the animals revolted against farmer Jones and set up their own government, but it wasn't long before the animal government turned to tyranny and all their freedoms were lost. George Orwell's vision of the future is precisely what lies in store for us if ever liberalism gains political dominance: a (government) boot stamping on a (Christian) human face, forever. Just as it has stamped on Ms Walden and Sgt. Holyfield.
That's just one reason why Viewpoint finds liberalism so horrid, and why we feel it a moral duty to set our friends and family wise to its false promises and enchantments.
RLC
A couple of days ago I mentioned that Senator Obama seems to hold to a postmodern view of truth, i.e. there are no fixed meanings in the text of his words. They mean whatever the listener wants them to mean, whatever has "purchase" with the listener. They're not to be taken literally - they're too broad and contradictory for that. Rather their vagueness and ambiguities invite us, like poetry, to bask in their resonances and read into them our own hopes and desires. For the postmodern, style trumps content and rhetorical power trumps logic. People in a postmodern world tend to think with their hearts rather than their minds, and come to know by intuition and emotion rather than through reason. This is perhaps why so many find Obama such an appealling candidate even though they can't point to a single accomplishment that would qualify him to be the leader of the United States.
Jonah Goldberg amplifies the idea of Barack as a postmodern in an essay at USAToday. Here's an excerpt:
Asked to define sin, Barack Obama replied that sin is "being out of alignment with my values." Statements such as this have caused many people to wonder whether Obama has a God complex or is hopelessly arrogant. For the record, sin isn't being out of alignment with your own values (if it were, Hannibal Lecter wouldn't be a sinner because his values hold that it's OK to eat people) nor is it being out of alignment with Obama's - unless he really is our Savior.
I encourage you to read the whole thing, but with the caveat that the column tends to make postmodernism seem arrantly bad. It's not, but lots of it is, and the idea that truth is whatever harmonizes with your own experience is particularly corrosive. Unfortunately, that's the aspect of postmodernism most frequently on display in Senator Obama's speeches and pronouncements.
RLC
Recall a couple of weeks ago a lunatic walked into a Unitarian church and started shooting people. The media made sure we all understood that the man hated liberals and, we were to conclude, was a right-wing nut case. No story on the tragic affair left unimplied that the man was driven by dangerous antipathies fairly typical of the right.
Okay, but now it turns out that Bruce Ivins, the biochemist who sent the anthrax letters to a number of people in Washington, killing several, was a committed Democrat. Have you heard any mention of this from the MSM? I haven't.
Ace of Spades, who has a very thorough report on the entire case, writes about this development:
So if you're wondering why Ivins' political affiliation has not been reported -- as many of you were certain would be the main storyline here, assuming he had turned out to be Republican -- there's your answer. Surely the MSM would be calling him a Republican in every report, but, alas, it turns out he's a Democrat, and hence no reportage on this aspect of his political beliefs whatsoever.
I wouldn't read too much into his political affiliation; his main party was of course "Crazy."
But yeah, I do know that if he had been a Republican, the MSM and the left would be going beserkers and blaming this all on us.
And I find it a bit unsettling that members of the "Reality Based Community" immediately begin offering conspiracy theories based on little more than the fact that Ivins was a Democrat, so of course he can't be guilty.
Brad Blog's argument is slightly more nuanced than that -- he asks why a liberal (presumably, based on his letters to the editor) Democrat would send anthrax to liberals Daschle, Leahy, and Tom Brokaw ( a curious sudden admission from the left that a big MSM figure is in fact "liberal").
But the writer seems trapped in the thinking that political orientation determines bad behavior (of course Ivins must have been a Republican; only mean Republicans do stuff like this!), rather than accepting that insanity and not political belief is the main motivating impulse in this sort of crime.
So why did Ivins send the letters to liberals, mostly? Why not? For one thing, he was bonkers. For another thing, he wanted a lot of publicity, and, at the time, Daschle and Leahy were in the Senatorial majority. Republicans, at that time, were in the minority....
And what conservative media figures were prominent enough to warrant an anthrax letter? George Will? Jonah Goldberg? Pshah. If you want to make a splash, you send letters to TV news anchors, and all of them, of course, were/are liberals.
For another thing, as the netroots proves day-in, day-out, the netroots hate what it considers heretics and apostates in the Church of Liberalism nearly as passionately (sometimes moreso) than actual Evil Republican Malefactors.
The left's determination to find a Republican villain behind every single crime or misfortune that befalls the world is borderline insane -- nearly Bruce Ivins level paranoid, actually.
Ace is right. The church shooter was nuts and so was Ivins, but it is annoying that the media thinks that one nut's ideology is relevant and the other's isn't.
It's sort of like the elite media's refusal to say anything about John Edwards' "love" affair until he admitted it, and his apparent illegitimate child. Does anyone really think that if a Republican of Edwards' prominence had engaged in such sordid behavior while his wife suffered from incurable cancer that the media would have sat on the story?
RLC
In the course of commenting on an article by Peter Wood on the obstacles confronting those who would like to see an increase in the number of American born and educated scientists, Bruce Chapman mentions an obstacle that Wood omits. Chapman thinks that the current hostility to religion among many educators, especially scientists, acts as a deterrent to many Christian young people who would otherwise be inclined to go into a scientific field. In other words, the climate is such that Christian students don't feel comfortable in the presence of so many militant materialist professors and fellow students.
Chapman admits he has nothing but anecdotal data to support his theory, but there's nothing implausible about it. Students who peruse the internet and view the rantings of people like Richard Dawkins, P.Z. Myers and their epigones are certainly not going to be eager to study science in college if they think they might be singled out and humiliated by such people. Nor would they be inclined to make science a profession if they thought that they would have to spend much of their career concealing their ideas from their colleagues and facing tenure denial if they speak out. It surely must seem much easier to a sizeable minority of bright Christian young people to choose some other line of work.
If Chapman is right then the Torquemadas among today's university professoriat are doing the nation a profound disservice in more ways than just their stifling of ideas.
RLC
My friend Byron passes along a list compiled by Neil Bowers of the 100 best novels ever written. This list is different from others in that it combines a number of other such rankings and orders the books by how many other lists they appear on and how high they're rated. Bowers' list can be found here, and his rationale and methodology are explained here.
Surprisingly, only one book was found on every list so Bowers has it ranked number one. How many of the 100 have you read?
Bethanne Patrick at Publisher's Weekly says she's read all but one of the titles on Bowers' list. That's quite an achievement, but I have to say that I was surprised at the title she hadn't yet read. I think you'll be, too.
RLC
Darwin's theory of natural selection (NS) continues to get dissed by scientists disillusioned by the failure of NS to account for the enormous diversity of living things. The latest outrage is occuring in England at a conference of over 300 biologists, chemists, philosophers and other scholars who are trying to come up with an alternative or a supplement to NS.
The story quickly offers its obligatory dismissal of any nonsense about intelligent agency behind life, but then buried in the text are passages like these:
Prof Mark Bedau of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, will argue at this week's meeting - the 11th International Conference on Artificial Life - that .... although natural selection is necessary for life, something is missing in our understanding of how evolution produced complex creatures. By this, he doesn't mean intelligent design - the claim that only God can light the blue touch paper of life - but some other concept. "I don't know what it is, nor do I think anyone else does, contrary to the claims you hear asserted," he says. But he believes ALife (artificial life) will be crucial in discovering the missing mechanism.
Dr Richard Watson of Southampton University, the co-organiser of the conference, echoes his concerns. "Although Darwin gave us an essential component for the evolution of complexity, it is not a sufficient theory," he says. "There are other essential components that are missing."
"Evolution on its own doesn't look like it can make the creative leaps that have occurred in the history of life," says Dr Seth Bullock, another of the conference's organisers. "It's a great process for refining, tinkering, and so on. But self-organisation is the process that is needed alongside natural selection before you get the kind of creative power that we see around us.
The more we learn about the complexity of life the more inadequate purely material processes seem to be in explaining it. Living things certainly appear to be engineered, and it is, I think, just a matter of time before scientists can no longer evade the inference.
RLC
I was watching a cable talk show the other night and one of the interlocutors was struggling mightily to make the point that McCain's ad briefly showing Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears was racist because it showed a black man (Barack Obama) right after two blonde white women and we all know what message that sends, don't we? Timothy Noah at The New Republic in all seriousness opined that it's racist to call Obama "skinny" because that calls attention to his appearance, and there can only be nefarious motives for wanting to do that.
There are apparently a lot of people who think that any criticism of Obama is rooted in racism, even if the sin is buried deep in the subconscious. There are some who think that all whites are racist just by virtue of being white, and thus if a white criticizes Obama it's confirmation of the suspicion. To assist our readers in confronting their own inherent racism, no matter how strenuously they deny its existence, we run the following partial list of reliable indicators of this awful and insidious affliction. We thank Peter Kirsanow at National Review Online for coming up with it and refer you to the full list at that site:
To this list might be added: If you use words like "black hole" or "niggardly" then you're definitely a racist. Re-education and sensitivity training will begin next week. If you don't show up it's because you're racist.
RLC
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi "explains" why she will not allow a vote in the House of Representatives on whether or not oil companies should be permitted to drill offshore for oil:
If the Speaker had a good reason for preventing a vote why doesn't she state it instead of insulting the nation the literal nonsense she stammers to Stephanopolous? It certainly appears as if Speaker Pelosi knows she doesn't have the votes to defeat the bill, and so, rather than let the representatives of the people decide what we should do about oil supply, she adjourns the House and goes on vacation. Is this how democracy works in America when liberals are in charge.
Ms Pelosi was adamant two years ago that Congress under her leadership would be bipartisan and open to debate, yet when an issue arises for which there is much bipartisan support but to which she is strongly opposed, she refuses to allow it to come to a vote.
She's also a champion of the "Fairness Doctrine" which would require radio stations to balance conservative points of view with liberal counterweights. Well, where's the fairness in refusing to allow the people to decide whether we should drill for the oil we have within our territorial waters?
RLC
There's a longish but interesting essay at Bookworm on what it's like to be a conservative in an overwhelmingly liberal community. Here's a sample of what the blogger, a mother and a housewife, says:
Given that liberals are in the catbird seat, and given their much-vaunted tolerance, one might think that they'd be kind to, indeed solicitous of, the few Republicans in the midst. Sadly, however, that's not the case. As regular readers know, I've chosen to keep my political life separate from the day-to-day aspects of my life. I simply can't (and don't want to) run the risk of tainting my carpools, my neighborhood barbecues, my kids' comfort level at school, the camaraderie of the sports teams with which we're involved, etc., by exposing myself to the obloquy that is routinely heaped on conservatives here - and this is a hostility that increases as elections draw near, of course.
During the 2004 elections, people who were unaware of my political inclinations announced in front of me that "Bush is the worst President ever," "Republicans are stupid," "Republicans are evil," "Bush is stupid," "Republicans are corrupt," "Republicans are fascists" and "Bush should be impeached." Children ran up to me on the sidewalk chanting "Bush is evil, Bush is evil" - so you know what their parents were saying at the dinner table. In this election cycle, one of my children announced after school that she was voting for Barack Obama "since every one is because he's black." I quickly scotched that line of reasoning.
I know I should be speaking out when I hear statements such as these, but the sad fact is that I like these people. Barring their monomaniacal animosity towards Bush and the Republicans, they're otherwise very nice: they're hard workers, loving parents, good neighbors and helpful and reliable friends. Being the social creature that I am, I don't want with one word ("Republican") to turn these friendships upside down and inside out. (I'm not the only one with this problem.) I don't want to be on the receiving end of some hideous Jekyll to Hyde transformation, so I just keep my mouth shut.
Those people I know who have spoken aloud their new conservative political views have been horrified by the animosity turned against them by formerly friendly neighbors and colleagues. My in-laws who are, like me, 9/11 neocons (down in Los Angeles) have stared open-mouthed at colleagues who use staff meetings to revile Bush and the Republicans - all to the cheers and huzzahs of the other staff members. (Indeed, what they describe sounds remarkably like Orwell's Two Minutes Hate.) On the occasions when they've suggested that maybe, just maybe, Bush isn't the Antichrist, they've found themselves shunned by these same colleagues.
This is all anecdotal, of course, but there is, as anyone who watches, say, MSNBC, can attest, an astonishing transformation that comes over some otherwise pleasant, rational people as soon as the subject turns to George Bush. There seems to be a venomous hatred roiling just below the surface of their psyches that transmogrifies some of these folks into thoroughly unpleasant commentators and companions. Whatever the cause, and we've speculated on some of the possibilities here over the years, it would be funny to behold were it not so pathetic.
Anyway, read the essay at the link.
RLC
I don't think there's much point in getting too excited about polls this early in the presidential campaign, but the most recent Rasmussen poll has some interesting results:
The Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows the race for the White House is tied with Barack Obama and John McCain each attracting 44% of the vote. However, when "leaners" are included, it's McCain 47% and Obama 46%.
This is the first time McCain has enjoyed even a statistically insignificant advantage of any sort since Obama clinched the Democratic nomination on June 3. A week ago today, Obama had a three-percentage point lead and the candidates were even among unaffiliated voters. Today, McCain leads 52% to 37% among unaffiliateds.
The huge swing of unaffiliated voters is especially noteworthy. Of course, this could all change tomorrow, but as of now it looks like the media infatuation with Obama is not helping him as much as one might have thought.
RLC
In yet another volte face, Senator Obama has pretty much reversed himself on off-shore drilling:
The change is dramatic because Obama often pointed to his opposition to drilling as a key difference between himself and presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain.
"I will keep the moratorium in place and prevent oil companies from drilling off Florida's coasts," Obama said in Florida in June.
Obama also said, in a separate statement issued by his campaign, that he supported the bipartisan energy plan offered by 10 senators Friday.
"Like all compromises, it also includes steps that I haven't always supported," he said. "I remain skeptical that new offshore drilling will bring down gas prices in the short-term or significantly reduce our oil dependence in the long-term, though I do welcome the establishment of a process that will allow us to make future drilling decisions based on science and fact."
Obama is racing headlong to minimize the substantive differences between himself and McCain. He apparently doesn't want McCain to be able to point to any reason why anyone should vote for him rather than Obama. If the public perceives there is no difference between the two then they'll be much more likely to vote for the youthful, charismatic Obama. It's a clever strategy, but if this is what he's doing it makes him look like a first class political opportunist with no guiding principles except the imperative of getting elected.
Read the last two paragraphs of this post from July 27th.
RLC
One man perhaps more than any other made it impossible in the second half of the 20th century to defend Soviet communism. That man was Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Douglas Burch at Time magazine writes:
Solzhenitsyn's unflinching accounts of torment and survival in the Soviet Union's slave labor camps riveted his countrymen, whose secret history he exposed. They earned him 20 years of bitter exile, but international renown.
And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person's courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.
Beginning with the 1962 short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn devoted himself to describing what he called the human "meat grinder" that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.
His Gulag Archipelago trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of the greatest heroes of the last century. His books are a must read for anyone who wishes to catch a glimpse of the hell to which atheistic totalitarianism leads. He is dead at the age of 89.
RLC
Quick: What's the most dangerous fuel to use to generate power? Coal, oil, nuclear?
How many people have died from accidents in American nuclear power plants? World nuclear power plants?
How many deaths occur in coal mining accidents each year in the U.S.? In China?
An article at FrontPage Mag provides some interesting perspective on these questions and others. For example, did you know that:
A coal-fired plant releases 100 times more radioactive material than an equivalent nuclear reactor-and not into a self-contained storage site but directly into the atmosphere. By generating electricity whose production otherwise would have required the use of fossil fuels, the 104 nuclear plants now operating in the U.S. prevent the release of approximately 700 million additional tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year; that is the equivalent of removing 96 percent of all passenger cars from U.S. roads.
If Three Mile Island was a disaster, it was largely in terms of public relations: the meltdown had resulted in no injuries and precisely zero deaths - indeed, there was no sign of harm to any living thing in the plant's vicinity. The worst that occurred was that the two million residents in the surrounding were exposed to approximately one-sixth the amount of radiation that they would have absorbed from a single chest X-ray at their local hospital. Thanks to the plant's built-in safety features, the public was never in danger.
The worst nuclear power plant accident in history, the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine, resulted directly in the deaths of more than 30 people, and it exposed millions more to radiation that, by the highest estimates, could eventually result in several thousand cancer-related deaths. Moreover, it rendered some 20 square miles of land uninhabitable for an extended period.
But the Soviet reactor in Chernobyl was an outmoded relic: it bore no resemblance to the reactors that are used in the West. Most notably, it lacked containment shells to prevent radioactive materials from escaping in the event of an accident. The far superior Western reactors were equipped not only with such safeguards, but also with numerous built-in sensors designed to shut down the plant immediately in the event of trouble.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, American nuclear plants have long been safer workplaces than most other manufacturing plants. The nuclear industry's safety record is far better than that of the competing coal industry, for instance. Each year in the United States, an average of 33 coal miners die in the line of work, yet there have been no calls to end coal mining on grounds that it is too dangerous.
In other nations, the numbers are much worse. During Chernobyl's heyday, thousands of men were killed in coal mining accidents in the Soviet Union. In China, some 5,000 coal miners perish in accidents each and every year. Since the dawn of the nuclear era, the world's 400-plus civilian nuclear plants have logged well over 10,000 aggregate years of activity, and Chernobyl remains the only accident ever to have harmed members of the public. In addition, the U.S. Navy has been powering ships with nuclear reactors for more than 50 years and has experienced no nuclear accidents.
Nor is there any discernible health risk associated with living close to a nuclear plant. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a person would have to live next door to such a plant for more than 2,000 years to get the amount of radiation exposure he gets from a single X-ray.
Coal today is used to produce about 49 percent of America's electricity, while natural gas and petroleum account for another 20 percent and 2 percent, respectively. A coal-fired plant releases 100 times more radioactive material than an equivalent nuclear reactor-and not into a self-contained storage site but directly into the atmosphere. By generating electricity whose production otherwise would have required the use of fossil fuels, the 104 nuclear plants now operating in the U.S. prevent the release of approximately 700 million additional tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year; that is the equivalent of removing 96 percent of all passenger cars from U.S. roads.
If not for nuclear energy, America's dependence on foreign oil would be even greater than it currently is. During the 1973 oil embargo, nuclear technology produced only 5 percent of the U.S. electric supply, while oil accounted for 17 percent. Today those figures are 19 percent and 2 percent, respectively. If more nuclear plants are constructed, they could replace coal and natural gas as America's major source of electricity production.
So why aren't we building more nuclear power plants? For the same reason we're not drilling for more oil and building new refineries. The Democrats refuse to allow them. They need to be told politely to get out of the way.
RLC
Another young Muslim woman is murdered by a family member, in this case her father, and the cable news outlets which can't give enough coverage to the murders of Caucasian women slain by relatives, can't be bothered to even report the news. John Avlon at the New York Post wonders why. He concludes that the media doesn't want to emphasize a story that discredits the multicultural narrative that the left has promoted for the last two decades.
Perhaps this is so, but I'm beginning to wonder. Could there not be a tincture of lower expectations among journalists when it comes to certain demographic groups? Might there be a feeling of well, that's just how these people are and one can't expect much better from them? Civilization is an achievement of white Europeans, and those others who have adopted their assumptions. Perhaps, buried in the psyches of a lot of journalists, is the assumption that a desert plant transplanted to a rain forest is still a desert plant and nothing will change it much.
Surely if a Caucasian American father murdered his daughter because she wanted out of an unhappy arranged marriage the media would be all over the story, especially if the father were a putative Christian. Perhaps the reason is that this is unusual behavior for white Christians, but when blacks in our cities kill each other by the tens of thousands every year, or Muslims kill their own daughters the media treat it as little more than a sad statistic. It's as if they think it would be somehow racist to call attention to the dysfunctionalities in these communities, and appearing racist is the very last thing a good liberal wants.
Yet isn't the real racism the refusal to hold people to the same standard as everyone else? Isn't the real racism the belief that some groups just can't be expected to behave in a civilized, moral manner? Isn't the real racism what President Bush has called the "soft bigotry of diminished expectations"?
Perhaps we do others no favors with all our talk of uneven playing fields, historical disadvantages, tolerating diversity and the equal value of all cultures. Perhaps the best thing we can do for other ethnic and racial groups in our society is to tell them that the standard white Americans are expected to meet is the standard that they are expected to meet, and that there are no excuses for failing to meet it.
As a society we need to adopt the same slogan that athletes live by: Excuses are for losers.
RLC
Strategy Page has an interesting piece on how the Taliban are trying to adjust to offset the deadly capabilities of the NATO and Afghan forces along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border:
The Taliban have developed more effective tactics this year. After a disastrous outing last year, the Taliban were under a lot of pressure to reduce their casualties this year, and they have. The Afghans have always been adaptable, especially when it is a matter of life and death, and there have been many small changes in Taliban tactics to counter the greater lethality of NATO forces (who use UAVs, smart bombs and better trained troops). Taliban forces now operate in smaller groups, keeping weapons (which can be identified from the air by UAV or aircraft cameras) hidden, and concentrate forces just before an attack. Cell phones and walkie-talkies make this easier. Taliban will also break off an attack quickly, knowing that the smart bombs are on the way.
The Taliban will stay near the Pakistani border, because the Americans and NATO rarely pursue, although smart bombs are more frequently dropped on the Pakistani side. But once a group of armed Taliban have made it into Pakistan, they can melt into the civilian population. Which leads to another popular Taliban tactic, using civilians as human shields. It doesn't always work, and when it doesn't the Taliban are quick to claim another NATO atrocity. The Taliban have also been using a growing number of deceptions to try and get NATO smart bombs or artillery to hit friendly targets. A favorite one on the border is to fire mortar shells at NATO troops on one side of the border, and at nearby Pakistani border guards just across the frontier, to try and deceive NATO and Pakistani troops into believing they are firing at each other. NATO counter-fire radars have spotted the shells, and traced them all back to the same location. But such radars are not always available, and sometimes this trick works. Another deception is to feed bad intel to the followers, and try and trigger a missile or smart bomb attack on civilians.
There's more at the link.
RLC
Kenneth Timmerman at Newsmax.com reports that intelligence agencies believe that Iran is practicing a nuclear strike against the U.S. They appear to be planning a single strike that would be launched from a merchant ship off the coast. A nuclear warhead would be mounted on a Scud missile and sent into the upper atmosphere where it would be detonated creating an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would fry all of our electronics across the entire continent. In the worst case we would be instantly thrown back into the 19th century and the resulting chaos and starvation would eventually kill off over 70% of our population.
We've written about EMP before and there's some doubt as to how successful such an attack would be, but evidently the Iranians think it would work.
There are several measures we can take to prevent it. We can stop Iran from securing nuclear warheads. We can continue to develop our missile defense system. We can tell Iran that any such attack in which they are suspected will result in a total obliteration of their country. Of course, this last option depends on being able to demonstrate that the attack came from Iran, and if they sink the ship that launched the missile we might not be able to do that.
In any event, the last alternative is certainly the worst since if it fails to deter the Iranians a nuclear holocaust would ensue. The best way to prevent such a catastrophe is to prevent the Iranians from developing a nuclear weapon in the first place. The second best is to build a missile shield and create enough uncertainty of success in the minds of the Iranian mullahs that they wouldn't attempt the attack. Of the three options, guess which two Senator Obama and the Democrats are on record opposing.
RLC
A New York Times report notes that, due largely to a Bush administration initiative, chronic homelessness in the U.S. has declined by 52,000 people from 175,914 to 123,833, a 30% drop, between 2005 and 2007.
I wonder what the decline was during the halcyon years of the Clinton administration.
In any event, this is another data point that future historians will factor into their assessment of Bush's presidency. Combined with his achievements on behalf of the poor in Africa and his liberation from tyranny of 50 million people in the Middle East, those who really care about human rights and human welfare, as opposed to those who simply pay lip service to these concepts, will be forced to conclude that Bush has done more good for the people they're concerned about than any president or world leader in the last 100 years.
For many this will no doubt be an awkward and uncomfortable realization.
Perhaps this is one reason liberals despise him. While they have talked endlessly about their concern for the poor, he has made them look impotent and hypocritical by actually doing something to alleviate their suffering.
RLC
A generation or so ago it looked as though theistic belief in general and Christian belief in particular were on the ropes. The atheists had all the good arguments, it was thought, the liberal church was embracing them, and it was just a matter of time until skepticism trickled down from the ivory towers of the academy to the pulpits and pews of parish churches and wiped out religious belief altogether.
Along the way to this denouement, however, a funny thing happened. A number of Christian philosophers remained unimpressed by the force of the secularists' arguments and were quietly churning out powerful philosophical arguments in defense of traditional Christian belief. This effort was epitomized, perhaps, with the publication in the late sixties of Alvin Plantinga's God and Other Minds, a work which completely altered the terms of the debate. Other philosophers contributed additional efforts over the next couple of decades and some, like William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland, became powerful public debators.
In addition, the creationist critique of Darwinism and the rise of the intelligent design movement hewed away at an essential prop in the atheistic worldview. All this, coupled with the utter failure of secular assumptions to provide a framework for social well-being - the devastation wrought by the sexual revolution and the horrors of street crime and the ubiquity of white collar crime - cast into unmistakeable highlights the moral inadequacies of secular atheism.
Douglas Groothius at Books and Culture gives us an interesting glimpse of the current state of the controversy with emphasis on books by three of the participants, Alistir McGrath, Antony Flew, and a debate between William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. It's a good read.
RLC
This article at Strategy Page discusses some interesting aspects to the war in Iraq from the standpoint of the military:
Throughout the current conflict, the military made no secret of what they were doing, and just kept focused on winning. They knew they would be dealing with an unusual enemy, a stateless force based on ideology and religion based hatred. This foe was weak, in the conventional military sense, but was armed with two powerful weapons.
First, there was the suicide bomber, and terrorism in general. Against civilian populations, this was a very effective weapon. Against a professional and resourceful military foe, it was much less so. But the enemy had another weapon; the media and political opposition in their opponents homeland. The media is eager to report real or imagined disasters and mistakes. This is how the news business has stayed solvent since the mass media first appeared in the mid 19th century. Al Qaeda was run by people who were aware of this, and knew how to exploit it, both among friendly (Moslem) populations, and in nations they had declared their enemy. This they did by exploiting the proclivities of the political oppositions in the West.
There is much more at the link, especially regarding how the liberal media and our political leadership has been one of terrorism's most effective weapons.
RLC