Well, Is It or Isn't It?

Compare this statement by Jamie Gorelick President Clinton's Deputy Attorney General in 1994 --

"The Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes and that the President may, as has been done, delegate this authority to the Attorney General.

"It is important to understand, that the rules and methodology for criminal searches are inconsistent with the collection of foreign intelligence and would unduly frustrate the president in carrying out his foreign intelligence responsibilities." - Jamie Gorelick testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on July 14, 1994 (Thanks to Byron York).

With this statement by Jamie Gorelick today:

"The issue here is this: If you're John McCain and you just got Congress to agree to limits on interrogation techniques, why would you think that limits anything if the executive branch can ignore it by asserting its inherent authority?" 12/20/05 Washington Post, p. A10. (Thanks to Cliff May)

Ms Gorelick's legal opinions concerning what presidents can and cannot do seem clearly to be a function of which party the president is a member of.

Follow Up

Not too long ago I posted an article that discussed the merits of acquiring gold when it had just reached the $540 per ounce area. In it, I pointed out that one might save $10 or $20 dollars if they waited for gold to drop back to a lower level but I also pointed out the risk of being left at the station only to see that the gold train had pulled away...without them.

Perhaps you spoke with your broker about gold. Well, this was most likely one of the guys who was touting the NASDAQ in 2000. I suspect they're not going to recommend gold simply because they stand nothing to gain. They're job is to sell paper...stocks. That's how they make commissions and their living. No, one has to stop listening to the siren songs of the last decade and look around a see what is going on and make their decisions accordingly.

Today, the price of gold has closed at $492 per ounce. Wow, was my statement really bad? Was your broker right after all? Well not really. The number one rule of investing is to not miss a bull market. The only way one can do that is to establish a position and be in...through the short-term highs and lows. Since the price of things fluctuates going up and down, the prudent individual invests over time using a mechanism known as dollar cost averaging. This means they make their acquisitions over time which smoothes out the variations. If I purchased an ounce of gold at $540 and a month later the price is at $460 and I purchase another ounce, my average cost is $500. Similarly, if after I purchased my first ounce, at some time in the future gold is at $620 and I purchase another ounce, my average cost is $580.

The take away message is that there is only one point to remember: in a bull market, (in 2000 gold was at $250 per ounce) the important thing is to establish one's position. The good news is that one doesn't have to plunge into the market hoping, against the odds, that they have gotten in at the bottom. They can implement a disciplined, orderly, regularly scheduled program of acquisition knowing that the ups and downs are smoothed out as they do so. It's next to impossible to buy on the exact low and the risk of trying to do it is that you may find yourself out of the market looking at higher cost to get in.

The price of gold is rising in what is called a channel. The channel can be illustrated by drawing two parallel lines on a graph of the price of gold over years. The lower line traces the lows of the price and the upper line traces the highs. They tend to illustrate the overbought and oversold state of a given item. Given that in 2000, gold was at $250 per ounce, the channel illustrates a bull market is in play. Also, given our governments proclivity to print money, it's no wonder. Last month, gold broke out of that channel to the upside and may be in the process of establishing a new channel at a higher angle of ascent, or it may return to the boundaries of the original channel. It doesn't really matter as ultimately, the trend appears to be up.

So, from a technical analysis perspective, given our channel work, the price of gold could possibly go to the lower line of the channel, approximately $460 - $480 (depending on the time frame) and if that level holds, the price should continue up again to the upper channel line of approximately $520-$540. On the other hand, if the price of gold fails to meaningfully penetrate the upper line of the channel ($480 - $490) a new channel could be established meaning that the rise of gold would be more vertical.

Got that? If not, feel free to drop us a line on the Feedback page and I would be happy to provide more explanation.

Through the last five years of the '90s, the slogan in the stock market was "buy the dips". Sure, it was a bull market and people became conditioned to buy any dips almost guaranteeing a profit. That behavior also ensured the bull market...until 2000 when the bull market was perceived to be a bubble and finally burst. Unfortunately, as the markets continued to plummet, they "bought the dips" like conditioned white rats (see B.F. Skinner on behavioral modification, reinforcement history and classical conditioning) during the corrections higher only to find the trend ultimately going lower. Since I believe the bull market in gold has 5 to 10 years to go, the "buy the dips" strategy makes sense once again but personally, I would only use it as a supplement to my basic strategy of dollar cost averaging mentioned above.

Lastly, gold is insurance against the loss of one's wealth through the erosion of inflation and a general disenchantment and distrust of fiat currencies around the globe. Since it appears that this erosion is going to continue for the foreseeable future, it explains why the trend in the price of gold is up and it matters little if one acquires gold at every periodic bottom. What matters is that they acquire gold.

Hiding WMD

This report just about cinches the speculation that Syria has a death wish:

LONDON - Syria has signed a pledge to store Iranian nuclear weapons and missiles. The London-based Jane's Defence Weekly reported that Iran and Syria signed a strategic accord meant to protect either country from international pressure regarding their weapons programs. The magazine, citing diplomatic sources, said Syria agreed to store Iranian materials and weapons should Teheran come under United Nations sanctions.

Iran also pledged to grant haven to any Syrian intelligence officer indicted by the UN or Lebanon. Five Syrian officers have been questioned by the UN regarding the Hariri assassination, Middle East Newsline reported.

"The sensitive chapter in the accord includes Syria's commitment to allow Iran to safely store weapons, sensitive equipment or even hazardous materials on Syrian soil should Iran need such help in a time of crisis," Jane's said. The accord also obligated Syria to continue to supply the Iranian-sponsored Hizbullah with weapons, ammunition and communications. Iran has been the leading weapons supplier to Hizbullah, with about 15,000 missiles and rockets along the Israeli-Lebanese border.

The accord, negotiations of which began in 2004, was signed on Nov. 14 and meant to prepare for economic sanctions imposed on either Iran or Syria. Under the accord, Jane's said, Iran would relay financial aid to Syria in an effort to ease Western sanctions in wake of the UN determination that Damascus was responsible for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Iran also pledged to supply a range of military aid to Syria. Jane's cited technology for weapons of mass destruction as well as conventional arms, ammunition and training of Syrian military. Teheran would seek to upgrade Syrian ballistic missiles and chemical weapons systems. Under the accord, Iran would also be prepared to operate "advanced weapon systems in Syria during a military confrontation." Jane's said.

Hmmm. We thought Iran's pursuit of nuclear power was completely peaceful. Odd that they'd be signing accords to hide weapons they have no intention of building. And another thing: might this report hold some clue as to where Iraq's WMD disappeared to? Just wondering.

The Dover Decision

Judge John E. Jones has rendered his decision on the Dover Intelligent Design case and although we differ with him at several points in his 138 page opinion we agree generally with his conclusion:

The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board's ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.

Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs' scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.

To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an Case 4:04-cv-02688-JEJ Document 342 Filed 12/20/2005 Page 137 of 139 imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy.

The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

To preserve the separation of church and state mandated by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and Art. I, � 3 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, we will enter an order permanently enjoining Defendants from maintaining the ID Policy in any school within the Dover Area School District, from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution, and from requiring teachers to refer to a religious, alternative theory known as ID.

The Dover Board members who sought to to get ID into the schools made at least two mistakes. They were clearly motivated by religious impulses in what they did and, as the judge points out elsewhere in his decision, they utterly failed the Supreme Court's Lemon test for acceptable intrusions of religious content into public schools.

Secondly, they sought to fight this out as a battle over whether ID is real science rather than as a conflict between competing views in the philosophy of science which is what it really is.

At any rate, the decision does seem narrow, applying, as it does, specifically to Dover, and we haven't had a chance yet to see what legal minds on both sides of the issue think about how this will effect other attempts to have ID presented in schools. One thing, however, is almost certain: very few schools are going to be willing to take the risk of introducing ID formally into a science curriculum after what happened in the Dover case.

Whose Side Are They On?

John Hinderaker at PowerLine.com offers this analysis of the media brouhaha over the New York Times story about secret surveillance of al Qaeda allies in the U.S. He makes an excellent point about what the constitution says about search warrants, but the most chilling stuff is in the last paragraph. The leakers and the Times, in their Ahab-like pursuit of the Bush administration, may well have made it very much more difficult to protect our families from terrorist attacks on our soil.

Hinderaker writes:

[T]hose who leap to the conclusion that the intercepts must be unconstitutional seem to assume that all searches require a warrant. That is not correct. The Fourth Amendment prohibits "unreasonable" searches and seizures. Warrantless searches are legal, and appropriately so, in a number of circumstances.

Second, the issue of speed is critical. When we capture a cell phone or laptop being used by a terrorist, it is usually because we captured or killed the terrorist. The amount of time we have to exploit the capture is very short. The terrorists will soon figure out that their confederate is out of business, and stop using his cell phone numbers and email addresses. So if we are to benefit from the capture, we must begin obtaining information right now.

A delay of even a few days may render the information useless, as the terrorists will have realized that their colleague has been neutralized. And it is likely that the first hours or even minutes after we obtain a cell phone number or email address are most apt to yield helpful new information. So it is easy to see why going through the process needed to obtain a warrant from the FISA court would undermine the effectiveness of our anti-terror operations.

This is entirely different from the situation we are all familiar with, where wiretaps are authorized against organized crime figures. Such wiretaps are not executed in connection with an arrest. They often continue for months or even years. There is ordinarily nothing about the context to suggest that the utility of the wiretap will expire in a matter of days, if not hours. Hence the delay required to obtain a warrant is usually immaterial.

Under the circumstances we face in dealing with the terrorist threat, is it unreasonable--the Constitutional standard--to begin immediately intercepting calls being made to a captured terrorist cell phone, whether those calls originate in the U.S. or another country? Of course not.

I'm just guessing here, but I suspect that we have technology in place that allows us to begin intercepting phone calls within a matter of minutes after we learn of a phone number being used by an al Qaeda operative overseas. My guess is that there is a system into which our military can plug a new phone number, and begin receiving intercepts almost immediately. I hope so, anyway; and I'm guessing that the disclosure of this system to al Qaeda is one of the reasons why President Bush is so unhappy with the New York Times. If we do have such a technology, it certainly would help to explain the remarkable fact that the terrorists haven't executed a successful attack on our soil since September 2001. And the disclosure of such a system, by leaking Democrats in the federal bureaucracy and the New York Times, makes it more likely, by an unknowable percentage, that al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations will launch successful attacks in the future.

There certainly seems to be cause here for an investigation into the source of this story. The leakers should be prosecuted and the Times should be economically punished by Americans fed up with the casual attitude displayed by liberals toward our national security. Perhaps it is time to indeed begin to start questioning the Left's patriotism, especially in light of the fact that, as Byron York demonstrates in an article at National Review Online, what the Bush administration did was done by every president, at least since Reagan.

Moreover, it was a policy vigorously defended by the Democrats in the Clinton administration whose point man (woman) on the issue was Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick. Gorelick argued in 1994 that the president has the power to do just what George Bush is being pilloried by Democrats for doing today. These people either have no memory or they are astonishing hypocrites.

Symposium on Torture

A number of Christian thinkers have been invited to participate at Evangelical Outpost in a symposium on the question of the use of torture:

"Torture is not always impermissible," argues Charles Krauthammer in "The Truth About Torture", his provocative essay in The Weekly Standard. "However rare the cases, there are circumstances in which, by any rational moral calculus, torture not only would be permissible but would be required (to acquire life-saving information). And once you've established the principle, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, all that's left to haggle about is the price. In the case of torture, that means that the argument is not whether torture is ever permissible, but when--i.e., under what obviously stringent circumstances: how big, how imminent, how preventable the ticking time bomb."

The "truth" about torture is an issue being widely addressed throughout the country, yet our sense is that the Christian intellectual community has been relatively silent on this important issue. We believe a symposium of this nature could significantly aid and inform the Church and the wider culture and help provide clarification on the principles involved in judging this practice. In order to open the dialogue we have asked several leading Christian ethicists and opinion journalists to respond to Dr. Krauthammer's article and to address the questions: "What is the truth about torture from a Christian worldview? Is torture ever allowed? And if so, under what conditions and circumstances?"

The symposiasts include: Darrell Cole, John Jefferson Davis, Daniel Heimbach, Mark Liederbach, Kenneth Magnuson, Albert Mohler, Richard John Neuhaus, and Robert Vischer and their essays can be found here.

Kinsley's Anti-Torture Argument

It looks as if the McCain amendment on torture has unstoppable momentum. Evidently, our intrepid Congressmen and women are scared to death of being seen as even remotely in favor of being mean to terrorists. But as I've written on several occasions recently it's a mistake to embrace a prohibition on cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment without clarifying exactly what cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment are. Without guidance on this matter American interrogators are going to be very reluctant to aggressively question detainees, and consequently innocent people are going to die.

There should indeed be laws governing the treatment of prisoners, but to ban absolutely anything that could be construed by a sufficiently clever or creative lawyer as cruel or degrading is to needlessly jeopardize peoples' lives. Even so, Michael Kinsley disagrees and asks some thoughtful questions of those who believe, as I do, that laws against torture should not be absolutized. For starters, he poses this scenario:

What if you knew for sure that the cute little baby burbling and smiling at you from his stroller in the park was going to grow up to be another Hitler, responsible for a global cataclysm and millions of deaths? Would you be justified in picking up a rock and bashing his adorable head in? Wouldn't you be morally depraved if you didn't?

Tough question, of course, but ethical conundrums which rely upon situations that can't possibly occur in the real world are singularly unhelpful in clarifying important issues. In the real world there simply is no possible way anyone could know what Kinsley posits, so he's proposing an impossible state of affairs and then asking what one would do. There's no way to answer the question.

Or what if a mad scientist developed a poison so strong that two drops in the water supply would kill everyone in Chicago? And you could destroy the poison, but only by killing the scientist and 10 innocent family members? Should you do it?

This scenario, or one like it, is much more plausible than the first and indeed has occured frequently since 9/11. We have a chance to kill a high-value terrorist murderer but certain of his innocent family members may be killed as well. Would it be wrong to do it? Not necessarily. If this is the only practical way to get the terrorist and as long as the deaths of his family are incidental to the attack on the terrorist then, although it would be tragic, it would not be immoral. It would be to a pacifist, of course, but I don't believe Kinsley to be a pacifist.

Or what if an international terrorist planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in Manhattan, set to go off in an hour and kill a million people. You've got him in custody, but he won't say where the bomb is. Is it moral to torture him until he gives up the information?

Yes, of course, provided that no more pain is applied than what is necessary to elicit the information. Even John McCain agrees with this. He just wants to make it illegal and say it'd be acceptable, in an instance such as Kinsley proposes, to break the law.

Indeed, it's a strange aspect of McCain's proposal that almost everyone who has talked about it, including John McCain himself, and most recently Colin Powell, have said that, although there should be no exceptions to the ban on torture, there are circumstances which would make violating the law against it the right thing to do, and that the person who breaks the law in those circumstances should expect that the law will take them into account. In other words, they're saying, torture is not always wrong, but we should pretend that it is. This is a rather unsatisfactory way of looking at the matter. Kinsley himself admits the inadequacy of this position:

But what about [the ticking time bomb] conundrum? Will you eschew torture even when a few minutes of it, applied to a very bad person, would save a million lives? One answer is that the law wouldn't really be enforced in such an extreme situation....Surely [though] every law should at least aspire to be enforced. Or-an even more modest standard-a law should not depend on unenforceability for its very justification. Furthermore, a law expresses a social norm even apart from its enforcement. If the hypothetical situation ever arises, something will happen. What do we want that something to be?

But back to Kinsley's main argument:

If you would torture to save a million lives, would you do it for half a million? A thousand? Two dozen? What if there's only a two-out-of-three chance that person you're torturing has the crucial information? A 50-50 chance? One chance in 10? At what point does your moral calculus change, and why?

Good question, but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be done to save even a single life. Nevertheless, his question about uncertainty is more difficult. It's not without analogs, however. We face the same problem with capital punishment. Just as in legal cases in which a man may be sentenced to death, we have to be as sure as we can be that the person being interrogated actually possesses the information needed to save lives. Sometimes we may be wrong, but we must do everything practical, given the circumstances, to insure that we're not.

Kinsley continues with his cross-examination:

What about someone wholly innocent? It's hard to imagine a situation where someone who refuses to supply life-saving information could be considered "innocent." But it's not impossible [i.e. suppose the terrorist is unbreakable under pressures applied to his person, but he has a child he dearly loves...] In this cold, hard world, allegedly facing a challenge greater than any the civilized world has faced before, would you torture an innocent individual for five minutes [if it would make the terrorist talk] in order to spare a million innocents from death?

No. The position taken here at Viewpoint is not utilitarian. The utilitarian would argue that the pain sufferered by a single individual is outweighed by the good of saving the lives of the many and therefore the infliction of the pain is the right thing to do. This is unacceptable. The Biblical command to do justice is a morally binding absolute, and if justice means anything, it means that you don't willfully and intentionally harm innocent people, even if it's to accomplish some great good.

If you say yes, [it's okay to] go ahead and torture an innocent person, you have pretty much abandoned the various exquisite moral distinctions that eased your previous abandonment of an absolute ban on torture. But if you say no, [because] my own moral hygiene, or my country's, forbids the torture of an innocent individual, even if the indirect but predictable consequence is a million human deaths, you are more or less back in the camp of the anti-torture absolutists whose simple-minded moral vanity you find so irritating.

Kinsley errs here in confusing the absolutes in question. Just as there is a vast moral gap between murdering an innocent child and executing the thug who murdered her, so, too, is there a vast moral gap between absolutizing torture and absolutizing justice. The presumptive reason for banning torture is that in the usual case it is either uncompassionate or unjust, but in the instance of using pain or degrading treatment on someone who plans to cause the deaths of others, in order to prevent those deaths, it would be uncompassionate or unjust to fail to do so.

Having said that, I should add that I see no objection to deceiving a terrorist into mistakenly believing that his loved one is being tortured if this were the only way to elicit life-saving information from him. Such a tactic, however, would probably be prohibited as "inhuman" under McCain.

Finally, it should be noted that liberals, who scoff at the slippery slope argument when it comes to gay marriage, who fondle nuances like Midas fondled gold, who disparaged Ronald Reagan twenty years ago for having a too simplistic view of the world, and who otherwise abhor absolutes, are now, when it comes to torture, embracing the slippery slope argument, disdaining nuance, and reveling in simplistic absolutes. If the subject matter weren't so somber it'd be funny.

The Only Alternatives: ID or the Multiverse

Physicist Leonard Susskind has written a book titled, Cosmic Landscape: String theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design in which he seeks to explain away the fine-tuning of the universe by offering the hope that there are something like ten to the 500th power universes out there all with different laws and constants so that one of them just has to be like ours. He suggests that there really are only two options: The existence of zillions of universes, so many that we cannot comprehend the number (To get an idea of the size of the number there are only ten to the 80th atoms in the whole of our universe), or there is only one universe and it was intentionally designed by a cosmic intelligence.

New Scientist runs an interview with Susskind by Amanda Gefter. She asks him:

Gefter: So even if you accept the multiverse and the idea that certain local physical laws are anthropically determined, you still need a unique mega-theory to describe the whole multiverse? Surely it just pushes the question back?

Susskind: Yes, absolutely. The bottom line is that we need to describe the whole thing, the whole universe or multiverse. It's a scientific question: is the universe on the largest scales big and diverse or is it homogeneous? [i.e. Is it many universes or just one, Viewpoint] We can hope to get an answer from string theory and we can hope to get some information from cosmology.

There is a philosophical objection called Popperism that people raise against the landscape idea. Popperism [after the philosopher Karl Popper] is the assertion that a scientific hypothesis has to be falsifiable, otherwise it's just metaphysics. Other worlds, alternative universes, things we can't see because they are beyond horizons, are in principle unfalsifiable and therefore metaphysical - that's the objection. But the belief that the universe beyond our causal horizon is homogeneous is just as speculative and just as susceptible to the Popperazzi.

Gefter: If we do not accept the landscape idea are we stuck with intelligent design?

Susskind: I doubt that physicists will see it that way. If, for some unforeseen reason, the landscape turns out to be inconsistent - maybe for mathematical reasons, or because it disagrees with observation - I am pretty sure that physicists will go on searching for natural explanations of the world. But I have to say that if that happens, as things stand now we will be in a very awkward position. Without any explanation of nature's fine-tunings we will be hard pressed to answer the ID critics. One might argue that the hope that a mathematically unique solution will emerge is as faith-based as ID.

Nuclear physicist David Heddle responds:

Susskind's answer shows that his book should be subtitled String Theory and the Possible Illusion of Intelligent Design. He has done nothing whatsoever to disprove fine-tuning. Nothing. He has only countered it with a religious speculation in scientific language, a God of the Landscape. Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, he tells us that we should embrace the String Theory landscape, not in spite of its ugliness, but rather because of it. Physics should change its paradigm and sing praises to inelegance. Out with Occam's razor, in with Rube Goldberg. Out with reductionism, in with lots of free parameters. Why? Because if we don't (according to Suskind) there really is no way to explain the fine-tuning, except by Intelligent Design. He even likens, in his last sentence quoted above, those physicists who search for the antithesis of his landscape, a simple, beautiful fundamental theory, to IDers.

I think he is correct. For a fundamental theory that predicted all the constants would be a "win" for ID-it would destroy the only real threat to cosmological ID: multiple universes with varying laws of physics.

The subtext (at times explicit) in Susskind's book is that fine-tuning is real, in the sense that our universe really does exist on a knife's edge, so much so that it demands attention. The only possible way that it is an illusion is if our universe is but one of many. To save materialism, Susskind argues that we must explain this fine-tuning, and his landscape [i.e. that there are zillions of universes] has the best chance of playing the role of a white knight.

Susskind's argument demonstrates the desperation of materialists who wish to escape the conclusion that there is an intelligence behind the cosmos. He is willing to jettison the criteria of testability, falsifiability and Occam's razor and accept on faith, without any evidence, that there exits a nearly infinite number of other worlds. With so much cosmological variety, he believes, one of those other worlds just has to possess the extraordinary complex of features required to support life. Thus our universe is not so extraordinary after all.

Susskind's interview makes it plain that the battle over Intelligent Design is not one between science and religion but rather between two different philosophical views of the world. Susskind says that our universe certainly appears to be intricately well-ordered and planned for living things, but that any apparent purpose and intention woven into the parameters of the universe are simply illusions. Given the fact that so many universes exist, he asserts, the existence of one as improbable as ours becomes much less astonishing.

The intelligent design theorist counters that the only evidence we have tells us that this universe is the only one that exists. It tells us that our world is singular, unique, and alone and that this is in any event the most parsimonious hypothesis. Thus we think we see purpose and intentional engineering in the fabric of the cosmos because it's really there, and the only reason one would have for failing to accept this conclusion is an a priori metaphysical commitment to atheism which is not a very scientific approach to the search for truth.

Should anyone question why everyone seems to agree that the universe at least appears to be deliberately fine-tuned we commend either or both of the following: Modern Physics and Ancient Faith by Stephen Barr and Nature's Destiny by Michael Denton.

Time's POTY

Of all the people in the world who have done magnificent things for humanity in the past year Time couldn't find any to surpass Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono for their person of the year!? They announce their award with this silly bit of nonsense:

For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow, Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono are TIME's Persons of the Year.

See Michelle Malkin for some worthy alternatives.

In addition to Malkin's suggestions we would have liked to have seen consideration given to our military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pope John Paul II, The Iraqi soldiers and police, George Bush, Condaleeza Rice, or the U.S. Coast Guard crews who rescued so many along the Gulf Coast after Katrina.

We don't wish to sound like we're disparaging the Gates' or Bono for the contributions they've made, but in terms of making an impact on the world in 2005, none of them, especially Melinda Gates, has done what any of the above have done. We think Time is just trivializing their award in an attempt to be politically correct and to avoid giving credit to either the Bush administration or anything remotely associated with it.

Christian Beliefs II

Why place the authority of Scripture next after belief in God in order of logical significance to a Christian's set of beliefs? The existence of God is something which presents itself to us through natural revelation, through the world and our experience in the world, but apart from special revelation, i.e. the Bible, none of the claims of Christianity have any grounds for belief. Extra-biblical sources offer only scant mention of the existence of Jesus let alone anything about him of religious significance. All we would have to rely upon would be an oral tradition that would be expected to be distorted over centuries of time and hence of exceedingly dubious reliability.

So, unless the Bible, or at least the New Testament portion of it, is held to be authoritative in the life of the individual and of the church there is very little reason to believe any of what Christians do, in fact, believe. There is, apart from what's contained in the New Testament, nothing we can know that is unique to Christianity. This is, of course, why skeptics are at such pains to discredit the historical relaibility of the New Testament. They realize that in doing so they strike at the heart of Christian faith.

What, then, does the New Testament tell us that is of vital and essential importance to a Christian understanding of the world? Most fundamentally it tells us that man is burdened by a kind of spiritual affliction. It teaches us that we're out of harmony with God, alienated from him, and headed for cosmic ruin. There is about us some sort of fatal flaw that we have inherited from our earliest progenitors, something philosopher Alvin Plantinga has suggested might be called trans-world depravity, that influences us to often choose evil rather than good.

How this has come to be the Bible doesn't make precisely clear but that it is the case that man often chooses evil is abundantly confirmed by our daily newspapers.

The story we glean from the Bible goes something like this, if I can be permitted to fill in some gaps with speculation: God is characterized as, inter alia, the perfection of love. Love "desires" something to give itself to, to lavish itself upon, and so God created the world, and specifically mankind, as objects of His love, much as parents create a child to love.

God wished to live in a maximally fulfilling love relationship with man, but such a relationship requires that love be both freely given and freely requited. God could have created us in such a way that we had no choice but to love Him in return, but that would have been to create us as robots. It would have been like programming the screen saver on your computer to flash the message "I love you" over and over. Thus, God made us free to choose to love Him or not, and in so doing He bestowed upon us the essential element of our humanity and the sine qua non of our dignity, our freedom.

Our relationship to God is like the relationship of a bride to her husband. God institutues marriage between a man and a woman for many reasons but one is to illustrate for us our relationship to Him and to remind us of it every day.

Man has used this freedom badly and unwisely, however, and in so doing has alienated himself from God. The Bible suggests that we're like an unfaithful bride whose husband comes home to find her cavorting with His worst enemy. We have demanded our autonomy. As a race, we've made it plain that we don't wish to be tied down to Him. Our infidelity has alienated us from God, the source of our life, and consequently death is our fate - both physical death and eternal separation from the source of life, the source of all that is good in our existence. This is what it means to be "fallen."

Yet, though broken-hearted and crushed by our continued betrayals, God has not abandoned us. Throughout the ages He has continued to woo us, to cajole us, to try win our love back to Him.

"But," the skeptic will object, "You've given no reason, no proof, why one should believe this story or the Bible that contains it."

That's true. I haven't, nor could I. There is plenty of evidence that suggests that, at the very least, the Bible is correct in its significant historical affirmations, but the evidence is not dispositive. It doesn't amount to a logical proof. Someone who wishes to withhold belief will certainly be able to find reasons to do so.

The fundamental question is this: Do we trust the Biblical witnesses to be writing the essential truth, or don't we? If the narrative I've traced resonates with us, and if we are not already dead set against the Christian worldview, then perhaps we're willing to give the Biblical witnesses the benefit of the doubt. If we are totally opposed to the Christian story, however, if it would upset us beyond our endurance were it to be true, then we simply won't accept their testimony. Whether we accept it or not, though, is not a matter of intellect, it's a matter of the heart. It's a matter of whether we would be delighted or disappointed to discover that the story of man's redemption as related in the Bible is true.

The Christian desires it to be true and finds the evidence sufficient to warrant his confidence in it. There's no point in trying to convince someone who doesn't wish it to be true that it is, since such a person's objections are not intellectual but emotional or psychological. At any rate, for the remainder of this series on basic Christian beliefs we'll simply follow the Christian assumption that the Bible is reliable in conveying truth about God's plan to win us back to Him. The next thing we need to understand about that plan is that our physical death is not the end of our existence.

What's Heaven Like

Boston College philosophy professor and popular writer Peter Kreeft addresses himself to 35 questions commonly asked about heaven. Even if you don't agree with everything he says his answers will still make you think.

On the matter of heaven, by the way, we never tire of recommending C.S. Lewis' little novel The Great Divorce.

The Fruit of Cultural Relativism

They won't be celebrating the joys of multi-cultural diversity in Australia any time soon, nor in Sweden, we wouldn't think:

In Australia this week amidst anger over an Islamic man's rape conviction and the bashing of two Aussie life savers, working-class locals erupted in a rampage of anger and brawling in some of the worst racial riots in decades. But there is more to the story than is being repeated in the American mainstream media....

Four days after he set foot in Australia, the rape spree began. And during his sexual assault trial in a New South Wales courtroom, the Pakistani man began to berate one of his tearful 14-year-old victims because she had the temerity to shake her head at his testimony.

But she had every reason to express her disgust. After taking an oath on the Qur'an, the man - known only as MSK - told the court he had committed four attacks on girls as young as 13 because they had no right to say "no." They were not covering their face or wearing a headscarf, and therefore, the rapist proclaimed: "I'm not doing anything wrong."

MSK is already serving a 22-year jail term for leading his three younger brothers in a gang rape of two other young Sydney girls in 2002. In his own defence, he argued that his cultural background, was responsible for his crimes. And he is right.

In some parts of Pakistan, sexual assault - including gang rape - is officially sanctified as a legitimate form of enforcing the social value system. One village council recently ordered that five young girls should be "abducted, raped or murdered" for refusing to be treated as chattel. The girls were aged between six and thirteen when they were married without their knowledge, to pay a family debt.

And when Mukhtar Mai's 12-year-old brother was alleged to have committed an offence in a small Pakistani farming village, the village council ordered that his sister be gang-raped. So, she was taken to a hut where four men repeatedly assaulted her. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan there were 804 cases of such officially orchestrated sexual assault in 2000, and 434 of these were gang rapes. And if that isn't bad enough, the victims of these atrocities are then expected to commit suicide because rape victims bring irreparable shame upon their family.

So as MSK committed his acts of rape while visiting Australia, he was simply perpetuating his own cultural heritage. He hails from a society where officially sanctioned sexual violence is commonly employed as a means to enforce the subservience of women. And this is where two fundamental tenets of the modern Left clash: the irresistible force of cultural relativism collides with the immovable object of gender equality. But in the 21st century it is the latter that must prevail.

The laissez faire attitudes of cultural relativism are unacceptable in modern society. Female genital mutilation is not some quaint tribal custom that we are bound to respect: it is barbarism, pure and simple. Yet many Western leftists habitually excuse these crimes against women in order to maintain political solidarity with their allies in the Islamic world. After all, it would be tough to make common cause with Muslim groups in the antiwar movement if Progressives began to criticize the practice of polygamy.

But along with Islamic immigration to the West have come Third World value systems regarding the treatment of women. We must not be seduced by the false tenets of cultural relativism into a toleration of forced marriages, officially sanctioned rape, and honour killings. Australia's unique brand of multiculturalism confers both rights and obligations: while cultural and linguistic diversity are to be cherished, every Australian must subscribe to a single standard of human rights. Australians must forcefully repudiate the corruption of the multicultural idea that would condone crimes against women and support jihadism.

And it's not just Australia. Read this chilling report from Sweden. The phenomenon of Muslim rape in Western countries appears to be one of those stories that the MSM would rather not tell, but which seems to be busting out all over.

Who Will Rid Us of This Madman?

Recapping Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call for the destruction of Israel and his denial of the holocaust, Charles Krauthammer writes this:

To be sure, Holocaust denial and calls for Israel's destruction are commonplace in the Middle East. They can be seen every day on Hezbollah TV, in Syrian media, in Egyptian editorials appearing in semiofficial newspapers. But none of these aspiring mass murderers are on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons that could do in one afternoon what it took Hitler six years to do: destroy an entire Jewish civilization and extinguish 6 million souls.

Everyone knows where Iran's nuclear weapons will be aimed. Everyone knows they will be put on Shahab rockets, which have been modified so that they can reach Israel. And everyone knows that if the button is ever pushed, it will be the end of Israel.

But it gets worse. The president of a country about to go nuclear is a confirmed believer in the coming apocalypse. Like Judaism and Christianity, Shiite Islam has its own version of the messianic return -- the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam. The more devout believers in Iran pray at the Jamkaran mosque, which houses a well from which, some believe, he will emerge.

When Ahmadinejad unexpectedly won the presidential elections, he immediately gave $17 million of government funds to the shrine. Last month Ahmadinejad said publicly that the main mission of the Islamic Revolution is to pave the way for the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam.

And as in some versions of fundamentalist Christianity, the second coming will be accompanied by the usual trials and tribulations, death and destruction. Iranian journalist Hossein Bastani reported Ahmadinejad saying in official meetings that the hidden imam will reappear in two years.

So a Holocaust-denying, virulently anti-Semitic, aspiring genocidist, on the verge of acquiring weapons of the apocalypse, believes that the end is not only near but nearer than the next American presidential election. (Pity the Democrats. They cannot catch a break.) This kind of man would have, to put it gently, less inhibition about starting Armageddon than a normal person. Indeed, with millennial bliss pending, he would have positive incentive to, as they say in Jewish eschatology, hasten the end.

Negotiations to deny this certifiable lunatic genocidal weapons have been going nowhere. Everyone knows they will go nowhere. And no one will do anything about it.

Well, no one in Europe or on the American Left is likely to do anything, that's for sure. Whether no one at all will do anything remains to be seen this March.

AFR

From the folks at Americans for a Free Republic:

Could a full convertible gold standard be legally implemented in today's world with the amount of paper currency that has been floated by the Fed throughout the 20th century? No, it couldn't. But tomorrow's world is going to be radicalized beyond our conventional imaginations of today. America's almighty dollar could possibly go the way of the Argentine peso. That is how serious the mess is that we are in. Would the call for a new money system free from government manipulation resonate with voters in the midst of such a disaster? It certainly would; but we will need to have strong, articulate voices manning the megaphones to explain why and how.

The great majority of economists in our government and in our colleges today will naturally attempt to deny the necessity of such a step, becoming almost apoplectic upon hearing that the utilization of gold money is being advocated. They will go to great lengths to try and convince their audiences that the economy's money supply must be continually inflated via the Federal Reserve in order to produce growth. But this is totally erroneous! America's productive growth during the 19th century was spectacular, and there was no Federal Reserve pumping unconvertible paper money into the system at all.

For example, the Consumer Price Index decreased by 30% from 43 to 30 between the years 1800 and 1913 (an average of 1/4 percent per year). This was because the money supply of this time, being tied to gold, was next to impossible to expand with a printing press in excess of the growth of goods and services. As a result, there was no upward pressure on prices.

In contrast, today we no longer use gold as money, but paper printed by the Federal Reserve as it sees fit. As a result, the Consumer Price Index increased by 1,663% from 30 to 529 in the years 1913 to 2000. This was because the money supply was created at a far faster rate than the production of goods and services -- all of which should tell us quite clearly that government money managers are not reliable and never will be, and that a fiat paper money system will never be stable. [The above percentages are taken from The World Almanac 2002, p. 103.]

When the above figures are combined with other vital 19th century statistics, we readily see that the Keynesian claim of "growth needing inflation" is a fallacy. During the 19th century due to the dollar being backed by gold, we enjoyed gently deflationary prices (the beneficial kind of deflation) and yet also rapid economic growth of all goods and services. America's GDP increased over 500% in just the years 1870 to 1913, averaging 4.3% annual growth, and real wages for the workingman tripled. In comparison, we average about 2.5% annual growth today, real wages are stagnant, and we are plagued by inflationary prices brought on by the Federal Government's relentless monetary expansion, with a possible gargantuan credit collapse now looming ahead to balance our government created excesses. [These figures are taken from The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present, Fairfield Publishers, 1960, pp. 91, 141, 409, 413.]

The Keynesian claim of monetary inflation being a requisite for healthy economic growth is thus totally in error. So also is its claim that only with government control over the currency and banking system can we have "stability" in our economy. Growth will take place very nicely without government inflation of the money supply; and what's more, it will be real growth, not the frenzied, speculative, boom-bust kind of growth our Great Society dreamers have given us. As for stability, how can any logical observer of the 20th century claim that the Fed's inflationary monetary policy has given us stability? Yet this was the publicly announced reason for the Fed's creation in 1913. It was going to be the great "stabilizer" of the banking system and our economy. Yet it has brought us precisely the opposite.

The reason the collectivists throughout the country oppose the stable monetary policy of a gold-backed system is because they know their ever-expanding welfare state is tied directly to Keynesian inflationary policy. Without the ability to egregiously inflate the money supply year after year, the vast panoply of big government programs could not be financed because American citizens would not pay for such fiscal extravagance with taxes. Without such welfare programs, the collectivists' egalitarian dream of a Great Planned Society, regulated and manipulated from Washington, is dead.

The future of America lies in ending the Keynsian inflation-deflation cycle. This requires the restoration of a gold-backed money system. The answer to so many of our problems would come if we would just end excessive monetary inflation by the Fed. Prices of goods and services would stop relentlessly rising. Excessive labor union demands would subside. Capital formation would increase. True prosperity would result. Poverty would shrink at a faster pace. Yet life would churn at a more moderate and predictable pace. The elderly would be able to keep the security they worked for. Jobs would stop leaving America for third world countries. And we could all get off this infuriating treadmill of never quite catching up with our bills. In general, life would again be stable, productive, and free rather than the speculative, frenzied, Washington managed economy that has evolved under the whip of collectivist-liberal ideology.

It's interesting to note that in the last 80 years, the economic cycle of boom and bust has been experienced and seemingly accepted as the natural order of things. I wonder how long the American people will continue to be sheared like sheep by the money masters.

The following, from the same link, sounds almost radical but given that this country was established as a republic and not a democracy (pdf), it's actually quite appropriate.

But such a flat tax must be a REAL flat tax, not the imposters put forth by the likes of Steve Forbes and Dick Armey. These two attempts to promote a flat tax were no answers at all because of their huge personal exemptions ($36,000 for a family of four). They would greatly increase the amount of people who pay zero taxes, and thus the amount of people who have infinite demand for government services. This type of "tax reform" is totally assinine. If we wish to shut down the inferno of government growth and spending, then we must truly shut down the PROGRESSIVE RATES that are causing its relentless expansion, which means all voters must pay the same rates, which means no exemptions!

As sure as the sun will come up tomorrow, however, liberals will attack any genuine "equal rate tax" as unfair to the poor people. So if a floor is to be established under which no one will have to pay the tax, i.e., an exemption for those under the poverty level, then a provision must be included in the tax bill stating that those who are exempted from paying are to also be excluded from voting. Remember we are trying to restore a RESPONSIBLE electorate and legislature. This cannot be done if voters get their services free. All who vote must pay the tax period! This is the only way they will act responsibly. This is human nature. After all, we deny children the right to vote. Why do we do this? Because they are not mature enough to vote responsibly. The same principle applies to men and women who are exempt from taxes; they will never vote responsibly. They will possess "infinite demand" for government services.

The entire AFR website offers some important reading and I encourage you to visit.

Just A Coincidence?

From the link:

On March 23, 2006, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System will cease publication of the M3 monetary aggregate. The Board will also cease publishing the following components: large-denomination time deposits, repurchase agreements (RPs), and Eurodollars. The Board will continue to publish institutional money market mutual funds as a memorandum item in this release.

So the Fed is going to begin hiding vital statistics from the US people and the rest of the world about a critical measure of our money supply. It's bad enough that there isn't anything "federal" about the Federal Reserve as it isn't a branch of the federal government but, rather, a privately held institution. And to make matters worse, some of the "owners" of that private institution are banks outside of the US. And they have no "reserves" to speak of. The Federal Reserve is kind of like that little guy behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz. Do a search on the internet of "Wizard of Oz Federal Reserve" for some interesting reading.

Ah, but I digress. The question is, what else of international importance is scheduled to occur on or about the same time as the discontinuation of the Fed's reporting of M3?

If we remember back to this article from November we read that Iran is scheduled to begin trading oil for euros on their newly established Iranian Oil Bourse - IOB.

So the Fed's last report of M3 just happens to be the week prior to the first day of trade on the IOB? If countries like Japan and China and other Asian countries with their trillions of U.S. dollars no longer need them or require less of them to buy oil - does anyone suppose they might begin a wholesale liquidation of their U.S. Bonds (the primary instrument where foreigners 'store' their U.S. dollars)?

If foreigners begin wholesale liquidation of U.S. debt obligations, the Fed would have no recourse but to print the dollars necessary to redeem them and this would necessarily imply an absolutely enormous expansion of our money supply - which would undoubtedly be captured statistically in M3 or its related reporting.

What Sort of God Are We Talking About?

This caught our attention recently:

A new Gallup survey released today finds that four decades after the "God Is Dead" controversy was first noted, Americans retain a strong belief in a higher power. Some 94% think God exists.

Only 5% feel God "does not exist" -- and even most of them "are not sure" of that. Exactly 1% are certain there is no God. But how strongly do the believers believe? Nearly 8 in 10, in fact, say they are "convinced" God exists, although Gallup does not ask them why that is.

Conservatives are more likely to be convinced than liberals (87% vs. 61%), women a little more likely than men (82% vs. 73%), and residents of the South more than those in the East (88% vs. 70%). Surprisingly, some 61% of those who seldom or never attend church are nevertheless convinced that God exists.

The poll sampled 1,002 national adults, Nov. 17-20.

If a space alien were to observe our culture would he not think that Gallup got the numbers backward? It would be interesting to know what god it is that most Americans believe exists. Dionysius? Bacchus?

A poll like this is less meaningful than it could be if it does not provide some idea of what sort of god the respondents are saying they believe exists.

An Interview With Richard Dawkins

BeliefNet has an interview with Richard Dawkins. Here are some of the more provocative portions:

Interviewer: What are your thoughts about the despair some people feel when they ponder natural selection and random mutation? The idea of evolution and natural selection makes some people feel that everything is meaningless--people's individual lives and life in general.

Dawkins: If it's true that it causes people to feel despair, that's tough. It's still the truth. The universe doesn't owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn't owe us a nice warm feeling inside. If it's true, it's true, and you'd better live with it.

Interviewer: Is atheism the logical extension of believing in evolution?

Dawkins: They clearly can't be irrevocably linked because a very large number of theologians believe in evolution. In fact, any respectable theologian of the Catholic or Anglican or any other sensible church believes in evolution. Similarly, a very large number of evolutionary scientists are also religious. My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.

Actually, Dawkins draws a much stronger correlation between evolution and atheism in a speech he gave last Fall. You can hear what he had to say about the incompatibility of evolution and theism here.

The fact is that almost all of the more prominent writers on evolution say the same thing Dawkins says, i.e. that an understanding of evolution leads to atheism. It's obvious that evolution is a trojan horse for getting atheism into our schools and as such teaching it clearly violates the separation of church and state. The desire on the part of people like Dawkins to have evolution taught in schools is really an ill-disguised attempt to brainwash our children with atheistic materialism.

Does the foregoing sound a little extreme? Does it sound a bit laughable? If your answer is no, it sounds about right to you, then what justification is there for teaching evolution in schools? If your answer is yes, the assertions in the previous graph are absurd, then why is the same argument not considered absurd if we insert Intelligent Design in place of evolution and theism in place of atheism?

Interviewer: If you had to name top sources for optimism and hope in a naturalistic or materialistic worldview, what would they be?

Dawkins: I think there is something glorious in the universe, in contemplating the Milky Way galaxy, in contemplating the fact that this is only one in billions of galaxies, contemplating the fact that at the beginning of the 21st century, humanity really has gone a very long way toward understanding the universe in which we live and the life form of which we are a part. I find that a truly inspirational thought.

Here's another inspirational thought that follows from Dawkins' worldview: We're born, we look at the stars, and we die. So what's the point? For Dawkins' answer go back to the interviewer's first question and Dawkins' reply.

Dawkins says the following, and then the interviewer asks him about it:

Dawkins: Then there's the added fact that it is the only life we're ever going to get. Don't kid yourself that you're going to live again after you're dead; you're not. Make the most of the one life you've got. Live it to the full.

Interviewer: You've criticized the idea of the afterlife. What do you see as the problem with a terminally ill cancer patient believing in an afterlife?

Dawkins: Oh, no problem at all. I would never wish to disabuse or disillusion somebody who believed that. I care about what's true for myself, but I don't want to go around telling people who are afraid of dying that their hopes are unreal.

Funny, we thought he'd just done pretty much exactly that just prior to the interviewer's question.

Stop and Think

The editors at National Review urge us to stop and think about what we are doing in adopting the McCain amendment and its blanket ban on "torture." Here are some key paragraphs in their editorial:

So, what is torture? Under CAT and U.S. law, it is the infliction of "severe pain or suffering." Bush critics like to ignore the word "severe" and pretend that subjecting a detainee to any pain is torture. It is not. While most people instinctively know what they consider torture - fingernails pulled out, electric shocks, beatings - defining what rises to the level of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment is a trickier question. What, then, do McCain and his colleagues think of those methods that aren't included in the manual but don't necessarily constitute CID?

That's the key question. Given the way the debate is now playing out, if McCain's amendment becomes law it will be interpreted as banning almost every coercive interrogation technique. In dealing with captured terrorists, we will then be able to apply only methods formulated to deal with conventional soldiers in a different sort of conflict than the one that faces us now. This is folly.

The most constructive path forward would be for Congress to put aside legalisms and empty phrases and work its way through interrogation practices, starting with the least controversial. Is dietary manipulation "cruel"? Are cold rooms? Is sensory deprivation? Is being made to stand for hours? How about an "attention grab," i.e., shaking a detainee? Sleep deprivation? A belly slap? We think these methods would all pass muster in any rational debate, provided they are applied within reason (there is a difference between standing for two hours and twenty hours).

Then Congress could make its way to the most aggressive techniques, such as water-boarding, which simulates drowning. It has reportedly been effective in breaking high-level al Qaeda detainees within seconds, but is a practice with which most people would be uncomfortable. It is at least close to the line of what constitutes torture, and is certainly "cruel" in almost every circumstance.

But circumstances matter. Even some of the most fervent backers of McCain, including McCain himself, say we should torture someone in a ticking-bomb scenario, where saving a U.S. city depended on doing so. Such scenarios are unlikely in the extreme, but there are other exceptional cases that are more probable: for instance, the capture of a top-level al Qaeda operative who may have knowledge of a coming attack or know the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

To deal with such cases, the president should be able to sign a finding - on the model of a finding authorizing an assassination - to use an extraordinary method like water-boarding. The definition of CID depends on context. While water-boarding may be unacceptably cruel if applied to 69,990 of the roughly 70,000 people we've detained since the war on terror began, there are perhaps ten top-level captives in whose cases water-boarding doesn't "shock the conscience," to employ the phrase often used in defining CID. Requiring presidential authorization in these cases would ensure accountability while shielding from criminal exposure the agent charged with obtaining information that could save lives.

The use of water-boarding and stress positions, etc. is unacceptably cruel only if the measure is used for wicked ends, i.e. to punish, to amuse, to inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. This is what torture is throughout most of the world, and this is why it is evil. Harsh measures employed, however, to save lives and which cease the moment they are no longer necessary is in a completely different moral category. Indeed, to conflate them is to commit the fallacy known as undistributed middle: Because two acts share a common feature they are considered to be in all important moral respects the same. Thus the execution by the state of a serial killer is often claimed to be morally identical to the crimes committed by the killer because in both cases someone is being killed. This is silly, of course, but it is, unfortunately, a common error.

To be sure, we need to be more vigilant than we have been in preventing the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading practices, such as occured at Abu Ghraib, but we should not prohibit the use of what are called "harsh measures" altogether without defining precisely how it is we are constraining ourselves. We need to know exactly what we mean by words like "cruel", "inhuman", and "degrading" before we tell the world that we will not resort to them. Is it cruel or inhuman to deceive a terrorist into thinking he's going to die when in fact he's not? Is it degrading refuse to allow a detainee unsupervised lavatory privilege?

We must also allow for the use of extraordinary measures in extraordinary circumstances. To say that we would never, ever use a particular method of interrogation like water-boarding no matter what the exigencies might be, is both foolish and immoral. It is foolish because although the technique is terrifying it causes no real harm and it is immoral because it places a higher premium on the welfare of a murderer than it does on the lives of his victims.

Lionizing a Killer

FrontPageMag has an on-scene photo shoot by Zombie.com of the protests which accompanied the execution of Tookie Williams. Anyone who may have been leaning toward clemency for Williams may be deeply troubled by the behavior and allegiances of some of the people who hold that position, and anyone who feels any sympathy for Williams should be sure to look at the photo of the young woman he killed.

No Joy in Demville

The festive spirit and euphoria of the Iraqi people at being able to vote for their government in a meaningful election is displayed all over Iraq (see here, here and here). Smiles and waves are everywhere as the people ignored the threat of violence and filled the streets to walk to the polls.

At home, however, it's rather a different story. The sourpuss Dems look like they've bitten into an aspirin. They know they have to express satisfaction that things have gone well, but it's just not in their nature to be happy with a George Bush success. So on Hardball tonight Bob Schrum, a synecdoche of the liberal response to the day's events, mumbled lip service to the accomplishment that the elections represent and quickly moved on to warning that the real measure of success will be what happens in the months ahead.

The Dems say this everytime something good happens in Iraq. Like the illusory "puddles" on the highway on a hot day, however, we never seem to arrive at the "months ahead." If Iraq is a stable democracy by this time next year, and a force for peace in the Middle East, the Democrats will still be saying that Iraq may be a haven for freedom now, but what matters is whether it will still be a democracy twenty years from now.

Chris Matthews kept demanding on his show that Pat Buchanan and other guests tell him whether the president's strategy was really going to work, as if any mortal could actually know such a thing. How can anyone say that it will all be like the Garden of Eden in Baghdad this time next year? No one knows that. What we do know, though, is that things are moving in the right direction and that despite the constant wailing and teeth gnashing by the Howard Deans and Harry Reids and the MoveOn.orgs, every benchmark that the Bush administration has set for Iraq has so far been met.

The Democrats are in an awful predicament. Having cast their lot in opposition to Bush on Iraq, if that tragic nation succeeds the Dems will suffer a grievous political setback yet they certainly can't be seen hoping that Iraq fails. So, they have to keep cautioning the American people that as good as it appears to be going in Iraq, it's not really all that good. They have to hope that they convince enough voters that doom is just around the next bend as long as Bush is in the White House and Republicans control Congress. Of course, the next bend, like the months ahead, never arrives and eventually the American people are reminded of the story of the boy who cried "wolf" and the Democrats will be cast into the political outer darkness of irrelevancy. It's a just desert for people who have sought to undermine the president on a matter as absolutely crucial as Iraq.