Happy St. Patrick's Day

Eight years ago I wrote a piece for the local paper on the significance of St. Patrick, and I thought I'd share it with you on the eve of this year's observance:

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, will soon be celebrating their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day. We are indebted to Thomas Cahill, and his best-selling book How the Irish Saved Civilization, for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating.

As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by doing so, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 A.D., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later.

Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland, where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the gospel and abolish slavery. Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D., and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages. Throughout the continent unwashed, illiterate hordes descended upon the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt, and the literary heritage of the classical world went up in smoke or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the efforts of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts, such as the incomparable Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin.

Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, Irish Christians applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on. For a century after the fall of Rome, monks sequestered themselves away in cold, damp, cramped mud and stone huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans.

Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be ready once again to receive them. These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed.

Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges. Clutching their precious books to their hearts, they sailed to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write and make books of their own.

Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Muslim incursions that arrived a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilizations germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the goths and the vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of matter.

From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational mind and was thus not capricious, random or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish. A legacy from Patrick. It is worth pondering on this St. Patrick's Day what the world would be like today had it not been for the Irish thirteen centuries ago.

Buiochuas le Dia ar son nan Gaeil! (Thank God for the Irish), and happy St. Patrick's Day.

A Reprieve?

According to this article, the launch of the Iranian oil bourse has been postponed.

It looks like we might have to wait and see how this unfolds.

Axis of Evil Update

Good news:

Iran's clerical and business establishments, deeply concerned by what they see as reckless spending and needlessly aggressive foreign policies, are increasingly turning against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Within this context, many see the president's long-running confrontation with the United States and Europe over Tehran's nuclear program as an attempt to demonize the West and distract the Iranian public from pressing domestic problems.

"His appeal was to those for whom class discrimination is important, and his simple lifestyle gave an air of credibility to his claims," said Nasser Hadian, a political analyst at Tehran University who attended high school with Mr. Ahmadinejad. Mr. Hadian predicted that senior Iranian clerics would continue to support Mr. Ahmadinejad -- or at least not move against him -- for about a year because of that popular support. But privately, he said, they feel he is isolating Iran internationally and putting its economy at risk. Also at the back of their minds is the fear that his anti-corruption drive ultimately threatens their own considerable privileges.

The value of Tehran's stock market had fallen by $10 billion under Mr. Ahmadinejad as of February, the Los Angeles Times reported. Other recent Western news reports say that the nation's vibrant real-estate market has withered and that capital outflows are increasing. Mr. Ahmadinejad's spending has pushed the inflation rate to an estimated 13.5 percent, and several estimates say it could go as high as 30 percent this year. Economic analysts note that inflation will be felt most acutely by the poor, undermining the president's support among his most important constituency.

Mr. Ahmadinejad's detractors say the broad coalition against him is attracting many of the regime's powerful personalities and may include even the supreme leader himself, despite his superficial statements in support of the president. They point to a recent decree by Ayatollah Khamenei giving the Expediency Council, headed by former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, oversight of the presidency. The clerical establishment has close ties with the capitalist class and is said to be appalled at the rapid slide of the economy since Mr. Ahmadinejad's inauguration. The clerics are also thought to be deeply apprehensive about the president's aggressive foreign policy.

Mr. Ghaninejad said that by confronting Iran over its nuclear program, the West was in fact throwing a lifeline to Mr. Ahmadinejad. "If they keep piling on the pressure, Ahmadinejad will become a national hero," the newspaper editor said. "Let the Iranians deal with him. If you leave him alone, he will become a bankrupt politician within a year. With greater pressure, only the extremists will benefit."

Bad news:

North Korea has the right to launch a pre-emptive attack against U.S.-backed South Korean forces because the two Koreas are technically still at war, the communist state's official media said on Tuesday. The comments came as North Korea shows its displeasure with annual joint South Korean-U.S. military exercises, which Pyongyang has said are a preparation for an invasion of its territory.

A spokesman for the North's Korea People's Army (KPA) said distrust is high between the United States and North Korea, and Pyongyang "will never remain a passive onlooker to the U.S. pre-emptive attack on the DPRK," its official news agency reported. DPRK is short for North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

"The KPA side is of the view that a pre-emptive attack is not (the) monopoly of the U.S. and the DPRK, too, has the right to pre-empt an attack as the most effective and positive act for self-defense in the light of the hard reality that the DPRK and the U.S. sides are still technically at war," the spokesman was cited as saying.

The question that occurs to us is, if Ahmadinejad's government will collapse if just left alone, why hasn't North Korea's government suffered similar collapse already? North Korea is much poorer, more oppressive, and more isolated than Iran. Yet they just keep chugging along, murdering their people and threatening to murder everyone else, just like Iran. Maybe the "leave them alone" advice isn't so good.

Racist Prodigy

Michelle Malkin, whose blog, in my opinion, is the best on the net, has a good piece on the racist poet Autum Ashante. Autum is all of 7 years old, but:

...as New York Post education reporter David Andreatta reported this weekend, she was invited to perform at public middle and high schools in Peekskill, N.Y., for Black History Month. After asking white students to remain seated while she led black students in a recitation of the Black Panthers' Black Child's Pledge, Autum (now home-schooled by her single father, a Nation of Islam member and poet) angrily read this original poem:

White Nationalism Put U In Bondage

White nationalism is what put you in bondage

Pirate and vampires like Columbus, Morgan, and Darwin

Drank the blood of the sheep, trampled all over them with

Steel, tricks and deceit.

Nothing has changed take a look in our streets

The mis-education of she and Hegro - leaves you on your knee2grow

Black lands taken from your hands, by vampires with no remorse

They took the gold, the wisdom and all of the storytellers

They took the black women, with the black man weak

Made to watch as they changed the paradigm Of our village

They killed the blind, they killed the lazy, they went So far as to kill the unborn baby

Yeah White nationalism is what put you in bondage

Pirates and vampires like Columbus, Morgan, and Darwin

They drank the blood of the sheep, trampled all over them with Steel laden feet, throw in the tricks alcohol and deceit.

Nothing has changed take a look at our streets.

Leaving aside churlish questions like whether a seven year old would have ever come up with a word like "paradigm" on her own, Malkin notes that:

Complaints from shocked students and parents led to a tape-recorded apology sent to all parents apologizing for the performance. Autum's father condemned white district officials as "racist crackers." Autum defended her poem by explaining to the Westchester Journal News that white people are "devils and they should be gone. We should be away from them and still be in Africa."

Michelle reminds us of the media outrage over the two white thirteen year old girls who sing racist lyrics and wonders how much outrage there'll be over Ms Ashante's diatribe.

Easy answer to that one.

Go to Michelle's page for the whole story and related links.

Learning the Hard Way

Here are a couple of reports on how low our economy has sunk under the incompetent supervision of George W. Bush:

WASHINGTON - Jobs grew at a healthy clip in February, the government reported Friday, helping boost wages to their highest year-over-year increase in more than four years while encouraging more jobless people to reenter the labor force.

The stronger-than-predicted net increase of 243,000 jobs was the largest gain in any of the last 12 months except for November, when the economy was rebounding from the effects of Hurricane Katrina.

The report signaled that wage growth, which has lagged behind inflation even as the unemployment rate has tumbled, might finally be making a comeback. "The growth in most workers' wages is probably just about to catch up with inflation, resulting in the first inflation-adjusted wage gains in years," he said.

------------------

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks rose sharply on Tuesday, with the Dow and S&P 500 indexes hitting their highest in nearly five years as U.S. Treasury yields fell and record profit from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. boosted shares of financial companies.

The liberals have been telling us for years that those tax cuts wouldn't work but we obstinately refused to listen. Now we're learning the lesson the hard way and getting just what we deserve for not heeding the economic sages in the Defeatocrat party.

Thought Experiment

Steve Petermann at Telic Thoughts invites us to try a thought experiment:

Suppose there is an alternate universe where there is also a trial in Dover, PA. However, in this universe a few things are different. In this universe this is how evolution is currently taught in high school biology classes:

Evolution means change over time. Observation suggests that life has evolved with some form of common descent. It also suggests that change occurs because of mutations in the genome where the environment has some effect on what gets passed on from one generation to the next. Except for materials on fossils and genetics, that's it.

Now in Dover a majority of the school board members believe that this explanation of biotic emergence is scientifically inadequate. They claim that the best scientific explanation is that mutations occur strictly by chance, that they are unguided and purposeless. These board members are known as evangelical atheists and deists. They vote to include this additional level of explanation in high school biology classes. But some parents of students sue because they believe that this additional material does not belong in science class and is instead an attempt to smuggle atheism or deism into public schools. A trial ensues.

The plaintiffs offer expert witnesses who argue that the additional material is not scientific because it cannot be tested or falsified. They also challenge the defense experts claim to be able to scientifically detect what is unguided and purposeless in evolution. Then they call witnesses who testify that the board members who pushed for the new syllabus have often talked about how a knowledge of science naturally leads to atheism or deism.

The defense calls expert witnesses who claim to offer scientific evidence that unguidedness and purposelessness in evolution can be detected. They claim it offers the best scientific explanation available and therefore should be included in science classes. They also assert that the religious beliefs of board members are irrelevant to the issue.

Given that this universe has the same constitution as in ours, how should the judge rule?

Well, regardless of how he should rule, if he's Judge John Jones he would rule exactly opposite of the way he decided in the real Kitzmiller case, of course. He would find in favor of the school board since they're the defenders, in this hypothetical case, of materialist metaphysics.

But Petermann's point is well taken. The belief that the development of life is an unguided, purposeless process is no less "religious," and no more scientific, than is the contrary claim that life is the product of intelligent planning. Sooner or later even Judge Jones will realize this.

Lost Cause

Ralph Peters has returned from Baghdad and he's not happy. With the media. Here's what he says:

During a recent visit to Baghdad, I saw an enormous failure. On the part of our media. The reality in the streets, day after day, bore little resemblance to the sensational claims of civil war and disaster in the headlines.

No one with first-hand experience of Iraq would claim the country's in rosy condition, but the situation on the ground is considerably more promising than the American public has been led to believe. Lurid exaggerations and instant myths obscure real, if difficult, progress.

I left Baghdad more optimistic than I was before this visit. While cynicism, political bias and the pressure of a 24/7 news cycle accelerate a race to the bottom in reporting, there are good reasons to be soberly hopeful about Iraq's future.

Much could still go wrong. The Arab genius for failure could still spoil everything. We've made grave mistakes. Still, it's difficult to understand how any first-hand observer could declare that Iraq's been irrevocably "lost."

He then goes on to give eight examples of how "what everyone knows" about Iraq is false:

Consider just a few of the inaccuracies served up by the media:

Claims of civil war. In the wake of the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a flurry of sectarian attacks inspired wild media claims of a collapse into civil war. It didn't happen. Driving and walking the streets of Baghdad, I found children playing and, in most neighborhoods, business as usual. Iraq can be deadly, but, more often, it's just dreary.

Iraqi disunity. Factional differences are real, but overblown in the reporting. Few Iraqis support calls for religious violence. After the Samarra bombing, only rogue militias and criminals responded to the demagogues' calls for vengeance. Iraqis refused to play along, staging an unrecognized triumph of passive resistance.

Expanding terrorism. On the contrary, foreign terrorists, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, have lost ground. They've alienated Iraqis of every stripe. Iraqis regard the foreigners as murderers, wreckers and blasphemers, and they want them gone. The Samarra attack may, indeed, have been a tipping point--against the terrorists.

Hatred of the U.S. military. If anything surprised me in the streets of Baghdad, it was the surge in the popularity of U.S. troops among both Shias and Sunnis. In one slum, amid friendly adult waves, children and teenagers cheered a U.S. Army patrol as we passed. Instead of being viewed as occupiers, we're increasingly seen as impartial and well-intentioned.

The appeal of the religious militias. They're viewed as mafias. Iraqis want them disarmed and disbanded. Just ask the average citizen.

The failure of the Iraqi army. Instead, the past month saw a major milestone in the maturation of Iraq's military. During the mini-crisis that followed the Samarra bombing, the Iraqi army put over 100,000 soldiers into the country's streets. They defused budding confrontations and calmed the situation without killing a single civilian. And Iraqis were proud to have their own army protecting them. The Iraqi army's morale soared as a result of its success.

Reconstruction efforts have failed. Just not true. The American goal was never to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure in its entirety. Iraqis have to do that. Meanwhile, slum-dwellers utterly neglected by Saddam Hussein's regime are getting running water and sewage systems for the first time. The Baathist regime left the country in a desolate state while Saddam built palaces. The squalor has to be seen to be believed. But the hopeless now have hope.

The electricity system is worse than before the war. Untrue again. The condition of the electric grid under the old regime was appalling. Yet, despite insurgent attacks, the newly revamped system produced 5,300 megawatts last summer--a full thousand megawatts more than the peak under Saddam Hussein. Shortages continue because demand soared--newly free Iraqis went on a buying spree, filling their homes with air conditioners, appliances and the new national symbol, the satellite dish. Nonetheless, satellite photos taken during the hours of darkness show Baghdad as bright as Damascus.

Peters isn't naive. He recognizes that Iraq can still implode, but:

[T]he foreign media have become a destructive factor, extrapolating daily crises from minor incidents. Part of this is ignorance. Some of it is willful. None of it is helpful.

Read the rest of his essay at the link. The short version is: Iraq is a lost cause only to those who want it to be.

Pombo Bill

The House of Representatives last September passed a piece of legislation authored by Richard Pombo (R-CA) which would effectively gut the Endangered Species Act. It puts at risk the ability of the Federal government to protect threatened species of living things as well as habitat critical for the fluorishing of these organisms.

The bill is now in the Senate which must vote to pass it, or a compromise measure, in order for it to become law.

If you believe that allowing our wildlife and wild places to be extirpated and asphalted is irresponsible, profligate, and myopic, write or call your Senator to tell him or her so. You can find their e-mail, snail mail, and phone addresses here.

Political Sucker-Puncher

New York Times reports on Senator Feingold's dismay with his fellow Democrats:

Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold accused fellow Democrats on Tuesday of cowering rather than joining him on trying to censure President Bush over domestic spying. "Democrats run and hide" when the administration invokes the war on terrorism, Feingold told reporters.

Feingold introduced censure legislation Monday in the Senate but not a single Democrat has embraced it. Several have said they want to see the results of a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation before supporting any punitive legislation.

Republicans dismissed the proposal Tuesday as being more about Feingold's 2008 presidential aspirations than Bush's actions. On and off the Senate floor, they have dared Democrats to vote for the resolution.

"I'm amazed at Democrats ... cowering with this president's numbers so low," Feingold said. The latest AP-Ipsos poll on Bush, conducted last week, found just 37 percent of the 1,000 people surveyed approving his overall performance, the lowest of his presidency.

Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., tried to hold a vote Monday on Feingold's resolution but was blocked by Democrats. He said Tuesday that Feingold should withdraw the resolution because it has no support. "If the Democrats continue to say no to voting on their own censure resolution, then they ought to drop it and focus on our foreign policy in a positive way," Frist said in a statement.

Feingold's resolution condemns Bush's "unlawful authorization of wiretaps of Americans within the United States without obtaining the court orders required" by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Of course, his Democratic colleagues are not the only ones who have failed to display the courage of their convictions. Senator Feingold himself left the Senate chamber after introducing his resolution, leaving it to others to debate it for him. The Senator, evidently an accomplished political sucker-puncher, whacks the president with an allegation of criminal activity and then flees. Gutsy.

On Friendship

It is in the friendship of good men that feelings of affection and friendship exist in their highest and best form. -- Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics.

I had occasion recently to reflect upon what I thought to be the ingredients of friendship. I ventured that friendship requires that two people share an affection for each other based upon similar values and interests, mutual esteem, and shared experience. To the extent that two persons hold common intellectual, moral, and spiritual values and are bonded by similar personality traits and shared experiences in life, to that extent their friendship will be deep. The less they share in common, either in terms of values, personality, or experience, the more superficial will be any relationship between them.

Atleast that's what I think. There are many other opinions on the matter much more profound and compelling than mine. Of those that I'm aware of, the loveliest expression of the nature of friendship is found in Augustine's Confessions. Augustine, describing his grief at the death of a dear companion, writes of his friends that:

All kinds of things rejoiced my soul in their company - to talk and laugh and do each other kindnesses; read pleasant books together, pass from lightest jesting to talk of the deepest things and back again; differ without rancour, as a man might differ with himself, and when most rarely when dissension arose find our normal agreement all the sweeter for it; teach each other or learn from each other; be impatient for the return of the absent, and welcome them with joy on their home-coming; these and such like things, proceeding from our hearts as we gave affection and received it back, and shown by face, by voice, by the eyes, and a thousand other pleasing ways, kindled a flame which fused our very souls and of many made us one.

This is what men value in friends, and value so much that our conscience judges them guilty if they do not meet friendship with friendship, expecting nothing from their friend save such evidences of his affection. -- Confessions Book IV: viii, ix

Beautifully put.

What Was She Thinking?

Democrats can't win no matter how hard they try. Every time they assay to land a whopping insult on the presidential kisser they just wind up making themselves look laughable. The latest exhibit is this photo of Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan trying to call attention to the president's inadequacies on the Senate floor.

No doubt Michigan Republicans are archiving this shot for use in future campaign ads.

Al-Qaeda on the Run

Maybe Tim Russert should interview Oliver Poole, the reporter who penned the following article in Britain's Telegraph. Given that it contains some positive developments in the war against al-Qaeda, however, Mr. Russert would probably not be interested.

Insurgent groups in one of Iraq's most violent provinces claim that they have purged the region of three quarters of al-Qa'eda's supporters after forming an alliance to force out the foreign fighters. If true, it would mark a significant victory in the fight against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'eda in Iraq, and could partly explain the considerable drop in suicide bombings in Iraq recently.

Considerable drop in suicide bombings? We thought the country was going all to pieces.

"We have killed a number of the Arabs, including Saudis, Egyptians, Syrians, Kuwaitis and Jordanians," said an insurgent representative in the western province of Anbar. The claims were partly supported by the defence ministry, which said it had evidence that Zarqawi and his followers were fleeing Anbar to cities and mountains near the Iranian border.

Iran? Why Iran? Iran wouldn't harbor terrorists would it? The left will soon be snorting that this claim is just disinformation put out by Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld, the Satanic trinity, to create a pretext for war with Iran.

It is this move that is believed to have prompted a statement a fortnight ago from the insurgent groups in the central city of Hawija that they were declaring war on al-Qae'da. It is being interpreted by intelligence experts as a response to an unwanted influx of foreign fighters seeking refuge. Iraq's Sunni Muslim insurgents had originally welcomed al-Qa'eda into the country, seeing it as a powerful ally in its fight against the American occupation.

But relations became strained when insurgents supported calls for Sunnis to vote in last December's election, a move they saw as essential to break the Shia hold on government but which al-Qa'eda viewed as a form of collaboration. It became an outright split when a wave of bombings killed scores of people in Anbar resulting in a spate of tit-for-tat killings.

In reaction, the insurgent groups formed their own anti-al-Qa'eda militia, the Anbar Revolutionaries. The group has a core membership of 100 people, all of whom had relatives killed by al-Qa'eda. It is led by Ahmed Ftaikhan, a former Saddam-era military intelligence officer. It claims to have killed 20 foreign fighters and 33 Iraqi sympathisers. Many more are said to have fled. The United States has confirmed that six of Zarqawi's deputies were killed in Ramadi.

Osama al-Jadaan, a tribal chief, has claimed that with the support of the Iraqi army his supporters have captured hundreds of foreign fighters, and has sought to prevent jihadis entering the country from Syria.

So the insurgency has had it with al-Qaeda and is cleaning them out, or claiming to. Of course, this will make it much more difficult for the malcontents to fight against the coalition and more likely that they'll eventually start laying down their arms. It's going to be messy there for a long time, but the trend lines, despite what we hear from the defeatist media, are pointing in the right direction. Iraqi security forces are gaining in numbers, competency, and operational experience. Attempts to build a government continue. The people want peace. But it would all fall apart if we were to pull out too soon and leave a vacuum that the most ruthless would fill.

The nay-sayers, having had their hopes of a civil war dashed in recent weeks, are now promoting the case that the administration's incompetence and bull-headedness made the situation much more difficult to manage than it needed to be, and perhaps they're right, but how do we know? How can we say for certain that had we sent in more troops to keep the peace after toppling Saddam that the results would have been significantly different from what they are? I tend to believe that we should have used more troops, but whether they would have prevented the insurgency or not, who knows?

An Evil Twin?

Here's an interesting wrinkle in the case of presidential advisor Claude Allen who has been charged with fraud in a scheme to steal goods from a Target store in Gaithersburg, MD: Allen has an identical twin. Michelle Malkin wonders why the left thinks that's funny.

We take no position, of course, on the significance of this development with respect to Allen's (Claude) guilt or innocence. We just thought you might like to know about it.

Senator Quixote

Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI), often portrayed as a serious voice along the left-most aisle of the Senate chamber, has made himself look more like a ridiculous Don Quixote tilting at windmills with his attempt yesterday to curry favor among the MoveOn crowd. Feingold introduced a resolution into the Senate calling for censure of President Bush on the grounds that the president has broken the law by directing the National Security Agency to listen in on phone calls made by suspected terrorists to people in this country who may be accomplices.

Feingold claims that Bush did not follow the protocols established to govern such eavesdroppings and therefore deserves censure. This is absurd, of course, but absurdity does not have much deterrent effect upon the Ahabs on the left obsessed with their pursuit of Moby George.

It is absurd because 1) It's not at all clear that the president lacks the authority to do what he has done; 2) In any case, his actions were taken to protect the American people, not to benefit himself in any way; 3) He hasn't done anything that everyone of his predecessors both themselves approved of and carried out without complaint from the Democrats; 4) Senate leaders of both parties were kept apprised of the existence and findings of the program.

Feingold, the only Senator to oppose the Patriot act in 2001, left the chamber immediately after introducing his proposal, not even sticking around to debate its merits. Presumably he was in a rush to leap astride his steed and search out further villainous windmills in Washington to impale upon his sturdy lance. Or perhaps he left in order to spare himself the embarrassment of watching his fellow Democrats moonwalking away from his risible resolution.

Know Them By Their Fruits

I was reminded of Matthew 7:21-23 when I read this story of people who call themselves Christians but who demonstrate at funerals of dead soldiers in the most vile and despicable ways, exploiting the grief of bereaved families in order to make a hateful socio-theological statement:

Five women sang and danced as they held up signs saying "thank God for dead soldiers" at the funeral of an army sergeant who was killed by an Iraqi bomb. For them, it was the perfect way to spread God's word: America was being punished for tolerating homosexuality.

For the hundreds of flag waving bikers who came to this small town in Michigan Saturday to shield the soldier's family, it was disgusting. The fringe group of fire and brimstone Baptists from Kansas has been courting controversy for more than 15 years, traveling the country with their hateful signs and slogans.

Pastor Fred helps said he and his congregants are targeting the funerals because God's way of punishing an "evil nation" of "fags and fag enablers" is to "pick off its children."

"I don't have any sympathy for these parents. They're all going to hell," Phelps said. "The family's in pain because they haven't obeyed the Lord God."

The Westboro Baptist Church first gained national notoriety when they picked the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a Wyoming student who was murdered in 1998 for being gay. In Flushing, Michigan they turned their leather-clad backs to the five women and held flags and tarps up so that mourners walking past wouldn't see the signs saying "God hates fags," "fag vets" and "America is doomed."

Many found it hard to hide their anger when Margie Phelps, the daughter of Westboro's founder, called out "All this for little old us? Oh, you shouldn't have. I feel so special," before she started singing "the Pope, the Pope, the Pope is on fire. He don't get no water let the heretics burn" in front of a Catholic church.

Jesus says in the passage in the gospel of Matthew mentioned above that:

You will know them by their fruits. Not everyone who says to me, "Lord, Lord" will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, "Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name cast out demons, and in your name perform many miracles?" And then I will declare to them, "I never knew you. Depart from me you who practice lawlessness."

Perhaps the worst photo of the Westboro haters appeared in our local paper. It was of a child holding up a sign at the funeral of a young man who was killed in Iraq. The sign had the words THANK GOD FOR IEDs.

Christ also has a word for people who would put children up to that sort of evil. He said: "Whoever causes one of these little ones who believes in me to stumble, it is better for him that a millstone be hung around his neck, and that he be drowned in the depth of the sea." (Matt. 18:6).

The people at Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas will some day have a lot to answer for, not the least of which is the unChrist-like image of Christianity that they have presented to a world eager to believe the worst of Christians. Pastor Phelps is an answer to their prayers.

Stanching the Flow

Omar at Iraq the Model tells us that:

Sheikh Usama said today that the "Nakhwa" 4,000 man-strong tribal force he's supervising has succeeded in capturing yet another 169 infiltrators coming mostly from the Jordanian borders during the past week.

The sheikh also spoke of disbanding 9 terror groups working with Zaraqawi's al-Qaeda in Iraq and confirmed that the recently captured infiltrators were mostly non-Iraqi Arabs with some Iraqis guiding them in and providing logistics and that they brought weapons, explosives and sophisticated maps with them with a selection of targets pointed on those maps.

"Our main problem is the vast size of Anbar as well as having shared borders with 3 countries; Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria and recently we have that more and more infiltrators are coming through the borders with Jordan rather than the other two countries...We have rid about 90% of the province of Zaraqwi's criminal thugs and we are coordinating our work with the ministries of defense and interior and we had several meetings with Iraqi officials as well as General Casey. Now we believe Zarqawi had escaped to Salahiddin province and we are cooperating with the tribes of Salahiddin to find out where this criminal is hiding."

Our question is what happens to all these infiltrators once they're captured. Are they returned to Jordan? Are they turned over to the coalition authorities? Are they sent on their way to their assignation with seventy two virgins? What?

Iran Prepares For War

Iran is convinced that the West lacks the will to block its production of nuclear weapons but is nevertheless preparing for a half-hearted gesture in that direction:

Iran's leaders have built a secret underground emergency command centre in Teheran as they prepare for a confrontation with the West over their illicit nuclear programme, the Sunday Telegraph has been told. The complex of rooms and offices beneath the Abbas Abad district in the north of the capital is designed to serve as a bolthole and headquarters for the country's rulers as military tensions mount.

The recently completed command centre is connected by tunnels to other government compounds near the Mossala prayer ground, one of the city's most important religious sites. Offices of the state security forces, the energy department and the Organisation of Islamic Culture and Communications are all located in the same area.

The construction of the complex is part of the regime's plan to move more of its operations beneath ground. The Revolutionary Guard has overseen the development of subterranean chambers and tunnels - some more than half a mile long and an estimated 35ft high and wide - at sites across the country for research and development work on nuclear and rocket programmes.

The opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) learnt about the complex from its contacts within the regime. The same network revealed in 2002 that Iran had been operating a secret nuclear programme for 18 years. The underground strategy is partly designed to hide activities from satellite view and international inspections but also reflects a growing belief in Teheran that its showdown with the international community could end in air strikes by America or Israel. "Iran's leaders are clearly preparing for a confrontation by going underground," said Alireza Jafarzadeh, the NCRI official who made the 2002 announcement.

As the United Nations Security Council prepares to discuss Iran's nuclear operations this week, Teheran has been stepping up plans for confrontation. Its chief delegate on nuclear talks last week threatened that Iran would inflict "harm and pain" on America if censured by the Security Council.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hardline president who has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map", also said that the West would "suffer" if it tried to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions. As the war of words intensified, President George W Bush said that Teheran represents a "grave national security concern" for America.

In Iraq, which Mr Ahmadinejad hopes will develop into a fellow Shia Islamic state, Iran is already using its proxy militia to attack British and American forces, often with Iranian-made bombs and weapons. As tensions grow, Teheran could order Hizbollah - the Lebanese-based terror faction that it created and arms - to attack targets in Israel.

The regime is also reviewing its contingency plans to attack tankers and American naval forces in the Persian Gulf and to mine the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 15 million barrels of oil (about 20 per cent of world production) passes each day. Any action in the Gulf would send oil prices soaring - a weapon that Iran has often threatened to wield.

The Pentagon's strategic planning is focused on the danger that Iran might try to mine the strait and deploy explosive-packed suicide boats against its warships. In May, American vessels in the Gulf will take part in the Arabian Gauntlet training exercise that deals with clearing mines from the strait, which has a navigable channel just two miles wide.

The naval wing of the Revolutionary Guard has in recent years practised "swarming" raids, using its flotilla of small rapid-attack boats to simulate assaults on commercial vessels and United States warships, according to Ken Timmerman, an American expert on Iran.

The Pentagon is particularly sensitive to the dangers of such attacks after al-Qaeda hit the USS Cole off the Yemen with a suicide boat in 2000, killing 17 American sailors. Last month the White House listed two foiled al-Qaeda plots to attack ships in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

US intelligence believes that if Iranian nuclear facilities were attacked by either America or Israel, then Teheran would respond by trying to close the Strait of Hormuz with naval forces, mines and anti-ship cruise missiles. "When these systems become fully operational, they will significantly enhance Iran's defensive capabilities and ability to deny access to the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz," Michael Maples, the director of the Defence Intelligence Agency testified before the Senate armed services committee last month.

A senior American intelligence officer said that the US navy would be able to reopen the strait but that it would be militarily costly. Hamid Reza Zakeri, a former Iranian intelligence officer, recently told Mr Timmerman that the Iranian navy's Strategic Studies Centre has produced an updated battle plan for the strait.

Its most devastating options would be to use its long-range Shahab-3 missiles to attack Israeli or American bases in the region or to deploy suicide bombers in Western cities under its strategy of "asymmetric" response. "The price to the West for standing up to Iran is clear," Gen Moshe Ya'alon, the former Israeli defence chief said last month in Washington. "It includes terror attacks, economic hardship... and consequences resulting from fluctuations in Iranian oil production. Indeed, the regime believes that the West - including Israel - is afraid to deal with it."

Indeed, the West should be afraid to deal with Iran, but then courage is the doing of that which one is afraid of doing. Attacking, and destroying, Iran's nuclear program and replacing its government and fearsome tasks, fraught with all manner of peril, and should be our next-to-last resort.

The last resort is letting the mullahs and Ahmadinejad have the weapons they seek.

Bad Advice

Professor of Anthropology Chris Toumey has some advice for his colleagues:

Our discipline of anthropology ought to take the intelligent design agenda seriously, and should actively oppose it, for two reasons: First, it is wrong for our public schools to mislead students. Secondly, intelligent design is a prominent feature of the so-called culture wars. Each victory for intelligent design in the classroom or the courtroom makes it easier to discredit the accounts of human origins that we generate in anthropology, along with the methods and concepts that guide our work.

I thought scientists opposed hypotheses because they believed them to be false, or because they lack the explanatory power of the favored hypothesis, not because they discredit their own position.

In any event, Mr. Toumey goes on to list four themes that anthropologists should stress in debating ID proponents. All four of them are irrelevant to Intelligent Design. For anti-IDers to employ any of them would be as smart as picking up a rattlesnake by the tail:

Gaps Argument: The core of intelligent design theory is the belief that, because we do not know the entire natural history of a complex phenomenon, it must be a miracle. This is too goofy to be either science or science education.

This is precisely wrong. ID is not predicated on what we don't know, it's based on what we do know. What we do know is that specified complexity (information), such as we find in living things, is not generated by blind, purposeless processes or random chance. It's generated by intelligent minds.

Are All Creators Equal? Intelligent design advocates pretend not to identify the Intelligent Designer, but use a wink and a nod to point to the conservative Christian portrait of the Judeo-Christian creator. Let there be a price to pay for being too cute. Just as the creationist effort to authenticate Noah's Flood makes the Babylonian hero Utnapishtem and the Sumerian Ziusudra just as real as the Biblical Noah, so the intelligent design effort to steer people to a creator god makes Kali, Allah and other non-Christian gods just as valid as the Christian god.

This is as dumb as saying that evolution advocates pretend not to be driven by atheistic materialism, but we know they are, so evolution is false. The designer may be the God of the Bible, many ID advocates believe that it is, but ID itself doesn't lead to that conclusion. For all we know the designer could well be an inhabitant of some other universe in the multiverse that physicists speculate about. If there can be other worlds why is it so difficult to accept that one of those worlds could contain beings capable of creating this world?

Evidence of Incompetent Design: The supposed proof of intelligent design consists of biological structures or behavior that work perfectly, or nearly perfectly. In other words, a simplistic biological functionalism. The counterproof includes vestigial structures that don't work anymore, or that put a creature at a disadvantage, plus anything else in anatomy or behavior which is not perfect.

This is an argument, such as it is, against belief that the designer is the omnipotent, omniscient God of the Bible. It has nothing at all to do with ID. After all, even an incompetent designer is still a designer. Parenthetically, even if the designer of this world didn't get everything right, it still turned in a pretty impressive performance.

Question the Single Alternative Science: Advocates of intelligent design say they want to broaden the public school science curriculum by adding "alternatives to evolution." Challenge them also to take the next logical step and add alternatives to astronomy and chemistry, and see whether conservative Christian parents are willing to include astrology and alchemy in their children's science courses.

This tactic is an indicator of the paucity of good arguments available to ID's opponents. Neither astrology nor alchemy are live options in the physical sciences. In the biological sciences, however, there are two alternatives: Either the information which fills the biosphere is the product solely of material forces or it is, at least in part, the product of intelligent agency. There are no other options, and both of these are live.

In the physical sciences there are also two options: Either the parameters, constants, forces and other properties of the physico-chemical universe are the product of purely naturalistic coincidence or they are the product of intentional engineering. There are no other options besides these, both of which are live. Throwing other creation myths, alchemy, or astrology into the mix is simply an attempt to blow smoke in peoples' eyes so that they won't see the real alternatives with which we are confronted in this debate.

Teach students the facts about the fine-tuned structure of the universe and then ask them which they think it is, chance or intelligence, that is responsible for the phenomena. Show them the computer generated videos of protein synthesis such as are found in the video The Mystery of Life's Origin and ask students whether they think this process is solely the result of chance and natural forces or whether they think it required some intelligent agency.

The vast majority of young people will agree that to believe that it's just a matter of chance and physics takes more faith than what they can muster. That's why secularists don't want students to know that there actually are alternatives to the materialist orthodoxy. They know that their metaphysics requires a superhuman exertion of will on the part of young people to believe it.

Here's a prediction I might have made before, but I'll reiterate: Because the evidence of intentional design is so strong in both the physical and biological world, as time goes on, materialists will increasingly encourage science teachers to down-play in their classes the wonders with which they seek to dazzle their students. The more teachers fill their students' minds with the fantastic truths of nature, the materialists will implicitly argue, the harder it will be to keep the young ones from wandering off the materialist plantation.

Of course, if they are ever successful in "sanitizing" science, it will mark the beginning of the end of scientific investigation and discovery because fewer students will be inspired to study it.

Twenty One Great Reads

A friend recently asked me to list my five favorite novels. I couldn't do it because, although I'm not much of a novel reader, I've read too many that have either moved me, instructed me, challenged me, or just entertained me to limit myself to only five. Instead, I gave him a list of twenty one, and I still had to leave some out that I should have included.

Herewith is the list, in no particular order, with a sentence or two of explanation:

The Gulag Archipelago (Aleksander Solzhenitsyn): a powerful indictment of the Soviet state and, by implication, it's leftist apologists in the West.

The Stranger (Albert Camus): Camus' mesmerizing vision of the post-modern nihilistic man for whom nothing really matters.

The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky): A powerful tale of innocence and faith, evil and skepticism. The chapter titled The Grand Inquisitor is a stand-alone classic.

1984 (George Orwell): Orwell's j'accuse of the totalitarian state.

Bonfire of the Vanities (Tom Wolfe): Wolfe is an excellent writer and deft social satirist. His image of the "social x-ray," the anorexic dowagers of the Manhatten social elite, has been imprinted indelibly on my mind.

Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe): A wonderful narrative of the misery and horrors of slavery. Every high school student should read it, but sadly few do.

Roots (Alex Haley): This book inspired me to begin a study of my own family's history, a pursuit which has led me overseas and which has been sometimes exciting and always satisfying.

To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee): A warm tale of family and moral heroism in the face of the banality of evil.

Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt): A delightful account, full of humor and pathos, of one man's struggle to rise out of the grinding poverty of his childhood in 1950's Ireland and make something of his life here in America.

Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor (Flannery O'Connor): Not a single work, of course, but I have to include this ouvre because O'Connor is just wizard with words, and her ability to skewer liberal pieties appeals to anyone cynical about the doctrine of the inherent goodness of human beings.

Moby Dick (Herman Melville): Melville captures the self-destructive nature of human vengeance, pride and obsessiveness and along the way offers a fairly complete course in whaling and cetology.

Billy Budd (Herman Melville): A marvelous work of human psychology. A good and innocent man is put to death and Melville almost has you thinking that it was the right thing to do.

Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkein): A tour de force of the imagination. It is astounding that one man could have conjured up this fabulous tale. Tolkein is in a class with Homer.

In the Heart of the Sea (Nathaniel Philbrick): This is not a novel, but it reads like one. It's actually a true story of amazing human endurance and survival at sea in the 19th century.

Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck): Classic tale of the dislocations and misery of Oklahomans during the depression-era "dust-bowl."

Les Miserables (Victor Hugo): Perhaps my very favorite novel. Hugo weaves so many threads through this story that you're tempted to focus on just a few, but then, in a stroke of literary brilliance, he ties them all together at the end. Read the unabridged version.

Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens): Another great writer tells an epic narrative of altruism and love. The image of Madame DeFarge knitting while victims of the terror are losing their heads is unforgettable.

I Am Charlotte Simmons (Tom Wolfe): A sleazy, lubricious story of big time university basketball and campus life served up in masterful prose. I haven't read all of Wolfe's works but of what I've read, this is, in my opinion, his best. It's not for children, but it is must reading for every parent sending his/her child off to college.

A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry) : A tragic and compelling tale of growing up poor in India in the fifties. Powerful.

The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown): A page turner of a novel full, unfortunately, of theological axe-grinding and historical flummery. Despite Brown's anti-Catholic, anti-Christian agenda, his book was an exciting read.

The Great Divorce (C.S. Lewis): Lewis packs more deep theological insight and wisdom about human nature into this little volume than one might think possible. Your view of hell, and heaven, will never be the same after you've read it.

Self-Destructive Paranoia

The New York Times has a fascinating article by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, based on their new book titled Cobra II, which highlights the strategic thinking in Baghdad prior to the war, and how Saddam's fear of internal coup made defending his country virtually impossible. It also raises the very important point that even Saddam's military leaders thought Iraq had WMD until just a few months before the war started, and that they were stunned to learn that "the cupboard was bare." Some of them even said that after Saddam told them that there were no weapons they still found Colin Powell's case at the U.N. persuasive and thought that maybe the U.S. knew more than they themselves did.

It is a terrible irony that Saddam's attempts to remove all traces of earlier WMD programs, so as not to give weapons inspectors reason to believe that the programs were still ongoing, actually caused the U.S. to think that he was trying to hide those very programs. Saddam tried to deny having the weapons without actually allowing inspectors to prove he didn't have them because he didn't want to appear weak. His ambiguity left the U.S. with no choice but to assume that he did indeed have them.

Those who were so quick to accuse George Bush of lying to get us into war in those days should be chastened by this revelation, but, of course, they won't be.