Bowing and Scraping

You just have to laugh at the major media. Their hypocrisy is so egregious it's humorous. In 1994, according to Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, the New York Times chastised then president Clinton for making a slight suggestion of a bow to the Japanese emperor. Now President Obama does a full jackknife in front of a Saudi Arabian dictator, and the Times finds its attention suddenly diverted elsewhere.

This video compares the measure of respect given by our president to the Queen of England, our closest ally, to the deft toe-touch granted a man who would just as soon see all infidels dead if it didn't mean that he'd have no one to buy his oil and protect him from his fellow Arab cutthroats:

A little obsequious, don't you think? I don't know why the President of the United States should bow to a dictator of a country whose only accomplishment is to be situated atop an ocean of oil. I suppose we should be glad he didn't kiss his ring.

RLC

Ten Myths about America

It's not uncommon to hear or read that the United States was founded on an attempt to eradicate Native Americans or that our Founders intended the U.S. to be a secular nation or that the U.S. is the biggest threat to world peace on the world scene today, etc. Often the claims are made with little or no evidence to support them, but if the person making them seems credible, they're often allowed to go unchallenged.

President Obama's recent claim that America has too often treated Europe with disdain and contempt and failed to recognize European leadership abroad are an example of the sorts of unsubstantiated calumnies that the left often levels at this nation. It's easy to make the accusation, but if it's not backed up with historical evidence then it's little more than empty rhetoric.

At any rate, Michael Medved has decided that some of these claims need to be challenged and he does so in a very useful book entitled Ten Big Lies about America: Combating Destructive Distortions about Our Nation. In the book he tackles ten common myths about the United States that have currency in the academy and leftist media, and shows that each is either false or at best unwarranted.

The ten "lies" are these:

• That America was founded on genocide against native Americans.
• That the U.S. is uniquely guilty for the crime of slavery and based its wealth on stolen African labor.
• That the Founders intended the U.S. to be a secular rather than a Christian nation.
• That America has always been a multicultural society and that it has been strengthened by its diversity.
• That the power of big business hurts the country and oppresses its people.
• That government programs are the answer for poverty and economic downturns.
• That America is an imperialist nation and a constant threat to world peace.
• That we need a third political party.
• That there is a war on the American middle class which is causing many to fall back into poverty.
• That America is in the midst of an irreversible moral decline.

I should mention that Medved's treatment of these claims (I think it's a stretch to call some of them "lies." They might better be called errors or myths) is uneven. The chapter on third parties, for example, takes on a decidedly more unpleasant tone than was employed throughout the rest of the book, as if he was personally offended by people who, quixotically perhaps, wanted to offer the country another political alternative. The subsequent chapter on the middle class offers a lot of facts and figures which cause the mind to wander, and is perhaps the least interesting of the ten.

Having said that, though, his treatment of the other myths is well-worth the price of the book. The first chapter, for example, examines the history of the interaction of the white settlers with the Indians and shows how the accounts of deliberate genocide and white atrocities are either unfounded or greatly exaggerated. There is much fascinating history to be learned here.

Exaggeration also seems to be the rhetorical tool of choice when it comes to the American involvement with slavery. Medved argues that as bad as chattel slavery is it's simply false to think that the United States was somehow the key villain in the story. Of all the slaves sold (by fellow Africans, it should be noted) to the western hemisphere, only 3% were shipped to North America. Yet we never hear denunciations of the Central or South American countries for their history of slavery which was far uglier than what took place in this land until ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865. Moreover, as Alexis de Tocqueville points out in his masterful work Democracy in America, so far from being the economic engine that drove American prosperity, slavery played only a minor role in building the American economy and in fact retarded economic progress rather than advance it. Slavery is indeed a great evil, but America should be respected for the tremendous sacrifice our forefathers made to end it. No country in the history of the world has ever done anything like what we did in our Civil War in order to bring an end to the injustice of human bondage.

Aside from the caveats mentioned above, I highly recommend this book to anyone who wishes to know more about the country in which they live. It'll be an education and a good antidote to the deprecations and denunciations of this country by many of our leftist academics and political leaders.

RLC

Talkers

Talk radio guy Hugh Hewitt explains the value of the medium to America, why the "legacy" media is dying, and also makes a surprisingly good case that conservative talk radio is actually good for President Obama.

There's not much to disagree with in his essay - except his admiration for Sean Hannity whose popularity I simply cannot understand - and it's a piece that should be read by those on both left and right.

RLC

The Blessings of Obesity

According to this article in New Scientist the musical genius of George Friedrich Handel was due to .... obesity and lead poisoning. That's what some Handel experts think anyway.

RLC

Sharing the Wealth

President Obama and Congressional Democrats have embarked upon a policy to tax the rich in order to fund programs that all of us can benefit from. A reader sends me this anecdote, perhaps apocryphal but no matter, that illustrates the problem with Obamanomics:

An economics professor had a class of students who adamantly insisted that the best society was one in which the government taxed the wealthy and gave the money to the poor. The best society was one in which all people were roughly equal in terms of their worldly goods. The professor decided to conduct an experiment with the class to teach them why such schemes always fail.

All grades in the class would henceforth be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A. After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied little. The second test average, predictably enough, was a D. No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the motivation to succeed is great; but when government takes all the reward away; no one has an incentive to try, or even want, to succeed.

Maybe we should forward this to the White House.

RLC

Falling into a Black Hole

Ever wonder what it would be like if by some odd set of circumstances you just happened to fall into a black hole? Of course you have. Everyone has. Well, go here and have it explained to you. Meanwhile, here's a quick simulation of the event:

Looks like a wild ride. I'm surprised amusement parks don't have one of these.

RLC

What's a Promise Worth?

What's the value of a politician's word? Breitbart gives us a clue in this report on President Obama's recent tobacco tax hike:

"I can make a firm pledge," [candidate Obama] said in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12. "Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."

He repeatedly vowed "you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime."

Now in office, Obama, who stopped smoking but has admitted he slips now and then, signed a law raising the tobacco tax nearly 62 cents on a pack of cigarettes, to $1.01. Other tobacco products saw similarly steep increases.

This is one tax that disproportionately affects the poor, who are more likely to smoke than the rich.

"Listen now," he said in his widely watched nomination acceptance speech, "I will cut taxes-cut taxes-for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class."

An unequivocal "any tax" pledge also was heard in the vice presidential debate, another prominent forum.

"No one making less than $250,000 under Barack Obama's plan will see one single penny of their tax raised," Joe Biden said, "whether it's their capital gains tax, their income tax, investment tax, any tax."

Okay, you say. So the Democrats broke their promise, nothing new about that, but people don't have to pay the tax. After all, no one has to smoke. Yes, but suppose everyone stops smoking, or at least many do. The revenue this tax is supposed to raise is to be used to expand medical care coverage for uninsured children. If people stop smoking where will the funding for this program come from?

Those of you making less than $250,000 may be the first to hazard a guess.

RLC

Hitchens Underwater

Christopher Hitchens wades into the Darwinism/Intelligent Design controversy and almost immediately finds himself in philosophical waters quite over his head. Referring to the Texas School Board debate over whether to teach the strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory to school children Hitch writes this:

So by all means let's "be honest with the kids," as Dr. Don McLeroy, the chairman of the Texas education board, wants us to be. The problem is that he is urging that the argument be taught, not in a history or in a civics class, but in a biology class. ... But it would also set a precedent for the sharing of the astronomy period with the teaching of astrology, or indeed of equal time as between chemistry and alchemy. Less boring perhaps, but also much less scientific and less educational.

Well, yes. Much of the debate is over how to interpret biological evidence. Why shouldn't a discussion about biological evidence occur in a biology class?

It's not just that the overwhelming majority of scientists are now convinced that evolution is inscribed in the fossil record and in the lineaments of molecular biology. It is more that evolutionists will say in advance which evidence, if found, would refute them and force them to reconsider. ("Rabbit fossils in the pre-Cambrian layer" was, I seem to remember, the response of Prof. J.B.S. Haldane.) Try asking an "intelligent design" advocate to stipulate upfront what would constitute refutation of his world view and you will easily see the difference between the scientific method and the pseudoscientific one.

This is simply not so. I can think of several things that would give pause to most IDers. One would be if procedures similar to the Urey/Miller experiments produced living cells or even just self-replicating molecules. Another would be if plausible pathways (as opposed to nomologically possible pathways) could be adduced to explain how seemingly irreducibly complex structures could have been constructed in a step-by-step fashion with no intelligent input.

At any rate, in the end Hitch comes up with a proposal that almost no Darwinian wants to see adopted:

I certainly do not want it said that my side denies a hearing to the opposing one. In the spirit of compromise, then, I propose the following. First, let the school debating societies restage the wonderful set-piece real-life dramas of Oxford and Dayton, Tenn. Let time also be set aside, in our increasingly multiethnic and multicultural school system, for children to be taught the huge variety of creation stories, from the Hindu to the Muslim to the Australian Aboriginal. This is always interesting (and it can't be, can it, that the Texas board holdouts think that only Genesis ought to be so honored?).

Set aside the fact that Mr. Hitchens, like so many other ID critics, still hasn't comprehended that the issue is not about teaching Genesis. Intelligent Design is not creationism. The real problem here is that Hitchens inexcusably perpetuates another myth about this whole debate: This is not a controversy between rival creation stories. It's silly to suggest that if we teach one creation story we have to teach them all. The debate is about this question: Are blind purposeless processes and forces adequate by themselves to account for the fine-tuning of the cosmos and the existence of information-rich living organisms or do the exquisitely precise values of the cosmic parameters and the existence of astonishingly complex biological machines and algorithms point to the need for intelligent input and/or guidance.

That's the question at issue and Mr. Hitchens misses it entirely.

He finishes with a second proposal which I'd love to see adopted:

Second, we can surely demand that the principle of "strengths and weaknesses" will be applied evenly. If any church in Texas receives a tax exemption, or if any religious institution is the beneficiary of any subvention from the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, we must be assured that it will devote a portion of its time to laying bare the "strengths and weaknesses" of the religious world view, and also to teaching the works of Voltaire, David Hume, Benedict de Spinoza, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. This is America. Let a hundred flowers bloom, and a thousand schools of thought contend. We may one day have cause to be grateful to the Texas Board of Education for lighting a candle that cannot be put out.

This proposal for teaching the arguments for and against the existence of a cosmic designer in all state and tax-exempt institutions is one that most IDers would love - and every Darwinian would be horrified - to see implemented. It would be great if both churches and public schools did what Hitchens suggests, but surely Darwinians blanch at the prospect. The works of Voltaire, Hume, Paine, et al. do nothing to challenge the view that the cosmos and life are intelligently designed, and, indeed, several of these worthies themselves believed that there was a designer of the world.

Hitchens seems to think that just because these writers were critical of classical Christianity that they therefore were opposed to the idea of a designer. They were not. Even uber-atheist Richard Dawkins acknowledges, albeit somewhat unguardedly, in the documentary Expelled that there's a case to be made that life on earth is designed by an intelligent agent.

It would be wonderful for students to be exposed to writers on both sides of the debate and allowed to make up their own minds without being indoctrinated by a philosophical school of thought which doesn't suffer any other position to be heard.

RLC

Uh Oh

Those of you who have money in the stock market might be celebrating the recent run that has seen the Dow rise 20.4 percent over the last month. Lest we get carried away, however, the AP's business writer Sarah Lepro, perhaps inadvertently, throws a little cold water on our exuberance.

She notes that the Dow's rise over the last four weeks is "its biggest percentage gain in a four-week period since the spring of 1933." That date sounds ominous. The depression lasted for about another decade after 1933.

RLC

Life among the Lefties

In the manner of the late intrepid Australian naturalist Steve Irwin, Jason Mattera wades out into the fever swamps of left-wingdom to bring back exotic specimens of the lefty fauna endemic to Washington and to show us how these strange creatures think, or don't think:

What's even more frightening than lefties talking about torturing conservatives or forming a military to fight against the bourgoisie or signing petitions to abolish greed is to think that these people probably all vote. I wonder how many of them voted for John McCain.

Anyway, Mattera is hilarious. More of his work can be found by typing in his name on our Search function.

Thanks to Hot Air for posting the videos.

RLC

The Last Thing We Can Tolerate

With the economy dominating all the talk we haven't heard much lately about what is perhaps the greatest challenge Barack Obama faces. Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic reminds us that the problem hasn't gone away and in fact is closer to the boiling point now than ever before. That problem is what to do about Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Israel's new Prime Minister has given President Obama a choice: either we stop Iran or they will, and the deadline is not years in the future but months:

Netanyahu gave his fullest public explication yet of why he believes President Obama must consider Iran's nuclear ambitions to be his preeminent overseas challenge. "Why is this a hinge of history? Several bad results would emanate from this single development. First, Iran's militant proxies would be able to fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella. This raises the stakes of any confrontation that they'd force on Israel. Instead of being a local event, however painful, it becomes a global one. Second, this development would embolden Islamic militants far and wide, on many continents, who would believe that this is a providential sign, that this fanaticism is on the ultimate road to triumph.

"Third, they would be able to pose a real and credible threat to the supply of oil, to the overwhelming part of the world's oil supply. Fourth, they may threaten to use these weapons or to give them to terrorist proxies of their own, or fabricate terror proxies. Finally, you'd create a great sea change in the balance of power in our area-nearly all the Arab regimes are dead-set opposed to Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons. They fervently hope, even if they don't say it, that the U.S. will act to prevent this, that it will use its political, economic, and, if necessary, military power to prevent this from happening."

If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, Netanyahu asserted, Washington's Arab allies would drift into Iran's orbit.

Not only would many of them, including Iraq, cozy up to Iran, but those which could afford it would seek to purchase their own nuclear weapons to counter the Iranian threat.

The last thing the world can tolerate is a nuclear Iran. The question is what will President Obama do to prevent it from happening.

RLC

How Much Power?

A little humor from Michael Ramirez to cap off the month:

I wonder how far President Obama is going to go with this exercise of his power. Is everyone who manages an institution which takes federal money going to be subject to being fired by the White House? What about schools and colleges? Are their administrators under Obama's thumb? What about employees of towns and cities that are recipients of federal largesse?

How much power will the President arrogate to himself before the people stand up and say "that's enough?"

RLC

The Basic Difference

Here's a quick quiz: How would you describe the fundamental difference between modern liberals (progressives) and modern conservatives?

Perhaps one way to answer this is to note how each group would answer another question:

Should government be empowered to regulate our lives to maximize the common good or should it be limited to protecting citizens from encroachments upon their basic freedoms?

Which of these two views did you think our Founders had in mind?

Progressives believe the role of government is to use its power to ensure that the greatest good is done for the greatest number of people. They hold that the greatest benefit is realized when everyone has a roughly equal share of the world's resources and that it is the role of government to bring this about, even if that means taking from those who have and giving to those who don't. To progressives, opposition to this view is a sign of greed and selfishness.

Conservatives maintain that that is not at all what our Founders intended. The men who established this nation, and most of those who followed them, believed that the purpose of the government they established was to guarantee the freedoms articulated in the Declaration of Independence and especially the Bill of Rights, and to protect these from the encroachments of all who would take them away, both foreign and domestic. The progressive view, most conservatives would argue, leads ultimately to tyranny.

Chances are if you hold to the first view you're a Democrat and if you hold to the second you're a Republican.

Right now, the first view is prevailing.

RLC

One in Ten Chinese

The British TimesOnline has a story about the amazing struggle and growth of the Chinese church:

A murmur of "Amen" echoes softly down a corridor in a luxury Beijing hotel. Dozens of young Chinese are gathered in a beige-carpeted conference room to listen to the word of God. After helping themselves to hot water or tea at the back of the room, they find a seat and chatter with friends. They tuck Louis Vuitton and Prada handbags under their seats, switch their mobile phones to silent and turn to listen to a young woman who takes the microphone to ask for silence and recite a prayer.

A casually dressed, grey-haired Chinese man takes to the podium. "Let us begin with a look at the Gospel of Saint John." There is a rustling of pages as converts and curious open their Bibles. Almost everyone in the room is scarcely a day over 30. Most look as if they are in their early twenties. They are fashionably dressed - girls with high-heeled boots, men sporting trendy knitted hats. This is Friday night Bible class in Beijing. And it is a weekend venue of choice for growing numbers of well-off middle-class city sophisticates.

The fact that this class is technically illegal, run by pastors lacking approval from the state-sanctioned Protestant church, is not the attraction. These are not young people seeking a frisson of excitement from some underground activity. They are at the forefront of a movement sweeping China - the search for spiritual satisfaction now that Marx is démodé.

No attempt is made to conceal what is, in effect, an underground religious gathering. A sign in Chinese outside the conference room reads: "Hill of Golgotha Church meeting". A board outside the hotel lift directs visitors to Hall 5. There is not a nod towards secrecy or even discretion. There is no sense of anxiety, let alone fear, that officials could burst in to break up this illegal assembly even though police do still frequently raid house churches run by underground Protestant pastors.

In fact, across China religion is undergoing a defiant and extraordinary revival. Millions of Chinese are turning to familiar traditional faiths such as Buddhism and Taoism - a mystical belief with about 400 million adherents that is China's only indigenous creed. Taoist believers, like Buddhists, visit temples across the country to burn incense, present offerings and request readings from fortune tellers. Others are finding comfort in Confucius, but it is Christianity that is leading the battle for China's 1.3 billion souls.

Recent surveys calculate the number of Christians worshipping independently of the State churches in China to be as high as 100 million. That means that almost one in every ten Chinese may now be a Christian, making Christianity bigger than the 74 million-member Communist Party.

These one in ten are not, presumably, tepid about their faith like, say, many mainline protestants and Catholics in America. These are people who realize they could very well pay a terrible price for attending a worship service. Yet they come.

There's an interesting irony in this. While Christianity seems to be flickering out in those regions of the globe where it held sway for almost 2000 years and where there's been no real social or political cost for affiliating with a church, it's exploding in places like China, where the faithful could be imprisoned, beaten, or otherwise sanctioned. It's also burgeoning in Africa and elsewhere in the third world countries that girdle the southern hemisphere.

Such news doubtless moves people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins to reach for the Maalox.

RLC

Re: Presidential Trends, Etc.

Jeff writes to add some insights of his own to the post titled Presidential Trends. Here's part of what he says:

...two candidates that fit all of these characteristics better than both Jeb Bush and Bobby Jindal are Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty (both of which are younger than Jeb Bush anyway). Both of these men served as Governors and both are very open about being Evangelical Christians. Both are down to earth and were popular in each of their bluish states (Arkansas and Minnesota). Both reached out to those outside of their own party and worked together to find positive solutions to problems and got a lot accomplished despite the opposing party in their states' legislatures. I think that a candidate such as Huckabee or Pawlenty would be a fresh new face for the GOP and could attract voters outside of the far right and rather than focusing on negativity and what the other party is doing wrong, they would focus on coming up with solutions and making progress.

The rest of Jeff's e-mail can be read on the Feedback Page.

Another reader wrote to take issue with the tone of an article by Keith Pavlischek that we discussed a few weeks ago. That letter is also on the Feedback Page.

RLC

The Problem of the Self

A.C. Grayling at New Scientist discusses a little of the history of an interesting metaphysical problem. The problem lies in trying to ascertain exactly what it is we are referring to when we talk about the self. What is the self? Who is the I or me to which I refer when I use these words? If it's just the body, as materialists believe, then what is it about us that perdures through time and makes us the same self from one point in time to the next?

Grayling writes:

After John Locke published his Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690, he sent copies to various savants of his acquaintance, asking for comments and in particular for advice on whether he had left out anything essential - for if so, he could add it to a second edition. His correspondent William Molyneaux of Dublin replied that Locke needed to say something about personal identity: that is, what makes a person the same person throughout their life.

Belief in the idea of a substantial soul - a "you" that is separate from your body - was waning. In the absence of this metaphysical entity as a convenience for underpinning personal identity, what, asked Molyneaux, makes the retired general continuous with the eager subaltern of 40 years before, and he with the red-cheeked baby in his nurse's arms 20 years before that? In response, Locke added a chapter to his second edition which instantly caused a storm of controversy and has been famous ever since in the annals of philosophy.

In that chapter Locke argued that a person's identity over time resides in their consciousness (he coined this term, and here introduced it to the English language) of being the same self at a later time as at an earlier, and that the mechanism that makes this possible is memory. Whereas a stone is the same stone over time because it is the very same lump of matter - or almost, allowing for erosion - and an oak tree is identical with its originating acorn because it is the same continuous organisation of matter, a person is only the same through time if he or she is self-aware of being so. Memory loss interrupts identity, and complete loss of memory is therefore loss of the self.

The divines, represented by Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, took umbrage and attacked Locke for ignoring the immortal soul. In 1712 The Spectator magazine ran a front-cover demand that "the wits of Kingdom" should get together in conference to settle the matter of personal identity and selfhood, because the controversy was getting out of control. In 1739, when David Hume published the first volume of his Treatise on Human Nature, he stated that there is no such thing as the self, for if one conducts the empirical inquiry of introspecting - looking within oneself - to see what there is apart from current sensations, feelings, desires and thoughts, one does not find an extra something, a "self", over and above these things, which owns them and endures beyond them.

Thus in 50 years the unreflective idea that each individual has an immortal soul as the basis of their selfhood had changed utterly. For millennia before Locke, no one had so much as raised the question. But it was no surprise that the question should suddenly become urgent as the Enlightenment dawned, with its central idea of the autonomous individual who is a bearer of rights and responsible for his or her own moral outlook; such an idea needs a robust idea of selfhood, and the philosophers eagerly tried to make sense of it.

Hume's sceptical view did not prevail. Kant argued that logic requires a concept-imposing self to make experience possible, and the Romantics made the self the centre of each individual's universe: "I am that which began," wrote Swinburne in Hertha, "Out of me the years roll, out of me God and Man." Without a deep idea of the self there could be no Freud or psychoanalysis.

So fundamental is the idea of the self to modern human consciousness that one would expect developments in neuroscience to have a direct bearing on it. And ... that is exactly what is happening - with surprising and often disconcerting results.

The disconcerting results consist primarily in the inability of materialist philosophers to identify anything other than the physical body that would constitute a self. If we have a mind or a soul then presumably it is that, or could be that, which comprises the essential "me," but for modern materialists who have no room in their ontological cupboard for immaterial substances, nothing remains but to conclude that we are simply a mobile pile of carbon and a few other elements. These chemicals are in constant flux so the self is constantly shifting and changing. There's nothing upon which to base a belief that I am the same person I remember being ten years ago.

T.S. Eliot put it this way: "What we know of other people is just our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then....At every meeting we are meeting a stranger."

If this is the case several awkward conclusions follow. In the first place there's no sense in which I can be held responsible for what was done by an individual who had my name and social security number ten years ago. It wasn't me. I cannot be held responsible for promises, contracts, crimes, or anything, for that matter, any more than I could be held responsible to keep a promise made by you.

Another thing that follows from the materialist view of man is that if there really is no self then there's no intrinsic human worth, no dignity, no significance to the individual, or indeed to humanity as a whole. We're simply a couple of scoops of gooey organic molecules, and there's not much value to goo.

Of course, once society comes to recognize and accept this unfortunate idea it will be no time at all before holocausts start looming right around every corner.

Ideas, especially metaphysical ideas, have consequences.

RLC

Bristol and Ashley

It'd be a terrible shame if the allegations of a tape of Joe Biden's daughter using cocaine really exists. I'm sure it would be a source of anguish for Biden and his wife, and it's beneath contempt that someone made it and is trying to shop the tape around. I'm frankly very reluctant to talk about it and prefer that this sort of thing just be ignored.

However, there's a point about this that needs to be made. Vice-president Biden has, to his credit, been a leader in the war on drugs, created the Drug Czar post and sponsored much anti-drug legislation. Thus the problems his daughter is allegedly having must be especially painful, and we should all be sympathetic, but this leads me to my point.

When word came out that Sarah Palin's daughter was pregnant and unmarried the media and many Democrats richly, and publicly, enjoyed the irony of the daughter refusing to abide by the values of the mother. Bristol Palin's story was all over the media. Some outlets even ran unsubstantiated allegations that Sarah's mentally retarded child was really Bristol's. Then, even after the election was over, the media came back to get in a few more kicks to the Palins' ribs when Bristol and the baby's father broke up. The whole episode was very sad and quite contemptible, but that didn't hinder gleeful reporters from doing their worst to gloat over every detail.

Now the shoe may be on the other political foot, but you'll probably not hear much about Ashley Biden on the six o'clock news, nor should you. But then you shouldn't have heard much about Bristol Palin, either. A principled reluctance on the part of journalists and political operatives to embarrass the families of our public figures is only principled if it's a courtesy extended to all of our public figures and not just those on the side we want to see win.

RLC

Is ID Boring?

At Telic Thoughts Bilbo recalls that in the documentary, Expelled, professor of evolutionary biology William Provine complains that Intelligent Design is "boring." Provine goes on to insist that Darwinism leads to the view that life is meaningless, there's no foundation for ethics, no basis for free will, and no life after death. Provine is surely correct about these entailments of a Darwinian worldview, but he's hardly correct about ID being boring. Nevertheless, a lot of commenter's at Telic Thoughts agreed with him, so I felt constrained to throw my two cents in:

Boring? What could be more exciting than to believe that scientific investigation actually means something, that the whole universe is imbued with purpose, that there's a reason, an intention, for why things are the way they are? What could be more exciting than thinking that one's research is literally thinking the designer's thoughts after it?

On the other hand, what could be more depressing than Professor Provine's view that life is meaningless, moral obligation is groundless, free will is an illusion, and the universe is just a pointless, accidental ontological burp?

Not surprisingly, several readers disagreed with me. One remarked that:

...except that the ID community doesn't do any research. And most of the time doesn't show much interest in biology except insofar as it supports their metaphysical predilections. While Darwin's Theory spawned generations of research, entire new fields of study, ID is a deadend.

Whatever the truth of these claims may be, they're a bit beside the point. The question is not whether intelligent design is a research program, it's whether it's interesting as an interpretation of the results of scientific investigation. Regardless of its merits as a scientific enterprise in itself, ID is a fascinating way of looking at the world. It maintains that the world is filled with transcendent purpose and meaning. It holds that scientific labor is not just mere fact collecting, but is actually a way of discovering how a superhuman intellect thinks.

Another commenter took exception to this claim. He wrote that, "Grandiose self-delusion like that is more properly the domain of theology and philosophy departments."

On the contrary, the idea that science is "thinking the designer's thoughts after it" goes back as far as Johannes Kepler and is certainly the attitude held by many of the founders of modern science. Men of the intellectual stature of Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Boyle, Einstein and, more recently, George Smoot, all have employed some variation of this sentiment in describing their work. To call it "grandiose self-delusion" is to belie an unfortunate ignorance of the history of science.

At any rate, I thought it interesting that no one chose to respond to the second part of what I wrote, i.e. that what's really discouraging and boring is the view Provine derives from his Darwinism that life is fundamentally pointless. If that's true, and I think it is given Provine's atheism, then what is the point of scientific research? Scientists spend their lives gathering a few facts, and some small number of them may even discover something that makes life better for a while, but in the end it's all for nothing. We all die, the world perishes in a solar explosion, and none of it matters at all. That view may not itself be exactly boring, but it sure does sap the motivation to go to the lab each day out of anybody that allows it to sink in. How can someone who really thinks this take their work seriously?

RLC

Presidential Trends

Sitting in my favorite restaurant the other day I reflected over lunch on the last five presidential elections and realized that there are some interesting patterns to be found in them:

Since 1992 we have had five presidential elections. In every one of them (3 elections) in which a younger candidate ran against a significantly older candidate the younger man won. In every election in which one candidate was a former governor and the other was not (4 elections) the former governor won. In every one in which one candidate was a war veteran and the other was not (all 5), the veteran lost. In every one of them (all 5) in which one candidate appeared considerably more at ease talking about his religious faith than did his opponent that candidate won.

The implications of this seem obvious. If the GOP wants to enhance its prospects of reclaiming the White House in 2012 they should look not to aging senators but to young, charismatic governors or ex-governors who hold sincere and well-thought out religious convictions.

It sounds like a recipe for Bobby Jindal, Sarah Palin, or Jeb Bush, if he had a different last name. Of course, if the Republicans do decide to go with another war vet in 2012, and choose David Petraeus, the trend against electing vets could come to a screeching halt.

RLC

Age of Confusion

National Review's Katherine Jean Lopez reflects on a recent poll of teenagers which found that 50% of them blamed Rihanna for the drubbing she received at the hands of her boyfriend Chris Brown. Half of the teens surveyed believed that Rihanna must have deserved it somehow. Here are some highlights of her post:

It's just one survey. But it's very bad news. And feminists are to blame.

I don't say that to bash Gloria Steinem, or whoever the most easily blamed feminist would be at this point. I say that so we can collectively get our heads out of the feminist fog in which we've been lost.

What has happened - and what Rihanna and Chris have to do with Gloria and us - is that by inventing oppression where there is none and remaking woman in man's image, as the sexual and feminist revolutions have done, we've confused everyone. The reaction those kids had was unnatural. It's natural for us to expect men to protect women, and for women to expect some level of physical protection. But in post-modern America, those natural gender roles have been beaten by academics and political rhetoric and the occasional modern woman being offended by having a door opened for her. The result is confusion.

And perhaps, too, a neo-feminist backlash.

The need for some return to sanity is presented pretty clearly in an article in the April issue of O, the Oprah Magazine. The article details how some women find themselves leaving men in favor of relationships with partners of their own gender.

One recently divorced academic describes what attracted her to a future female lover. "She got up and gave me the better seat, as if she wanted to take care of me. I was struck by that," she said. "I felt attracted to her energy, her charisma. I was enticed. And she paid the bill. Just the gesture was sexy. She took initiative and was the most take-charge person I'd ever met."

This article isn't about closeted homosexuality. It's not making the case that there is a vast population of women who were born to be with women, who are instead trapped in unfulfilling heterosexual arrangements. No, this article, despite its celebration of unconventional lifestyles, boils down to something much more orthodox: Femininity and masculinity mix well together. And women are taking masculinity where they can get it, even if that's in the arms of another woman.

Last year, Kathleen Parker published a book called Save the Males. What a perfect title, what a necessary cause, I thought at the time. As Parker wrote: "For the past thirty years or so, males have been under siege by a culture that too often embraces the notion that men are to blame for all of life's ills. While women have been cast as victims . . . men have been quietly retreating into their caves."

Lopez's article isn't long and could be read with profit by both men and women. Give it a look.

RLC