Chrenkoff's Latest

Arthur Chrenkoff's latest installment of Good News from Iraq is up. It's a mine of information about what is going on in Iraq and it's well worth a perusal.

Let's Let Everybody Vote

New York City presents us with more evidence that liberals in general, and Democrats in particular, have very little confidence in their ability to persuade citizens through the force of their ideas. They're now seeking to win elections by extending the franchise to non-citizens:

Left-wing advocates in New York have convinced a City Council member to put forward a bill that would legalize non-citizen voting in America's largest city.

Council Member William Perkins of Manhattan has drafted a bill that would allow any immigrant over the age of 18 who has been a resident of New York City for more than six months the right to vote in all local elections.

Why is it, we have to ask, that the left seeks to broaden the franchise to include convicted felons and now non-citizens? Is it because they realize that the only people they can persuade to vote for them are crooks, thugs, and those who can't speak English? Is it because they know that these people can be bribed with promises of access to the public purse? Is it because the left is so desperate for power that they don't care who votes as long as they're returned to office? Is it all of these?

Actually, maybe there's merit to extending the franchise to whoever shows up at the polls. Maybe we should allow teenagers to help elect our government. After all, they already vote for student council and homecoming queen, why not school board and county commissioners?

And how about letting al Qaida vote. Maybe if they had a say in how things were run here they wouldn't feel the need to resort to violence.

Somebody please relay this suggestion to the New York City Council.

The Threat to Marriage

Advocates of gay marriage often argue that it is not gays wanting to marry that jeopardizes the institution of marriage, rather it is the high divorce rate among heterosexuals that poses the real threat.

Dennis Prager deconstructs this argument and leaves it lying in tatters. He gives four reasons why the argument fails, and although in our view any one of them by itself is decisive, the third one is perhaps the most interesting. Prager writes:

A third flaw in the argument is that it presupposes that every divorce constitutes a failure of a couple's marriage. Sometimes this is true; sometimes it is not. I know a couple married for 30 years who made a beautiful home for their three now-married children. The couple divorced last year because they had both concluded that they had drifted too far apart to continue living together in any meaningful way (one aspect of the drift was one partner's increasing devotion to religion and the other's decreasing interest in it).

Who has the hubris to call their marriage a failure? Their children surely don't think their parents' marriage was a failure. It produced three wonderful married adults, and it provided them a beautiful and loving home in which to grow up. One can only wish all marriages so "failed."

It is simplistic to maintain that the one criterion of success or failure in marriage is permanence. There are marriages that provided years of comfort to a couple and a fine home to their children that eventually end; and there are permanent marriages that have provided neither comfort to the couple nor a loving environment for their children. If the end of something renders it a failure, every one of our lives is a failure, since they all come to an end.

Read the whole column. It's very provocative and well-reasoned.

Antony Flew's Conversion

A couple of months ago philosopher Antony Flew made news when it came out in the press that he was abandoning his ardent commitment to atheism and accepting the idea that the universe was designed by an intelligent agent. Now Christianity Today has an article by James A. Beverley, professor of Christian apologetics at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto, on Flew's very significant philosophical shift. The article will be extremely interesting to anyone who has read and/or been influenced by Flew and should be read in its entirety. Here are a few excerpts:

Flew has been rethinking the arguments for a Designer for several years. When I saw him in London in the spring of 2003, he told me he was still an atheist but was impressed by Intelligent Design theorists. By early 2004 he had made the move to deism.

Flew also cites the influence of Gerald Schroeder, an Israeli physicist, and Roy Abraham Varghese, author of The Wonder of the World and an Eastern Rite Catholic. Flew appeared with both scientists at a New York symposium last May where he acknowledged his changed conviction about the necessity for a Creator. In the broader picture, both Varghese and Schroeder, author of The Hidden Face of God, argue from the fine-tuning of the universe that it is impossible to explain the origin of life without God. This forms the substance of what led Flew to move away from Darwinian naturalism.

I asked Flew more explicitly about the impact of these and other scholars. "Who amazes you the most of the defenders of Christian theism?"

He replied, "I would have to put Alvin Plantinga pretty high," and he also complimented (Terry) Miethe, (J.P.) Moreland, and (William Lane) Craig for their philosophical skills. He regards Richard Swinburne, the Oxford philosophy of religion professor, as the leading figure in the United Kingdom. "There is really no competition to him." He said that (Gary) Habermas has made "the most impressive case for Christian theism on the basis of New Testament writings."

These Christian philosophers have uniform respect for Flew as a person and as a thinker. Craig spoke of him as "an enduring figure in positivistic philosophy" and was "rather surprised by his giving up his atheistic views." He, Miethe, and Habermas have found Flew to be a perfect gentleman both in public debate and private conversations. Swinburne says Flew has always been a tough thinker, though less dogmatic as the years went by. Plantinga, the founder of the Society of Christian Philosophers, said that Flew's change is "a tribute to his open-mindedness as well as an indication of the strength of current broadly scientific arguments against atheism."

There's much more at the link on the reasons for Flew's reluctance to embrace Christianity despite his very positive attitudes toward the person of Christ.

Needless to say, the secularists are beside themselves with angst. If a thinker of Flew's stature can abandon the dogmas of materialism then how do they prevent a hemorrhage of defections? If Antony Flew has become persuaded by the evidence that the universe and life are designed, it makes it that much more difficult to defeat the accursed Intelligent Design advocates who want to expose our children to the same arguments that persuaded Flew. How, they're no doubt asking themselves, will kids remain good Darwinian materialists once they've heard the arguments against it?

Paltry and Ignoble

These two stories indicate that whereas some people have to work at making themselves look foolish, others find that it just comes naturally:

A parent complained to the Washoe County School District this week about her child's school showing students parts of Pope John Paul II's funeral on television.

The complaint by Debby Carr, the mother of a Marvin Moss Elementary School student, was the only one received Thursday by the district's communications office, said Ron Cooney, a district spokesman.

Carr said she is concerned that showing the pope's funeral sends a mixed message about what is allowed in public schools about religion.

Cooney said the district's central office didn't instruct individual schools about what to do in regard to the pope's death and funeral. He said a teacher at Moss plans to show a tape of it today so children can see an example of a historical world event.

"If there are parents who don't want their children participating, they can opt out," Cooney said.

The district's policy allows religious literature, music, drama or art in the curriculum if presented objectively. An emphasis on religious themes in the arts, literature and history also is permitted if it doesn't foster particular religious tenets or demean any beliefs.

The policy also says that student-initiated expressions to questions or assignments in forms of compositions, art, music, speech and debate that reflect their beliefs are allowed.

And then there's this story out of Madison, Wisconsin:

A Madison secular organization is protesting Gov. Jim Doyle's order to fly flags at half-staff at public buildings all week to remember Pope John Paul II.

The gesture "appears like an endorsement of Roman Catholicism over other religious viewpoints," said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Gaylor said her organization would have looked the other way if the order had been for just Friday - the day of the pope's funeral - instead of all week.

"This seems excessive," she said. "Not everyone in the country is Roman Catholic, and (the pope's) not even American."

Federal statutes allow a president to lower flags not only upon the death of principal figures of the U.S. government but also upon the death of "other officials or foreign dignitaries."

Gaylor said she respects the private mourning of Catholics but protests state-backed grieving.

The American Humanist Association in Washington, D.C., also opposes the weeklong lowering of flags, said Tony Hileman, executive director. "We have to ask whether this would be done for other cleric - the Dalai Lama or Jewish or Muslim leaders."

Ms Gaylor evidently thinks that someone has to be an American in order to merit our respect and honor for the contribution he's made to civilization, and that if one is not a Catholic one cannot be moved to pay tribute to greatness. Why she should think such a thing is incomprehensible. Perhaps someone might remind Ms Gaylor of the old adage that it's better to keep one's mouth closed and have people just suspect you're a ditz than to open it and remove all doubt.

As for Ms Carr and Mr. Hileman, perhaps if they hadn't slept through the eighties they would understand that no religious figure in the history of the twentieth century did as much to relieve oppression and to promote peace as has John Paul II.

Mr. Hileman, blithely unaware of the embarrassing fatuousness of his assertion that this honor would not be accorded to religious leaders of other faiths, seems totally oblivious to the fact that there simply is no Jewish leader, and certainly no Muslim leader, who has accomplished what the late pope has. If there ever were, they would doubtless be likewise honored.

One gets the feeling that for such people as these the pope's contribution to the toppling of communist tyranny in eastern Europe is unimportant. Their gripe is that the pope was the head of a religion and was himself a model of piety. Honoring such a man in ways that might influence others to admire him is something they just can't abide regardless of the historic greatness of his life. Their carping sounds paltry and ignoble because that's precisely what it is.

A Glimpse of the Future in Gaza

Little Green Footballs tips us to this horrifying story in The Jerusalem Post from Palestinian-controlled Gaza.

Hamas has begun operating a "vice and virtue commando" in the Gaza Strip to safeguard Islamic values, Palestinian security officials and residents told The Jerusalem Post.

The new force, called the Anti-Corruption Unit, is believed to be behind the gruesome murder over the weekend of Yusra al-Azzami, a 22-year-old university student from the northern Gaza Strip. Her "crime" was that she was seen in public with her fiance.

Although "honor killings" are not a new phenomenon in Palestinian society, the perpetrators were almost always relatives of the victims. But this is the first time that one of the Palestinian groups has openly acted against a woman suspected of "immoral behavior."

Hamas's "morality" patrolmen first spotted the young couple strolling along the beach in Gaza City, together with Azzami's younger sister. After enjoying the spectacular sunset over the sea, they got into the future husband's car and started driving towards Azzami's home.

According to eyewitness accounts, five masked gunmen who were in another car gave chase, opening fire at Azzami, who was sitting in the front seat next to her fiance. She died instantly.

The fiance and sister were later brutally beaten and moderately injured by the attackers.

The incident took place at a busy intersection in Gaza City. What happened immediately afterwards left many passersby traumatized. The assailants dragged the young woman's body out of the car, pouncing upon it mercilessly with clubs and iron bars.

"It was the most horrific crime I've seen in my life," said a university student who witnessed the attack. "What they did to the body while it was lying on the ground was barbaric. This does not represent Islam." The student, who asked not to be named, said he and several other people at the scene were too afraid to interfere. "We waited until the gunmen left the area before we called the police and an ambulance," he added.

The witness claims that this savagery does not represent Islam, but then why is it that such atrocities seem so commonplace in Islamic countries? What the Palestinians are being given a taste of is exactly what the Taliban imposed on Afghanistan. If any Palestinian wonders what life will be like in the territories if, and when, the Islamists gain control of them all they need do is look at Afghanistan before it was liberated.

There's more on this brutal story at the Jerusalem Post link.

A Peanut a Day

Now comes word that whoever it is who studies these things has determined that peanuts are good for you. We knew it all along:

The federal government's latest dietary guidelines now acknowledge that peanuts, which contain monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fat, can be consumed in moderation. "Now we know that the type of fat found in peanuts is actually good for us," said Lona Sandon with the American Dietetic Association. "It doesn't clog our arteries like saturated fat. It helps keep the arteries clean."

But that's only if peanuts are consumed "in moderation," and that's the part that often trips up peanut lovers. There are 14 grams of fat in one serving of peanuts, which is only one ounce. And a handful can have up to 200 calories.

"The problem is that the portions need to be low so you don't overconsume the calories, that's where the public has a disconnect," said Madelyn Fernstrom, director of the Weight Management Center at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. "It's a well spent 200 calories if you can limit it to that. The problem is volume. It's very hard to have a small serving of peanuts, meaning a small handful."

The humble peanut contains a respectable list of nutrients -vitamin E, niacin, thiamin, riboflavin, vitamin B6, and essential minerals such as copper, phosphorous, potassium, zinc and magnesium. They also are a good source of fiber and protein.

Peanuts also contain a small amount of resveratrol, the antioxidant in red wine that has been linked to the "French Paradox" - a low incidence of heart disease among the French, despite their love of cheese and other high-fat foods.

Research at Penn State University, Harvard Medical School, Purdue University and the University of Florida have shown that peanuts may help prevent heart disease, that they can lower bad cholesterol and that they can help with weight loss, possibly by making people feel satisfied so they eat less overall. One of the Harvard studies showed an association between peanut butter consumption and a reduced risk of diabetes.

So, contrary to what we had long been told, peanut products are good for us as long as we don't consume too many calories in the eating of them. Perhaps if we wash them down with diet soda that'll neutralize the calories. In any event, this is exciting news. If peanut butter is now found to be healthy can fried chicken be far behind?

The Twilight of Clerical Influence

The Strategy Report tells us that Sunni imams and other preachers of hatred and violence are seeing their influence dim as the number of Iraqi children killed by the insurgents mounts.

April 11, 2005: The rift between hard-line Sunnis and more moderate ones seems to be widening. While many imams (religious leaders) are not openly siding with the 64 Sunni Arab clerics who issued a fatwa (religious decree) saying Sunnis should support the new government and join the security forces, the more extreme imams who tried to issue counter-decrees have apparently been ignored. The Sunni religious leaders are caught in a bind. Much to their dismay, their calls to fight the "occupiers" has only resulted in a lot of Iraqis getting killed by other Iraqis and foreign Moslems.

No one expected this, but the Americans proved expert at defending themselves. The next available targets were Iraqi police and soldiers. These poor guys were not as good at defending themselves from terrorist attacks. And when the terrorists hit the police and troops, they tended to kill nearby Iraqi civilians as well. In some cases, this included numbers of children. Even before the Second Battle of Fallujah last November, the videos of dead Iraqi children, slain by Islamic terrorists, was forcing the Sunni Arab clerics to reconsider their position as cheerleaders for the terrorists.

Then came the Second Battle of Fallujah last November. To most Iraqis, it was no surprise that the Americans tore right through the town, killing or capturing several thousand terrorists and anti-government fighters assembled there to slaughter the "occupiers." Again, the Americans proved expert at avoiding casualties, while wiping out the "Holy Warriors" who swore they would prevail. Then came the January 30th election debacle. Hundreds of Iraqi civilians were killed in January, as terrorists did all they could to discourage Iraqis from voting. It didn't work, and failed in a spectacular fashion as millions of Iraqis fearlessly came out to vote.

In February, you could hear the sermons at Friday prayers were getting less bloodthirsty. Many clerics were having second thoughts about whose side they were on. The terrorists and anti-government gunmen were looking like losers and killers who had only Iraqis for victims. Many of the Sunni Arab clerics believed the sermons they were preaching, calling for armed insurrection against the occupiers. The Sunni Arabs saw themselves as the guardians of Islamic orthodoxy in a sea of Shia blasphemy. But what's the point if you can't get at the occupying infidels, and they can kill you with impunity. What's the point when the Sunni Arab "Defenders of Islam" can only kill Moslem civilians.

There's more at the link.

Death Is the Answer

Here's another example, courtesy of the Drudge Report, of the high moral tone of political discourse offered by American liberalism. These people truly are deranged.

Getting Your Money's Worth?

Here's an article that may be of interest to those of you paying a king's ransom for you or your child's college education and wondering whether you're getting your money's worth (Registration may be required).

It might be pertinent here to repeat something we mentioned some weeks ago. If you can stomach some pretty vile and vulgar stuff, Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons is a must read for any parent about to send a child off to college in the near future or for any parent who has a child in college now. Wolfe no doubt exaggerates the dysfunctionalities of the contemporary university climate, but not much.

The story is about an exceptionally bright girl named Charlotte Simmons from the mountains of North Carolina who wins a scholarship to Dupont University (Duke). Wolfe follows her through her first semester on campus and draws a very disturbing picture of the campus culture, or at least one salient part of it, and shows how devastating it can be to someone like Charlotte.

Wolfe's novel is a magnifying glass on prestigious American universities which have largely abdicated any responsibility for policing their students personal lives. The result is a campus hedonism that turns people into human kleenex - something to be used, soiled, and thrown away, and for this privilege their parents pay upward of $40,000 per year. Sounds like a great investment.

Kerry Insults Dem's Intelligence

In the aftermath of the 2004 election there was no end of stories telling us either implicitly or explicitly how stupid red staters are for being Christians and voting Republican. Now comes a tacit admission from none other than John Kerry himself that when it comes to demonstrable boneheadedness Democratic voters are hard to beat:

Kerry supporters have charged that voting irregularities in largely Democratic areas made it difficult for voters to cast ballots in the November election. A lawsuit in Ohio cited long lines and a shortage of voting machines in predominantly minority neighborhoods, but the Ohio Supreme Court dismissed the suit.

Kerry also cited examples Sunday of how people were duped into not voting.

"Leaflets are handed out saying Democrats vote on Wednesday, Republicans vote on Tuesday. People are told in telephone calls that if you've ever had a parking ticket, you're not allowed to vote," he said.

If people really did decline to vote because the lines were too long, if they really did believe that they voted on a different day than the opposition, if they really did believe that a parking ticket disqualifies them from voting, then these people shouldn't vote anyway. They lack the basic qualification for being a voter in a free society - an IQ higher than the speed limit.

Democrats are a hoot. They derive a great deal of satisfaction from putting on intellectual airs, but they're forever having to admit that their base is comprised of a bunch of nincompoops. It was Al Gore, after all, who lost the 2000 election because Democrats in Florida were baffled by the ballot. Now John Kerry laments that his supporters couldn't figure out which polling place they were supposed to vote at or even which day they were supposed to show up.

The Dems might take solace from convincing themselves that they lost because Republicans are stupid Christians, but maybe somebody ought to do a study to see how each party would have fared in the last election if the right to vote had been contingent upon the results of an IQ test.

The Center For Naturalism

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost informs us of a new web site devoted to the metaphysical belief system called naturalism and offers a rollicking critique of it.

Naturalism is a comprehensive view of life and the world that says that nature is all there is. There's nothing beyond the natural realm, and all phenomena have explanations rooted in the laws of physics. Naturalism is atheistic and materialistic, that is to say it holds that everything can be reduced to matter and its equivalent forms (e.g. energy).

Such a philosophy allows no room for free-will, a soul, or life after death and denies as well the existence of any transcendent God.

The new web site, called the Center For Naturalism (CFN), seeks to clarify and promote the claims of naturalism and to tease out their implications for modern man.

In tracing these implications the CFN folks try hard to avoid contradicting themselves, but in my opinion they're unsuccessful. Their treatment of free-will and determinism is an example. They strongly and repeatedly reject the notion that man has the ability to choose in a way that makes him morally responsible for his choices.

An individual has free will if at any given existential moment there exists for this person at least two possible outcomes or futures. The naturalist denies that this kind of freedom exists and adopts instead a hard determinism that asserts that at any given moment there is really only one possible future, the future that has been preset by our genetics and the totality of extraneous influences which have acted upon us throughout our existence.

On the page which discusses the tenets of naturalism CFN says this:

[I]ndividuals don't bear originative responsibility for their actions, in the sense of being their first cause. Given the circumstances both inside and outside the body, they couldn't have done other than what they did.

If this is true, if no one can act otherwise than how they do act, then we are no more responsible for our behavior, which is determined by factors over which we have no control, than is a sufferer of Tourette's syndrome responsible for his uncontrollable outbursts. This seems an inescapable consequence of the naturalists' determinism, but then they say:

Nevertheless, we still hold individuals responsible, in the sense of applying rewards and sanctions, so that their behavior stays more or less within the range of what we deem acceptable. This is how people learn to act ethically.

This is double talk. They're using the language of responsibility and reward and punishment (they eschew the word punishment in favor of sanctions, but it amounts to the same thing) to give the impression that they don't really absolve people of their behavior simply because they didn't ultimately choose their actions. Yet these terms only make sense, in the determinist context, as conditioners of behavior.

CFN is not actually endorsing reward or punishment, in fact they cannot, because such words connote merit. Rather they are endorsing the use of pleasant and unpleasant reinforcers to train us like seals to do whatever our societal masters deem to be acceptable. If someone cannot respond in ways pleasing to the conditioners he or she bears no genuine responsibility for that failure, and it is disingenuous for CFN to imply that they believe they do:

Naturalism doesn't undermine the need or possibility of responsibility and morality, but it places them within the world as understood by science.

This claim is almost certainly false. The naturalistic determinism CFN promotes does indeed make morality impossible. Moral behavior is based on the notion that a person ought or should do some things rather than others. If, however, a person can only do whatever it is that she does, if there really is no genuine option available to her, as the naturalistic determinist insists, then there can be no genuine moral choices. Morality does not exist, can not exist, in a purely deterministic world any more than personal responsibility exists.

However, naturalism does call into question the basis for retributive attitudes, namely the idea that individuals could have done otherwise in the situation in which their behavior arose.

This assertion makes it clear that in CFN's opinion no one deserves punishment (or reward) as a consequence of his actions because he could not have done other than what he did. If this is so, however, then there can be no personal responsibility and no morality. There are just things that people do, some of which we like and some of which we don't, but our liking them or disliking them does not make them right or wrong, good or evil.

The irony of CFN's above claim is that if someone did mete out retributive punishment to another he would not be wrong in so doing since he couldn't have done otherwise. If society thinks retributive punishment is just fine, the determinist can't say that society is wrong because society has been shaped by forces outside it's control to think retribution is proper, and CFN has been shaped by forces beyond its control to think that it is improper. If determinism is true then whether punishment actually is wrong in any objective sense is unknowable and meaningless.

Naturalists seek to rid the world of belief in a transcendent moral authority and still hold on to benefits which are possible only if that authority exists. The fact is, as Nietzsche and others have clearly seen for over a century now, that if God is dead there really is no freedom, no moral responsibility, and no morality.

The CFN web site raises other important philosophical questions, some of which we'll take up in future posts. Meanwhile, interested readers might want to visit Evangelical Outpost to read what Carter has to say about it.

Oil and the Dollar

John Tamny at National Review Online talks about why oil prices are so high. He notes that the price is a function not only of increased demand but even more importantly, the falling value of the dollar. Since the barrel price of oil is pegged to the dollar, oil producers' profits suffer when the value of the dollar sags. In order to keep their profit margins up as the worth of the dollar sinks, producers charge more for the oil they sell.

Tamny asserts that the problem actually began back in the 70's when President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard and set it afloat, a point that Bill () has emphasized in his posts here at Viewpoint on numerous occasions.

Tamney says:

Since oil is priced in dollars, it was only natural that the oil price rose substantially in the 1970s. Early in that decade, oil "shocks" were a U.S. phenomenon related to the Federal Reserve's failure to maintain dollar stability, and a world phenomenon to the extent that other currencies followed the dollar's inflationary descent.

The reason why oil producers were far more able to meet economic growth with supply between 1947 and 1967 has to do with the U.S. monetary regime at the time and the fact that the dollar was fixed at $35 an ounce of gold due to the Bretton Woods agreement.

Producers could drill for oil during the Bretton Woods era highly confident that they would receive $2.50 a barrel. As evidenced by the fluctuating oil price since 1971, the floating dollar has introduced major instability that made occasional shortages and gluts inevitable. Oil hit a low of $10 a barrel in 1998, and that low price goes far in explaining why today's price has risen across all currencies.

What is needed is a commitment on the part of the Greenspan Fed to dollar stability, ideally in terms of gold. A message like this would give oil producers the confidence to make up for any shortfalls with new supply. As economists Peter Huber and Mark Mills note in their latest book, The Bottomless Well, we're not running out of oil.

This last assertion is interesting. If it's true that shortfalls in oil availability are not the consequence of limited supply in the ground, then they're obviously the result of factors like manipulation of supply or, less insidiously, limited drilling or refining capabilities. We haven't built a new refinery in twenty years in this country, and we're told that our present capacity can't keep up with the demand. We might ask our profit besotted oil executives why they haven't plowed some of their enormous cash harvests from the last two decades back into production enhancement. Or is that a silly question?

Interesting Quote From WND

"The Bush brothers' refusal to prevent Terri's killing will do lasting political damage to them both," writes Wheeler. "As John Fund of the Wall Street Journal points out, if Janet Reno could override a court order and have Elian Gonzalez kidnapped at gunpoint to be returned to Communist Cuba, either Jeb or George Bush could have overridden Greer to save Terri's life. Her death will be an ineradicable stain on GW's presidency and Jeb's chances for the White House.

...

"If any good is to come of this tragedy it would be to catalyze the recognition among Americans that America is no longer a democracy," Wheeler explains. "It has become a krytocracy, a government of judges. We no longer have a government of, by and for the people. America today is ruled not by elected representatives, but unelected judges, governed not by law but by the arbitrary - and in the case of George Greer, homicidal - whims of people in black robes."

Draining the Swamps

According to the Middle East Media Research Institute Yemen has announced that in order to drain the swamps which breed Islamic extremists they intend to close down 20,000 religious schools which are not under government supervision.

On balance, in Yemen, and knowing what kind of hate-filled religious beliefs are often taught in these schools, this is no doubt a positive development, and one wishes Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries would do likewise. On the other hand, of course, we find ourselves uncomfortable applauding the general idea that government should supervise religious instruction.

Our discomfort raises some interesting questions. Will the first amendment right to freedom of religion only work in a predominantly Christian country? More concretely, has there ever been a non-Christian nation (or government) which genuinely guaranteed freedom of religion? Does Israel? Has any officially Muslim or atheistic government ever granted the freedom to worship and preach whatever religious belief we wished?

I confess I don't know the answers. Perhaps a reader might be able to edify us on the matter.

Racial Disparities in Public Schools

The New York Times has a fascinating account of the racial disparity between the percentages of students in upper and lower level classes in a New Jersey high school:

This is a reality at many high schools coast to coast and one of the side effects of aggressive leveling, the increasingly popular practice of dividing students into ability groups.

I'm not sure what the Times means here by "increasingly popular". I'll bet everyone reading this attended a high school where college-bound students took more intellectually demanding courses than students who were on other tracks. School curricula have been structured this way at least since the 1950's. Even so, this is a minor quibble.

But at Columbia High, the students nearly revolted. Two weeks ago, a black organization on campus planned a walkout to protest the leveling system. Word soon spread to the principal, who pleaded with the students not to go. The student leaders decided to hold an assembly instead, in which they lashed out at the racial gap.

Were the students complaining that some of their classmates are not as bright as others? Exactly what is it about leveling that these students find so intolerable? If there's a racial gap why is that the fault of class levels or of the school?

The student uproar is now forcing district officials to take a hard look at the leveling system and decide how to strike a balance between their two main goals - celebrating diversity and pushing academic achievement.

Of course. If minority students are disproportionately represented in the lower level classes then an obvious solution to liberals is to do away with levels. We don't want students having their self-esteem damaged by being placed in the dunderhead classes, even if they really are dunderheads. Better to diminish the quality of education available to all students than to have some students fall hopelessly behind. Let's celebrate our diversity, not strive for academic excellence.

The superintendent of the district, Peter P. Horoschak, acknowledged that there were, in a sense, two Columbias. The de facto segregation is most visible at the extremes. Statistics for this year show that while a Level 5 math class, the highest, had 79 percent white students, a Level 2 math class, the lowest, had 88 percent black students. Levels 3 and 4 tend to be more mixed, though a school board member, Mila M. Jasey, said, "Some white parents tell me that they know their kid belongs in a Level 3 class but they don't want them to be the only white kid in the class."

The flashpoint of the assembly came when Nathan Winkler, a skinny, intense senior who says he wants to be governor some day, grabbed the microphone and announced that he had no sympathy for people in lower levels because all it took was hard work to move up.

His short outburst was like a cleaver, splitting the student body in two. Many blacks booed him. Many whites cheered. He was then accused of using the term "you people" in his speech - though he did not, according to a videotape of the assembly. After the assembly, he said, he was stalked in the hallways.

"I felt extremely isolated during that assembly," he said. "For the first time I was aware of being part of the minority. White kids are outnumbered at Columbia. I knew that, but I hadn't really felt it before."

Poor Nathan. He has the temerity to tell the minority students, who are in fact the majority, that they have every opportunity to improve their academic status through dint of hard work, and he's booed. Indeed, why should they work harder if they can just pressure the administration to get rid of levels? Mr. Winkler so offended the academic malingerers by his suggestion that they actually try studying and doing homework that they were sure he referred to them by the insufferably crushing epithet "you people", and in good "can't-we-all-just-get-along" fashion, sought to intimidate him in the halls.

The debate over leveling here boils down to fairness. Is it fair just to ensure equal access to upper level classes? Or does fairness go farther than that and require administrators to truly level the playing field so that the racial makeup of upper classes better resembles the racial makeup of the school?

Simply to ask the question is to know the answer. Fairness has nothing to do with equal access, it's all about equal outcomes. Critics of academic levels assume that if kids of one race can't compete with kids of another then the system is unfair and needs to be changed. I wonder if these critics think the school should apply the same principle to their basketball program.

"She's got an entire black population that wants to get rid of the leveling system and an entire white population who would leave this town if they did that," he said. "What's she supposed to do?"

What she's supposed to do is to tell those who want to get rid of the levels that their suggestion is so dopey that it could only have originated among people who spent their own high school years wallowing in classes that an average third grader could master.

It is astounding that actually watering down the more difficult courses is a live option at Columbia. The African-American students seem to be of the view that it is an affront to them that courses are offered which other groups seem able to handle but which they can't. Their solution is to eliminate the disparity by eliminating the difficulty of the course.

All manner of hand-wringing goes on in the article about this situation - what's causing it and how to fix it. Throughout the piece everyone seems to dance around the possibility that the lower academic levels are populated by individuals who in fact actually belong there. This just seems unthinkable to some of the interviewees in the account yet it is almost certainly the case.

Students of whatever race who find themselves on the academic ground floor in most schools in this nation have demonstrated throughout their scholastic career that, as Mr. Winkler trenchantly observed, they are either unable or unwilling to do the work necessary to succeed in the more challenging classes.

The concern at Columbia, of course, is that the lower level students are disproportionately black and the tacit assumption is that they are victims of a subtle racism that assumes that they can't handle upper level work. I find this highly implausible. Had these students shown a scintilla of academic potential at anytime along their march through the lower grades they'd have been seized upon by administrators and teachers desperate for opportunities to tout academic success among their black student body, and they'd have been cultivated and nurtured like rare orchids.

The fact is that black students do poorly, to the extent that they do, not because their schools don't encourage them but because they often don't respond to the encouragement. Why they don't respond varies from student to student, but the reasons are generally an impoverished socio-economic status, a dysfunctional family life, a depauperate urban sub-culture, and inherent inability. Any of these by itself is a millstone around the neck of any student. Two of them together pretty much guarantees that that individual will spend his or her youth in the academic netherworld. It is an extraordinary individual that can overcome the disadvantages imposed by these handicaps, and most kids are not extraordinary. Unfortunately, many urban black kids are encumbered by at least two of them and their prospects for success in school are correspondingly dim.

They are often poor because their families are dysfunctional and their families are sometimes dysfunctional because they're poor. They often have only one parent, no father, and the harried mother simply can't, even if she is inclined, provide the environment for her children necessary for healthy intellectual growth and development.

Kids in the inner city often grow up feral, with too little effective discipline, few or no rules, and minds influenced by dysgenic role models from early on. Rarely encouraged to read until they get to pre-school, they adopt the fashions of the street which dictate that they dress like they're intentionally trying to look as stupid as possible, listen to mind-numbing, degenerate music, and adopt speech habits which render them at best marginally articulate. If a white child spoke as unintelligibly as many of our inner city youth he or she would be taken to a speech therapist.

This urban culture too easily accepts these detriments as well as the disastrous phenomenon of teenage unwed motherhood, which is a socio-economic death sentence for most children born into such a circumstance. The child begins life at a tremendous disadvantage, faced with almost insuperable odds, and, in most cases, manages only to fall further behind every year.

Moreover, the sort of aptitudes necessary to succeed in some academic disciplines don't seem to come easily to such children. Black communities have produced men and women of genius, but only rarely is that genius in fields requiring a mathematical turn of mind. Black students are often unsuited both intellectually and temperamentally for the rigors of math and get frustrated early on in their schooling by the fact that they seem to have to work so much harder than their classmates to understand it. Add to this the lack of effective parental expectations and control at home, and the wonder is not that there are so many black kids in the low levels, but that there are as many as there are in the higher levels.

Even though almost everyone who has had at least one eye open for the last thirty years recognizes these problems, it is nevertheless considered totally unacceptable to give voice to them in polite liberal society. Charles Murray was pilloried for suggesting a couple of decades ago in his book The Bell Curve that blacks may not have, on average, quite the same intellectual potential as other racial groups. Murray was practically drawn and quartered for this transgression of the bounds of tolerable opinion.

Liberals assume that if blacks are underrepresented in the more challenging academic settings they must be being discriminated against. They must be the victims of subtle forms of racism. It is the perennial liberal solution to all racial disparities, at least those which work to the detriment of blacks, to look under the bed for lurking racists. Anyone who offers a modest dissent from the orthodox dogma, is, like Nathan Winkler, booed and intimidated, or worse. It's much easier and much less painful to dilute the curriculum so that everyone can succeed rather than admit and confront the sociological causes of black academic failure.

For the sake of African-American children we need to stop playing feckless games with political correctness. We need to stop acting like the characters in the story The Emperor's New Clothes who all knew the emperor was naked but nevertheless clucked and chortled about how marvelous was his finery. We need to be able to speak frankly, like Bill Cosby has done, about the causes of black failure without being reflexively labeled a racist just because some of that frankness may make people feel uncomfortable or may insult their self-image. Until we do, a large percentage of American children will continue to languish in academic purgatory, continue to drop out of school as soon as they can, and continue to perpetuate the whole culture of failure for generations to come.

Nowhere to Run to

Al Qaida evidently blundered when it initiated terror operations in Saudi Arabia. It must have thought that the high density of Islamists and other sympathizers in the Saudi population would be moved by their boldness to rise up with them in revolt against the Royal family. That didn't happen. Instead it seems that many Saudi's, although sympathetic with al Qaida's aims of getting the United States out of Dar al Islam, resent al Qaida's means for accomplishing that goal.

Now al Qaida finds itself with fewer and fewer safe havens as this Strategy Page account of recent developments in Saudi Arabia makes clear. The Saudi's drew up a list of twenty six most wanted terrorists a couple of years ago. Only three remain at large.

Equilibrium Of A Global Economy

A global economy is a dream come true for multi-national corporations. It means they can acquire services and manufacturing from countries that offer the absolute lowest labor costs on the planet. The human rights and environmental issues that prevail in said countries never enter the picture.

There is, however, one significant implication of a global economy that everyone needs to be aware of. The standard of living among all participating countries will eventually and inevitably reach a point of equilibrium. That will happen simply because competition will force the income of those in the richer countries (the US in particular) to decline while the income of those in the emerging countries will rise.

Consider that if someone in the US earns $20 per hour to provide a service or manufacture a product and someone in China, India, or Mexico performs the same service or manufactures the same product for $1.00 per hour, the laws of economics indicate that the US worker will have to take a pay cut to deter the exportation of their job. At the same time, an increase in demand will cause the pay rate in the competing countries to increase. Eventually, all pay rates will stabilize a some point in between the two original rates. For instance the pay rate of the US worker may be $10.00 per hour and that of the worker in the competing country will end up at $10.00 per hour as well.

At that time, there would be little economic incentive to export more jobs to foreign countries but the damage will have already been done and there will be few decent jobs left in the US. The worker in the US that refuses to work for such compensation will find themselves unemployed while the worker in the foreign country will be more than happy to find such an opportunity.

Personally, I suspect I'll survive this impending disaster but the next generation that is coming into the job market will surely be totally decimated.

Mugged by la Rèalitè

The Weekly Standard has a riveting account by Olivier Guitta of a recent celebration of cultural diversity in Paris. It is the sort of celebration Europe is likely to see much more of in the years ahead:

FREDERIC ENCEL, PROFESSOR OF international relations at the prestigious Ecole Nationale d'Administration in Paris and a man not known for crying wolf, recently stated that France is becoming a new Lebanon. The implication, far-fetched though it may seem, was that civil upheaval might be no more than a few years off, sparked by growing ethnic and religious polarization. In recent weeks, a series of events has underlined this ominous trend.

On March 8, tens of thousands of high school students marched through central Paris to protest education reforms announced by the government. Repeatedly, peaceful demonstrators were attacked by bands of black and Arab youths--about 1,000 in all, according to police estimates. The eyewitness accounts of victims, teachers, and most interestingly the attackers themselves gathered by the left-wing daily Le Monde confirm the motivation: racism.

Some of the attackers openly expressed their hatred of "little French people." One 18-year-old named Heikel, a dual citizen of France and Tunisia, was proud of his actions. He explained that he had joined in just to "beat people up," especially "little Frenchmen who look like victims." He added with a satisfied smile that he had "a pleasant memory" of repeatedly kicking a student, already defenseless on the ground.

Another attacker explained the violence by saying that "little whites" don't know how to fight and "are afraid because they are cowards." Rachid, an Arab attacker, added that even an Arab can be considered a "little white" if he "has a French mindset." The general sentiment was a desire to take revenge on whites."

Sometimes petty theft appeared to be the initial motivation. One or two bullies would approach a student and ask for money or a cell phone. Even if the victim complied right away, they would start beating him or her. A striking account was provided by Luc Colpart, a history and geography teacher and member of the far-left union SUD. Colpart said the scenes of violence were so disturbing that he could not sleep for days. He saw students being beaten or pulled by the hair. He stressed that assailants who stole cell phones smashed them in front of their victims: "It was a game. Hatred and fun."

Colpart, who is active in anti-racist causes, confirmed that "these were racial assaults," and the attackers used "far-right slurs, violent and racist." One black student he saw come to the defense of a fellow student under attack by three blacks was called "a white sellout" by the assailants. Some scores of victims were taken to hospitals. Those who were interviewed confirmed that they had been caught up in an "anti-white" rampage and that the cops did nothing to protect them.

By coincidence, last week the French government's human rights commission delivered to Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin its 2004 report on racism and anti-Semitism in France. The report underscores a worrisome pattern of retreat into separate ethnic communities. And the evidence of hostility is sobering: The number of violent acts and threats nearly doubled, from 833 in 2003 to a record 1,565 in 2004. Of these, 62 percent were directed against Jews, who make up just 1 percent of France's population.

There's much more about this ugly episode and related matters at the link.

Such incidents as this are the consequence of pretending that we can all get along, despite our differences, if we're just sufficiently tolerant of the things which divide us. We delude ourselves into thinking that we can avoid Balkanization of Western societies if we just don't offend those who are different by chauvinistically celebrating the things that should unite us.

Unfortunately, a nation with too little confidence in the rightness of its values to insist that those who would dwell within its borders adopt those values will ultimately find itself unable to hold its disparate ethnic and religious factions together. It will eventually become an object of contempt in the eyes of those who see themselves as having no stake in that nation's history, traditions, or principles.

There's a profound lesson here for the United States.

The Mystery of Consciousness

The Philosopher's Magazine recently passed along this quote from Thomas Huxley:

How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinn when Aladdin rubbed his lamp, or any other ultimate fact of nature.

Indeed, and neuroscientists still marvel that something as astonishing as consciousness could be somehow generated by brute matter and could have evolved through purely mechanistic processes acting blindly and by chance.

How this could be so no one has as yet been able to say. Consciousness is a mystery, like life and gravity. It's hard enough to define it, it's devilishly difficult to understand it, and it seems impossible to explain it. How material substance can give rise to what philosophers refer to as the qualia of experience, sensation and awareness, is a bafflement.

Someday it might all be figured out, but we wonder whether it will ever be explicable in purely materialistic terms. We'll be greatly surprised if it is.