Inside a Cell

Mike Gene at Telic Thoughts tells us that:

One of the best scientific animations ever can be found here.

It illustrates the process of leukocyte extravasation, but focuses largely on a protein's-eye view of the various events that take place inside the cell. You'll see both the assembly and disassembly of actins and microtubules, the shuttling of the cargo vesicles by the motor protein kinesin, the export of RNA through the nuclear pore complexes, the assembly of ribosomes on the RNA along with translation, the shuttling of ribosomes to the surface of the endoplasmic reticulum, the transport of vesicles to the golgi complex, and the exocytosis and activation of new receptors. Many details are missing and this is only a three minute excerpt from an eight minute animation.

The video is pretty neat although there's no explanation of what you're seeing. Even so, it's a remarkable piece of animation, especially if you appreciate biological beauty and are impressed by the amazing complexity of living cells. It just astonishes me to think that blind, purposeless processes and forces could produce such a marvel of engineering, but it must be so, after all, because people like Richard Dawkins assure me that it is.

For a little background on the clip go here.

What's Really Going On?

The bottom line for much that is going on in the Middle East today may be found at the link below. You may want to read this excerpt serveral times so it really sinks in...

"Moreover, any asset, regardless of location, that is denominated in dollars is a US asset in essence. When oil is denominated in dollars through US state action and the dollar is a fiat currency, the US essentially owns the world's oil for free. And the more the US prints greenbacks, the higher the price of US assets will rise. Thus a strong-dollar policy gives the US a double win."

Read the entire article here.

Fighting Terrorism With Non-Violence

Sojourners magazine ran a column recently by David Cortright which lays out a case for adopting a non-violent strategy against terrorism. As much as I'd like to be assured that there is a non-violent approach that would work against Islamic terrorism, I just don't think he makes a very good case. In fact, I think his argument is exceptionally naive.

He writes:

In the months after 9/11, Jim Wallis challenged peace advocates to address the threat of terrorism. "If nonviolence is to have any credibility," he wrote, "it must answer the questions violence purports to answer, but in a better way." Gandhian principles of nonviolence provide a solid foundation for crafting an effective strategy against terrorism.

Nonviolence is fundamentally a means of achieving justice and combating oppression. Gandhi demonstrated its effectiveness in resisting racial injustice in South Africa and winning independence for India. People-power movements have since spread throughout the world, helping to bring down communism in Eastern Europe and advancing democracy in Serbia, Ukraine, and beyond. The same principles - fighting injustice while avoiding harm - can be applied in the struggle against violent extremism.

At the outset he has caused me some doubt. In every case he cites where pacifist approaches were successful they were employed by oppressed and relatively powerless citizens against their own government. We find ourselves in a very much different situation vis a vis the Islamists. We are not yet governed by the Islamists nor do we have any non-violent tools at our disposal such as passive non-compliance, etc. which would be relevant to our circumstance. Moreover, in the cases Cortright mentions the goals of the oppressors were political whereas the goals of the Islamists are primarily religious. It was not in the interest of the oppressors in Cortright's examples to kill off their citizens, but it is very much in the Islamists interests, as they see it, to kill off all the infidels.

Bush administration officials and many political leaders in Washington view terrorism primarily through the prism of war. Kill enough militants, they believe, and the threat will go away.

I share Cortright's skepticism that we'll ever be able to "kill enough militants" to make the threat disappear entirely. But just because killing terrorists is not a sufficient condition to ending terrorism it doesn't follow that it's not a necessary condition. It may be that without killing at least some terrorists no diplomatic solution will work.

The opposite approach is more effective and less costly in lives. Some limited use of force to apprehend militants and destroy training camps is legitimate, but unilateral war is not.

What does he mean by "unilateral war"? In what sense is the war on terrorism unilateral? He doesn't say, but surely he doesn't mean that we're fighting against an enemy who is not himself fighting us. He must mean that we're alone in fighting the enemy, but if this is his meaning then not only is the statement false but it's absurd. There are many nations which have joined us in this struggle in one way or another and depending on where the conflict is being fought other nations will join us as well. We can't permit ourselves to think that just because the French aren't willing to help that therefore we're all alone. Moreover, even if we were fighting the battle by ourselves his statement is patently absurd. If one is fighting for one's life one doesn't give up the fight just because no one else will help.

In the three years since the invasion of Iraq, the number of major terrorist incidents in the world has increased sharply. War itself is a form of terrorism.

Here Mr. Cortright is succumbing to the temptation to indulge in rhetorical excess. Terrorism, ab defino, is the deliberate use of violence against innocent civilians in order to effect a change in their government's conduct. The United States is not, as a matter of policy, engaging in deliberate violence against the citizens of Iraq or any other country. War is only a form of terrorism if terrorism is defined as an activity in which people are deliberately killed. This definition, however, would have the unhappy consequence of making regular police work terrorism.

Using military force to counter terrorism is like pouring gasoline on a fire. It ignites hatred and vengeance and creates a cycle of violence that can spin out of control. A better strategy is to take away the fuel that sustains the fire. Only nonviolent methods can do that, by attempting to resolve the underlying political and social factors that give rise to armed violence.

It could be as easily argued, though, that the refusal to fight back against terrorism only emboldens those who would not otherwise join with the terrorists to do so and thereby increases the number of terrorists with which one must contend. Cortright's reasoning is the same that every bully hopes his victim will adopt: No matter what the bully does, no matter how savagely he beats his prey, the victim should not strike back in self-defense because that will only make the bully angrier.

The most urgent priority for countering terrorism, experts agree, is multilateral law enforcement to apprehend perpetrators and prevent future attacks. Cooperative law enforcement and intelligence sharing among governments have proven effective in reducing the operational capacity of terrorist networks. Governments are also cooperating to block financing for terrorist networks and deny safe haven, travel, and arms for terrorist militants. These efforts are fully compatible with the principles of nonviolence.

No doubt these methods must be employed, but if Mr. Cortright seriously believes that police work alone will stop Osama bin Laden and other terrorists then he's deluding himself. Consider Iraq. The police in Iraq would be overwhelmed by the insurgents were they not backed by military force. What police force on earth would be able to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan or disarm Hezbollah or apprehend Osama bin Laden or Abu al Zarqawi?

Terrorism is fundamentally a political phenomenon, concluded the U.N. Working Group on Terrorism in 2002. To overcome the scourge, "it is necessary to understand its political nature as well as its basic criminality and psychology." This means addressing legitimate political grievances that terrorist groups exploit - such as the Israel-Palestine dispute, repressive policies by Arab governments, and the continuing U.S. military occupation in Iraq.

These deeply-held grievances generate widespread political frustration and bitterness in many Arab and Muslim countries, including among people who condemn terrorism and al Qaeda's brutal methods. As these conditions fester and worsen, support rises for the groups that resist them. Finding solutions to these dilemmas can help to undercut support for jihadism. The strategy against terrorism requires undermining the social base of extremism by driving a wedge between militants and their potential sympathizers. The goal should be to separate militants from their support base by resolving the political injustices that terrorists exploit.

Reading this causes me to wonder if Mr. Cortright really understands the nature of the threat we're facing today. By far the predominant form of contemporary terrorism is perpetrated by Muslims, and it is not motivated primarily by politics, it's motivated by religion. The radical Islamists wish to spread their religion throughout the globe and to purge the world of all non-Muslim influences. To the extent that they have a political grievance it is that Israel exists and must be eradicated. Everything else Mr. Cortright mentions is, in their minds, trivial by comparison. The solution to these "dilemmas" is not hard to discern, of course. We can all simply convert to Islam and abandon Israel. That is the only non-violent solution that will appease the Islamo-fascists which plague the world today.

A nonviolent approach should not be confused with appeasement or a defeatist justification of terrorist crimes.

William James once observed that "a difference, in order to be a difference, has to make a difference". I see no practical difference between appeasement and what Mr. Cortright is advocating in his article. By refusing to fight them where they are we would be giving them exactly what they want. The situation would be similar to that of a football game where one team plays by the rules but only plays defense whereas the other team plays by whatever rules it wishes and plays only offense. The prospects of the defense being successful aren't encouraging.

The point is not to excuse criminal acts but to learn why they occur and use this knowledge to prevent future attacks.

But we know why they occur. The terrorists resent our very existence. They loathe it and believe they're doing God's will by killing us. The sooner Mr. Cortright himself realizes this the sooner he'll realize how hopeless are his suggestions for how to address the threat.

A nonviolent strategy seeks to reduce the appeal of militants' extremist methods by addressing legitimate grievances and providing channels of political engagement for those who sympathize with the declared political aims. A two-step response is essential: determined law enforcement pressure against terrorist criminals, and active engagement with affected communities to resolve underlying injustices.

And if that doesn't work, what then? Mr. Cortright proposes we throw the terrorists all in jail. How are we going to do that without moving militarily into the countries which harbor them? I don't think warrants for the arrest of terrorists in Saddam's Iraq, or Mohammad Omar's Afghanistan, or Kim Jong Il's North Korea or Ahmadinejad's Iran would put very many killers behind bars. What police force on earth is capable of acting beyond the borders of its own nation? And what's the difference anyway between a police force acting beyond its nation's borders and a military force?

Ethicist Michael Walzer wrote, counterterrorism "must be aimed systematically at the terrorists themselves, never at the people for whom the terrorists claim to be acting." Military attacks against potential sympathizers are counterproductive and tend to drive third parties toward militancy. Lawful police action is by its nature more discriminating and is more effective politically because it minimizes predictable backlash effects.

Lawful police action? What's lawful when we're talking about the dysfunctional states mentioned above? Would Mr. Cortright have urged that the British send their police to arrest Adolf Hitler in 1940?

Mr. Cortright might recall what happened the last time we did what he recommends. After 9/11 we demanded that the Taliban turn over Osama bin Laden. They refused to do so. So, what does he suggest we should have done next? Should we simply have given up the attempt to capture him?

I'm certain Mr. Cortright means well and that he sincerely believes the things he writes, but his argument fairly drips with naivete. I wish it weren't so because I agree with him that violence can often be counterproductive. Unfortunately, in the present conflict it's the only realistic alternative, for both the West and for Israel, to total abject surrender to the Islamist jihad being waged against us. We're in a war for the survival of our nation and our culture. Our enemy is implacable, and a war like that can't be won solely with police officers and arrest warrants.

Just One Truth Among Many

Karen Armstrong of the Guardian writes a column in which she makes a plea for better understanding of the different religious worldviews that are floating about in the global marketplace of ideas. After subjecting us to a dose of postmodern hocus-pocus which she employs, as best as I can tell, to make the point that truth is often a complicated thing, she closes with this:

We must, therefore, make a concerted attempt to listen critically to all the stories out there in order to gain a more panoptic vision. This includes our own cultural narrative. Our modernity has liberated many of us, but it has disenfranchised others. Counter-narratives that question the myth of western freedom must also be heard, because they represent a crucial element in the conflicted, tragic whole.

I have a couple of questions: Why is it that we're always the ones who have to try to understand other people's "stories"? Shouldn't Ms Armstrong's plea for understanding be directed at the Islamists who are undertaking to purge the globe of Western civilization? Shouldn't they be expected to show greater appreciation for our "myth"?

Second, when the "other" starts flying hijacked airplanes into our skyscrapers isn't the time for acquiring "a more panoptic vision" and appreciating their "context" pretty much at an end? Or are we supposed to keep "affirming" their "narrative" right up to the moment when they've sliced our head from our shoulders?

Living in a Fantasy World

Take any critic of the administration's Middle East policy, and, after he has gone through the entire list of what the Bushies have done wrong over the past five years, ask them, well, what should the president have done before, and what should he do now? Invariably, the answer will be that he should rely more upon diplomacy and negotiations. The administration should have sat down and talked to Saddam, to Ahmedinejad, to Hezbollah, to the Palestinians, to the North Koreans. They should sit down now and talk with the Europeans and get them to put more economic pressure on the bad guys in the Middle East. The Bush administration, we will be told, is absolutely inept when it comes to the art of diplomacy. And how does the critic know this? Because our diplomatic efforts have obviously not worked.

When talks fail to bring about the desired result, as they inevitably will when dealing with Islamo-fascists, the critics' assumption is that it's our fault. It's also our fault that the French and Germans didn't go along with the invasion of Iraq because we couldn't persuade them that that would be better than raking in billions in oil for food money. It's also our fault if Ahmadinejad, convinced that he's riding the crest of history's wave, insists on provoking Armageddon. It must be our fault because all these people are reasonable and want peace. Only Bush wants war.

If the matter weren't so serious the response would be amusing. It assumes that the administration hasn't been talking, and it assumes that the other side is comprised of reasonable people who are willing to accept compromise. It assumes that the other side will make concessions, even if there's no threat of force hovering over their heads, if only we can convince them that we mean well. That none of this has come to pass can only mean, in their minds, that we've failed to persuade them of our good intentions and that our team must be negligent or incompetent negotiators.

Should we ask the critic what we should do if, for whatever reason, talks fail to convince the peace-loving Iranians and North Koreans to abandon their nuclear programs, or fail to persuade Hezbollah and Hamas to live in peace with Israel, the response will be more irrelevant, rambling, recapituations of Bush's failings as a negotiator. In other words, the critic really has no answer to this question.

Some of them might hint that what Bush needs to do, in Iraq at least, is send in more troops, but although this might indeed be an appropriate measure, few critics, especially on the left, really want him to follow through with it. They'll use inadequate troop strength as a club with which to beat him up politically until he decides to follow their advice, and then they'll accuse him of pouring more resources into a failed cause, or of diverting attention from the real war on terror, and why haven't we caught Osama yet, etc.

The conversation follows this or a similar path because critics know they can't say what they're really thinking which is that they actually want the president to do nothing at all. They want the United States to give up its power, both military and economic, and become Sweden or Switzerland. They know that saying this would be political suicide for their party, and so they stick to their criticisms and mumble through their vague and unhelpful recommendations if they must.

This is why the left cannot be entrusted with the reins of power. They have no solutions to the most pressing issue of the day and don't really want to have to wrestle with it. The seeming indefiniteness of the war on terror is a great tool to use to diminish Republicans in the eyes of the voters, but the critics on the left have no idea what they would do differently, aside from surrender, appeasement, and trying to convince the Osama bin Ladens of the world that we really mean them no harm, that we want to give peace a chance, and why can't we just all get along.

Chris Muir, in his Day by Day political cartoon strip, illustrates the point:

Like many Europeans in 1938, not a few of the president's most vocal critics are living in a fantasy world, a world as they'd like it to be, but, unfortunately, not the world as it is.

Bummed Out Bushaphobes

I haven't written much on the Valerie Plame business because I thought it was very much ado about nothing much at all. The Bushaphobes have been frothing at the mouth for three years now hoping and praying (well...maybe not praying) that somebody, preferably the detestable Karl Rove, would take a hard fall for what always seemed to me to be a very trivial peccadillo.

Now, after a fortune in tax dollars has been squandered on a feckless investigation into a non-crime, it's all over and the Bush-despisers are crestfallen and stultified yet again. The major malefactor appears to be Ms Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, who seems to be an almost pathological prevaricator, and the source of the infamous leak about her identity is a State Department official, Richard Armitage, who vigorously opposed the Iraq war and is thus one of the left's angels of light.

Since no administrative heads will be rolling - except the relatively minor noggin of Scooter Libby, who I predict President Bush will now pardon - and since the villains are all Bushaphobes in good standing, the breathless media hyperventilations have suddenly flatlined, and the story is sinking as quietly as a stone in the ocean.

The Washington Post offers perhaps the best eulogy:

[I]t now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

Indeed. Well, now MSNBC's Keith Olberman can go back to bashing Bill O'Reilly, and meanwhile we'll await Hardball's Chris Matthews' apology to Karl Rove for having so gleefully anticipated his indictment.

Who Do You Trust?

The Israelis don't need many more reasons not to trust the U.N. to do the job they're supposed to do in Lebanon, but if they did need a reason maybe this would be it:

During the recent month-long war between Hezbollah and Israel, U.N. "peacekeeping" forces made a startling contribution: They openly published daily real-time intelligence, of obvious usefulness to Hezbollah, on the location, equipment, and force structure of Israeli troops in Lebanon.

UNIFIL--the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a nearly 2,000-man blue-helmet contingent that has been present on the Lebanon-Israel border since 1978--is officially neutral. Yet, throughout the recent war, it posted on its website for all to see precise information about the movements of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers and the nature of their weaponry and materiel, even specifying the placement of IDF safety structures within hours of their construction. New information was sometimes only 30 minutes old when it was posted, and never more than 24 hours old.

Meanwhile, UNIFIL posted not a single item of specific intelligence regarding Hezbollah forces. Statements on the order of Hezbollah "fired rockets in large numbers from various locations" and Hezbollah's rockets "were fired in significantly larger numbers from various locations" are as precise as its coverage of the other side ever got.

So much for Kofi's Kids as disinterested peace-keepers.

War Between Iran and Israel

The American Thinker informs us of an article in the Washington Times that suggests that Israel is moving closer to war with Iran:

In what must be an officially approved leak, the London Telegraph reports that Israel has appointed a top general to oversee a war against Iran, prompting speculation that it is preparing for possible military action against Tehran's nuclear program. ... Maj. Gen. Elyezer Shkedy, Israel's air force chief, will be overall commander for the "Iran front," military sources told the London Sunday Telegraph.

This must be a signal to the Iranians - and to the rest of the world, especially Europe and America: If you don't stop the Khomeiniacs, we will. The Telegraph is often used by British intelligence, and it is friendlier to Israel than other European media. It is read in the United States.

Go to the link for the rest of the story. Israel apparently believes it has one year to decide either to accept a nuclear Iran or to do what it can to prevent it.

Where the Left's Hatred is Taking Us

The "entertainment" left has plumbed new depths in their forthcoming televison docudrama based on the hypothetical assassination of President Bush. I can't imagine a similar series being produced during the tenure of President Clinton. If one were to be aired the outrage from the Democrats would have been incandescent, and rightly so. The more used to the idea of killing a specific human being we become, the more likely someone will take it into his/her head to attempt it.

There was a time when people thought that murdering a president was a topic that decent folk simply would not dream of talking about out of a respect for the value of human life and prevailing standards of taste, and also so as not to incite the crazies. But that time is past. The present-day secular left, never known to be constrained by taste or consideration for the well-being of political figures they despise, or, for that matter, the Biblical mandate to love one's neighbor, seems instead to be positively obsessed with the idea of killing George Bush.

Michelle Malkin offers the documentation here. It's pretty revolting, actually, but the idea behind the new docudrama will doubtless be boffo with the gentle folk at the Daily Kos and Democratic Underground.

Russell Shaw's Terrible Argument

A friend directed me to this article at the very liberal Huffington Post. I hasten to point out that the writer, Russell Shaw, is not endorsing a terror attack on the United States and is at pains to express his own revulsion at such a thought. Nevertheless, his speculations and reasoning seem to draw him, against his will, in the direction of hoping for one and they demand some critical examination. Mr. Shaw writes:

What if another terror attack just before this fall's elections could save many thousand-times the lives lost? I start from the premise that there is already a substantial portion of the electorate that tends to vote GOP because they feel that Bush has "kept us safe," and that the Republicans do a better job combating terrorism.

If an attack occurred just before the elections, I have to think that at least a few of the voters who persist in this "Bush has kept us safe" thinking would realize the fallacy they have been under. If 5% of the "he's kept us safe" revise their thinking enough to vote Democrat, well, then, the Dems could recapture the House and the Senate and be in a position to:

Block the next Supreme Court appointment, one which would surely result in the overturning of Roe and the death of hundreds if not thousands of women from abortion-prohibiting states at the hands of back-alley abortionists;

Mr. Shaw is an example of a man so blinded by ideology that he can't see the fallacies in his own argument even though they're as obvious as the noon-day sun.

How does he know, for instance, that a terrorist attack would not have the opposite effect of driving more people toward the GOP? He doesn't. And what makes him put scare quotes around "he's kept us safe" as if he thinks this is an absurd notion? What makes him think that the current administration hasn't kept us safe from terrorist attacks? Have there been any such attacks in the U.S. since 9/11? And where does he get the idea that overturning Roe would result in the deaths of thousands of women? What statistics is he relying on for this conjecture? Further, could it not be just as plausibly argued that overturning Roe would save the lives of millions of babies?

Nevertheless, Mr. Shaw, having demonstrated that he's not interested in something so inconvenient as competing facts, is just starting to gather his rhetorical momentum:

[This would place the Democrats] in a position to elevate the party's chances for a regime change in 2008. A regime change that would:

Save hundreds of thousands of American lives by enacting universal health care;

How does he know that granting universal health care would result in "hundreds of thousands of lives" saved? Where does he get that figure? How does he know that the decline in medical effectiveness that has accompanied state-run systems elsewhere around the world wouldn't also occur here with the result that we experience long-term increase in the number of people who die earlier than they otherwise would have?

Save untold numbers of lives by pushing for cleaner air standards that would greatly reduce heart and lung diseases;

It could be argued that the expenses incurred by forcing compliance with tougher emissions standards would result in companies laying off thousands of employees and thus thrusting these workers into a poverty which would shorten their lives and that of their children. Mr. Shaw offers no reason for thinking this would be unlikely.

More enthusiastically address the need for mass transit, the greater availability of which would surely cut highway deaths;

Democrats were in control of the White House throughout the nineties and never made mass transit a priority. Democrats also control the governorships and or legislatures of many states. Do these states have a better and more effective system of mass transit than states controlled by Republicans? It's not clear that Democrats would be any more effective at implementing mass transit systems than would Republicans.

Enact meaningful gun control legislation that would reduce crime and cut fatalities by thousands a year;

Gun control legislation actually has the opposite effect wherever it is tried (see John Lott's More Guns, Less Crime). The only way to eliminate gun crime is to deny criminals access to guns and the only way to do that is to eliminate guns from the face of the planet. That, of course, will never happen. Moreover, neither of the last two Democratic candidates for president supported gun control, why does Mr. Shaw think the next one will?

Fund stem cell research that could result in cures saving millions of lives;

Mr. Shaw has no evidence to support the claim that stem cell research could save "millions" of lives. Moreover, there's no law prohibiting private funding of stem cell research now, nor is there a prohibition against federal funding of adult stem cell research. This statement is pure flummery reminiscent of John Edwards' assertion in the last election campaign that if John Kerry is elected president Christopher Reeve would get out of his wheel chair and walk.

Boost the minimum wage, helping to cut down on poverty which helps spawn violent crime and the deaths that spring from those acts;

Where are the statistics that support his claim that a higher minimum wage cuts down on poverty? Is it not likely that at some point raising the minimum wage will increase unemployment because employers will no longer be able to afford to hire the marginal worker. The higher an employer's costs the fewer employees he will take on and the more expensive his product will be for consumers. Raising costs (wages)is not without it's downside, but Mr. Shaw seems blissfully unaware of the fact.

Be less inclined to launch foolish wars, absence of which would save thousands of soldiers' lives- and quite likely moderate the likelihood of further terror acts.

The most foolish war in our history, Vietnam, was launched by two Democratic presidents, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Shaw's implication that the war in Iraq has increased terrorism is simply not supported by the evidence. We went to war in 2001 in Afghanistan and since then there has been no terrorist attack on our soil. That doesn't mean there won't be in the future, but it certainly lends greater support to the belief that what moderates terror attacks is fighting terrorists in their house rather than ours.

I am not proud of myself for even considering the notion that another terror attack that costs even one American life could ever be considered anything else but evil and hurtful. And I know that when I weigh the possibility that such an attack- that might, say, kill 100- would prevent hundreds of thousands of Americans from dying who otherwise would- I am exhibiting a calculating cold heart diametrically opposed to everything I stand for as a human being. A human being, who, just so you know, is opposed to most wars and to capital punishment.

Of course it's possible that a terrorist attack would drive voters to the Democrats, as Mr. Shaw predicts, and it's possible that a Democratic administration would do the things Shaw assumes they would, but then anything is possible. No serious thinker would base an ethical question of this magnitude on mere possibility. It's possible, after all, that if someone burned down Mr. Shaw's house the whole nation would experience rapturous paroxysms of profound joy, but the bare possibility is certainly no justification for the arson.

But in light of the very real potential of the next two American elections to solidify our growing American persona as a warlike, polluter-friendly nation with repressive domestic tendencies and inadequate health care for so many tens of millions, let me ask you this. Even if only from the standpoint of a purely intellectual exercise in alternative future history:

If you knew us getting hit again would launch a chain of transformative, cascading events that would enable a better nation where millions who would have died will live longer, would such a calculus have any moral validity?

This question is to "intellectual exercise" what raising a donut to one's mouth is to physical exercise. Nor does his argument rise to the level of a "calculus". It's based entirely upon ungrounded speculation and suppositions. It boils down to this: If the deaths of a hundred innocent citizens could conceivably, maybe, if everything went right and counter to all of our experience, bring about the longer lives of tens of thousands, even millions, of others, it would be moral to allow, or hope for, the hundred to be murdered.

Perhaps the most succinct refutation of this bizarre piece of moral analysis is this: Keeping in mind that the benefits are only possible, and not even close to being demonstrably probable, Mr. Shaw might be asked whether he would be willing to volunteer one of his own children to be one of the terrorists' victims. If, as I would be willing to wager, he would not be at all agreeable to such a sacrifice, even though there may be a slim chance that it might secure a very great good for others, then what makes him think that his suggestion of sacrificing other peoples' children has any "moral validity" at all?

Do the Evolution

Well, we're pretty confident you won't find this tune by Pearl Jam on too many Darwinians' ipods:

Go here for the video and here for the lyrics (which are pretty much unintelligible on the video).

This is not the sort of direction, I wouldn't think, that Darwinians want people to think materialistic evolution takes us in.

Thanks for the tip to Uncommon Descent.

Is the Pope an IDer?

UPI informs of this development at the Vatican which seems to indicate that Rome is soon going to clarify its stance on the ID/Darwinism controversy:

Pope Benedict XVI may reportedly embrace the theory of intelligent design, possibly heralding a fundamental shift in the Vatican's view of evolution.

Philosophers, scientists and other intellectuals are to meet with the pope this week at his summer palace near Rome to discuss the issue, The Guardian reported Monday.

Advocates of the theory argue the universe and living things are so complex they must be a product of intelligent design rather than natural selection. Critics say the theory is a disguise for creationism.

Vatican officials last week announced evolution and creation would be the topics for this year's meeting of the pope's Schulerkreis -- a group consisting mainly of his former doctoral students that has been gathering annually since the late 1970s, The Guardian said.

Pope Benedict raised the issue during the inaugural sermon of his pontificate, saying, "We are not the accidental product, without meaning, of evolution."

HT: Uncommon Descent.

One Book He Needs to Read

A friend linked me to this column by Tony Norman in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. According to what Norman has been able to discover the presidential reading regimen is quite impressive. In fact, it seems almost unbelievably impressive:

The list of 60 books Mr. Bush is alleged to have read this year reveals an intellect of Promethean scale and ambition. He's read 10 books more than his chief adviser, Karl Rove, who presumably continues to run the country with Mr. Cheney while Mr. Bush wanders the aisles of Barnes & Noble.

A partial list of the books Mr. Bush is alleged to have devoured between mountain biking and weight lifting two hours a day includes Edvard Radzinsky's "Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar," John Barry's "The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History," Geraldine Brooks' "Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women" and "Mao: The Unknown Story" by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday.

Mr. Bush also put away three books about Lincoln this year -- "Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer" by James Swanson, "Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power" by Richard Carwardine and "Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural" by Ronald White Jr.

Mr. Bush's summer reading list is formidable, clocking in at 25 books. The list includes the three Lincoln books previously mentioned, "After Fidel: The Inside Story of Castro's Regime and Cuba's Next Leader" by Brian Latell, "Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different" by Gordon Wood, "Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War" by Nathaniel Philbrick, "Polio: An American Story" by David Oshinsky and "Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero" by David Maraniss.

And while contemporary writers exert a powerful pull on Mr. Bush's imagination, he also managed to reread Shakespeare's two greatest tragedies, "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" just to keep his literary allusions sharp and pungent.

Frankly, if this list is true (and I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the White House press office), Mr. Bush has fallen off the wagon of American anti-intellectualism that has served him so well and is now flagrantly engaged in the greatest presidential reading spree in the republic's history.

Well, I'm afraid I'm skeptical, but be that as it may, I wish that somewhere in the midst of his prodigious consumption of the printed word the president would find time to read Pat Buchanan's State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. If he did he would learn the following:

• In 2005 there were 687 assualts on border agents, twice the figure for the previous year.
• In 2004 160,000 non-Mexicans were caught trying to cross our border illegally. Only 30,000 were sent back.
• Under current law, the federal government is required to release people caught trying to cross our border illegally if their home countries refuse to take them back.
• In George Bush's first 4.5 years in office approximately 4 million people entered this country illegally.
• Many of our major cities have declared themselves sanctuary cities. It is forbidden to police in these cities to apprehend known illegal or criminal aliens.
• Gang members in L.A. who are in violation of deportation orders may not be arrested by police.
• In L.A. 95% of all outstanding warrants for homicide, some 1200 to 1500, are for illegal aliens.
• 66% of the 17000 outstanding fugitive felony warrants in L.A. are for illegal aliens.
• 12000 of the 20000 members of the 18th Street Gang in southern California are illegals.
• It is illegal to refuse emergency care to illegal aliens but the costs of doing so are so prohibitive that in the nine years from 1994 to 2003 eighty four hospitals in California were forced to close their doors.
• Between 300000 and 350000 "anchor babies" are born to illegal aliens each year. These children are automatically citizens and qualify for all benefits of citizens.
• Illegals are bringing contagious diseases like leprosy and tuberculosis into this country which had formerly been all but eradicated.

The list goes on. Buchanan's book weighs every aspect of the immigration controversy - the argument that we need the workers, that they will assimilate, and so on - and finds them all wanting. Given the urgency of the topic State of Emergency may well be the most important book of our time, and President Bush would do well to read it. If for no other reason he should read it to discover why many of his supporters are growing increasingly disillusioned with his lack of leadership on this issue and his egregious failure to perform his sworn constitutional duty to uphold the laws of this nation.

Mac Donald/Novak Debate Pt. II

Sunday I posted some comments on an essay by Heather Mac Donald which has triggered a debate among conservatives on the importance of Christianity to a conservative worldview. I'd like in this post to consider the argument she makes in her follow-up piece. Ms Mac Donald notes in this second column that the fundamental question, the "threshold question", is whether Christianity is true. She believes it is not, and the reason she gives is that she believes that the existence of a loving and just God is simply incompatible with the evil that afflicts our world:

The most important characteristics of the Christian God, as I understand them, are his love of man and his justice. If one were to posit a god who is capricious, ironic, absent-minded, depraved, or completely unknowable, I'd be on board. Any one of those characteristics would comport with a deity superintending the world as I see it. But not the idea, as a Bush administration publicist put it to me, that every one of us is "precious in God's eyes."

In the course of laying out her argument, which she does quite persuasively, she writes many things to which Christians would do well to give careful consideration, but she does not, in my opinion, successfully defend her claim that the presence of evil refutes belief in the Christian God.

In fact, Ms Mac Donald is really attempting two arguments in her paper. One argument is against the inconsistent manner in which many Christians conceive of God's action in the world, an argument with which I concur. The other is an argument that seeks to show that the manifest evil of the world is incompatible with the existence of a God who is loving and just.

The nut of this second argument is found here, I think, where she writes:

Let me take a banal example. As I write this, the Los Angeles Times has a small item on a thoroughly unremarkable traffic accident. A 27-year-old man in Los Angeles misread a traffic signal, and drove his car into an oncoming Blue Line Metro Train. He and his sister were killed; his 7-year-old son and his grandmother were seriously injured.

Now imagine that a human father had behaved towards the occupants of the car as our Divine Father did. That is: a) He knew that his children would be mowed down by a train; b) he had the capacity to avert the disaster through any number of, for him, quite simple means; and c) he chose to do nothing. No one would call this father's deliberate and possibly criminal passivity "love." Instead, we would deem such a father a monster and banish him from our midst. Yet when God behaves in just this way, we remain firm in our conviction that he loved the occupants of that car, and that each was "precious" in his eyes.

Ms Mac Donald is implying that there is a contradiction contained in the conflation of the beliefs that God is able to prevent evil and wants to prevent evil with the manifest fact that evil exists. Actually, this was a popular argument among atheists ever since Epicurus sketched it out over 2000 years ago up until the 1960s when just about everyone finally realized that, in point of fact, there actually is no contradiction. God might well be omnipotent and omnibenevolent and still have a reason, nonetheless, for permitting evil. Such reasons might include a commitment to honor our autonomy and to grant us the freedom necessary to make us more than robots. Or it could be that preventing some evils would unleash even greater evils. There may be other reasons as well which lie beyond our ken, but the point is that as long as it's possible that God have such reasons the argument that His existence is logically incompatible with evil just doesn't work.

Let's suppose, hypothetically, that the God Ms Mac Donald accuses of being able to prevent the train crash, unbeknownst to us cries out in profound anguish as this terrible tragedy unfolds. It breaks His heart to see it happen, to know from all eternity that it is going to happen, and yet, although He could intervene to suspend the laws of nature and prevent it from happening, He is constrained by considerations, perhaps self-imposed, of which we are unaware to let the event unfold. Suppose, too, that the grief God experiences in allowing this terrible tragedy far exceeds that of any experienced by even the family of the victims. Suppose, finally, that God quickly folds those victims into His bosom and embraces them in love and joy forever. Just suppose that something like this happens. If so, would Ms Mac Donald now say that the God of Christianity is a "monster"? Yet isn't this a thoroughly Christian view of the God of the Bible?

It could be, however, that Ms Mac Donald is trying to say something a little less strong than that there is a contradiction between evil and the existence of the Christian God. Perhaps she's making the case that the existence of evil makes the existence of a loving and just God not logically impossible but rather highly improbable. God's existence, she might be taken to mean, is unlikely given the facts she lays out in her essay.

Now the facts that she sets forth certainly must be allowed to count as prima facie evidence against the existence of God, and if these were all the facts there are then we might agree that it seems indeed that God, if He exists, at least appears to be either uncaring and unjust, or capricious, or inscrutable. But there is more to consider here than just the argument based upon the world's horrors before we conclude that the existence of God is unlikely.

Consider the following example. Someone tells you that they know a Chinese man who is over seven feet tall. You, having seen lots of Chinese men, none of whom is much over six feet, are very dubious. But suppose you then learn that this person is a professional basketball player, a center in the NBA. These additional facts might soften your doubt and make you reconsider. The fact that he's Chinese may count against him being seven feet tall, but the other facts would count in favor of it.

Likewise, the existence of so much apparently gratuitous suffering, grief, pain, and terror count, on the face of things, against the existence of the Christian God, but then we should throw into the pot the classical arguments for God's existence - the cosmological and ontological arguments, and Kant's moral argument, for instance - as well as the religious experience of millions of believers, the fine-tuning of the universe which gives every appearance of having been designed, the existential argument that concludes that the existence of God is the best explanation for man's yearning for meaning, as well as for a ground for morality, dignity, human rights, justice, and for his desire to survive his own physical death, etc. We should also stir into the mix the irreducible complexity of some biological structures and systems and the ubiquity of information throughout the biosphere, both of which point prima facie to an intelligent author of life. We should add, too, the implausibility of a naturalistic origin of life and the phenomenom of consciousness. All of these must be counted in support of the proposition that God exists.

We might then reason that if God does indeed exist the testimony of the Scriptures and the internal witness of the Holy Spirit might also count as evidence that this God is both loving and just.

All of these lines of evidence may have explanations other than God, of course, but the point is that the evil we find ourselves surrounded by might also have an explanation other than the one Ms Mac Donald assumes.

She is right that Christians often respond to instances of evil much too glibly and with an unseemly assurance that they understand God's doings, but the shortcomings of some theists is hardly an argument against the existence of God.

One final note. At one point in her essay she writes this:

Religious institutions and beliefs are, however, human creations. They grow out of man's instinct for system and order, as well as out of the desire for life beyond death and a divine intervener in human affairs. Our striving for justice is one of the great human attributes. Far from imitating a divine model, man's every effort to dispense justice is a battle against the randomness that rules the natural world.

A believer might ask Ms Mac Donald from whence she derives her notion of justice. If she's correct that there is no transcendent source of moral truth then her concept of justice is perforce a matter of her own subjective preferences. Justice for one person may be, as Plato has Thrasymachus say, merely the interest of the stronger (or the ruler). For another person justice may be treating other people with dignity and kindness. If there is no God there's no way to decide that one definition is better or any more right than the other. The correct definition is simply whichever one Ms Mac Donald likes the best. In other words, if there's no transcendent standard for justice, Ms Mac Donald's last two sentences above are nonsensical.

Moral Anguish

The Washington Post has a must-read account by Laura Blumenfeld of an Israeli air-strike against Hamas leadership in 2003. It is especially important that those who suspect Israel of wanton killing of Palestinians read this article all the way to the end.

I wonder if the Palestinians put themselves through the same agonizing moral struggle before they launch their suicide bombers and rocket attacks against the Israelis. It's hard to imagine.

Trust in Muslims Waning in Britain

There's much of interest in this report in the British Daily Mail on a recent poll taken in that country. Here are some of the findings:

Most Britons now believe the Muslim faith is a threat to Western democracy, a new survey has revealed. A YouGov poll shows that increasing numbers think "a large proportion" of British Muslims feel no loyalty to the UK and are ready to condone or even carry out terrorist atrocities, while far more people feel threatened by Islam itself than was the case five years ago.

The starkest finding was that 53 per cent of people now agreed that Islam itself - not just fundamentalist groups - posed a threat to Western liberal democracy, while only 34 per cent disagreed. A year ago the proportions were evenly balanced, and in 2001 only 32 per cent of people felt threatened by the Muslim faith while 63 per cent believed there was no threat.

The proportion of respondents who agreed that "a large proportion of British Muslims feel no sense of loyalty to this country and are prepared to condone or even carry out acts of terrorism" has almost doubled since last year from 10 to 18 per cent. At the same time the proportion stating that "practically all British Muslims" are law-abiding and deplore terrorism has dropped from 23 to 16 per cent.

More people now want MI5 and the Police to focus their counter-terrorist efforts on Muslims - up from 60 to 65 per cent in a year - while fewer are concerned about the impact on race relations -down from 30 to 23 per cent.

My first reaction to this story is surprise that the percentages were as modest as they are. I wonder how many respondents would have answered otherwise but didn't wish to seem to the pollster as being "illiberal".

The poll results came as Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly admitted that the doctrine of multi-culturalism - the cornerstone of left wing immigration and race policies for the past 20 years - may have been wrong, and contributed to isolation and alienation between communities.

Launching the Government's new Commission on Integration and Cohesion - first promised by ministers last year following the July 7 bombings - she admitted that encouraging immigrants to retain their own culture rather than to integrate with wider society may have "encouraged separateness."

This just goes to show that even a government bureaucrat can have the scales fall from her eyes if the evidence smacking her in the head hits her hard enough. It has long been an argument in this country that multiculturalism is counter-productively divisive. When we emphasize the things that make us different rather than those things that make us alike we should not be surprised that our communities remain balkanized and suspicious of one another. We should not be surprised, when we tell immigrants that they need not worry about assimilating into the larger culture and adopting the political values of the larger society, that they don't.

Immigration would be a good thing for both the immigrant and his new nation if the immigrant wished to become a full citizen in his new country, but Muslim immigrants too often don't. Their dream - I had an imam tell me this once in so many words - is to replace the constitutions of the countries in which they live with Islamic law. They'll use democratic processes to do this, but once they are successful in achieving political dominance the principles of democracy will be discarded and all law will be based on the Quran. Now there's an unsettling thought.

Shallow Fascination

Gary Varvel captures pretty well the media's fascination with the "confessed" murderer of JonBenet Ramsey:

Iran is intent on becoming a nuclear power willing to use nuclear weapons against Israel. Tens of thousands of illegal aliens, many of them felons, some of them potential terrorists, are streaming across our southern border. The war in Iraq continues to shape the Middle East in ways that cry out for analysis. And all some of our television stations can talk about, for most of the twenty four hours of their broadcast day, is a ten year old murder case and every detail of the daily existence of a non-entity named John Mark Karr.

Either these cable news channels are staffed by some of the most incredibly shallow people in the country or else they have rightly divined that the country is populated by incredibly shallow television viewers, or both.

Is Bush Losing His Will?

Has George Bush lost his will to fight the war on terrorism? After 9/11 the world shook in Afghanistan and Iraq as the United States rose up to smite its enemies, but a lot has happened in the last three years, and much of it is not good. We are threatened in Iraq by Iranian and Syrian machinations which are carried out with impunity. Moqtada al-Sadr leads Iraq closer to civil war, and we hestitate to neutralize him. Israel has Hezbollah, a terrorist organization which has killed hundreds of Americans, on the ropes, and we vote in the U.N. for an otherwise meaningless resolution that allows them to survive. It has become clear that the administration's war against Islamic terrorism has taken a turn away from an aggressively offensive strategy and seems to have morphed into a strategy of merely keeping the Islamo-fascists at arm's length.

The Iraq experience has certainly sapped the will of many Americans. It is not just the drain on our resources and soldiers' lives and well-being that have taken a toll on our resolve, but also the relentless negativism of the media which has refused to acknowledge that anything worthwhile was being accomplished there.

Now, increasingly, we're hearing military voices which were once optimistic, expressing implied skepticism. We're seeing former supporters of the president's policies start to edge closer to the side of the ship. We're seeing Republican politicians up for re-election who lack the fortitude to campaign as supporters of the president and who instead pusillanimously scurry away from him.

Part of the blame for this must lie with the White House which has been notably incapable of articulating its vision and strategy to the general public in a very convincing way. President Bush is probably the least articulate man to occupy the White House in my lifetime, and he apparently thinks that he does himself little good by trying to take his case to the public on a regular basis. I think this is a mistake. People need to be continually reminded of what the nature of the struggle is, what our goals are, what our strategy and tactics are, and how we are doing in the contest. Instead the president, to his detriment, lets a hostile media frame the debate and pretty much have the floor.

Part of the blame must also lie also with a Department of Defense which has never made a compelling counter-case to those who claimed that we needed more troops from the beginning of the post-invasion period. They seem to think that the criticisms are too uninformed to be worth their notice, but they're not. Millions of Americans would like to know why we didn't send in more troops when it became obvious that Iraq was spiralling into an insurgency. Their curiosity goes unsatisfied.

Finally, part of the blame must lie with a political opposition which has been the insurgents' best tool in their war against the coalition forces. Nothing has degraded the ability of the administration to respond appropriately to events on the ground than the relentless sniping, criticism, and carping of the president's political foes. No matter what the president does it gets distorted and maligned by an adversary media and political party that acts as if they really believe the rhetoric of those who proclaim that George Bush is a greater threat to world peace and safety than are the Islamo-fascist jihadis.

Even so, there are glimmers of hope. The president sounded as determined as ever to continue to fight the war against terrorists in his press conference last Monday. Moreover, it may be that our vote for Res. 1701 was a consequence of our assessment that Ehud Olmert was not interesting in prosecuting the war against Hezbollah and was himself hoping that the U.N. would step in to stop it. If that's so, there would have been no point in the U.S. voting against the resolution to end hostilities.

The next several months will tell us a lot about the president's determination. Will we neutralize or eliminate al-Sadr? Will we hold the Iranians to their claim that they're willing to enter into serious negotiations over their nuclear weapons program? Will we offer full support to Israel when the conflict in Lebanon flares up again? If not, then we can conclude that the aggressive phase of the war against Islamic terror is over and we will have pretty much decided to play rope-a-dope for the last two years of the Bush presidency.

Mac Donald/Novak Debate

There's a fascinating debate taking place among conservatives affiliated with National Review surrounding the question of the legitimacy of Christian belief and whether one can be an atheist and still be a conservative. The debate was triggered by this column by Heather Mac Donald in the American Conservative. Michael Novak here and Mac Donald replies to Novak in this thoughtful and challenging essay.

Heather Mac Donald is very bright, very well-educated, and usually right, but I think this is one time when she's not. In her first piece, the one which began the discussion, she makes the error of essentially arguing that because the existence of God is not a sufficient condition for people, and nations, to be moral that neither, therefore, is His existence a necessary condition for morality. She wishes to stress that one need not be religious in order to be conservative. Some of what she says in the column is certainly true, but there are some things, too, from which I must dissent. Here are a couple of examples with commentary.

She writes:

Skeptical conservatives-one of the Right's less celebrated subcultures-are conservatives because of their skepticism, not in spite of it. They ground their ideas in rational thinking and (nonreligious) moral argument. And the conservative movement is crippling itself by leaning too heavily on religion to the exclusion of these temperamentally compatible allies.

The presumption of religious belief - not to mention the contradictory thinking that so often accompanies it - does damage to conservatism by resting its claims on revealed truth. But on such truth there can be no agreement without faith. And a lot of us do not have such faith - nor do we need it to be conservative.

Nonbelievers look elsewhere for a sense of order, valuing the rule of law for its transparency to all rational minds and debating Supreme Court decisions without reverting to mystical precepts or "natural law."

Skeptical conservatives do not look into the abyss when they make ethical choices. Their moral sense is as secure as a believer's. They do not need God or the Christian Bible to discover the golden rule and see themselves in others.

Perhaps this is true, perhaps the moral sense of unbelievers is as secure as that of a theist, but as I've frequently argued here at Viewpoint, most recently here, it doesn't seem likely. Suppose we ask Ms Mac Donald why the golden rule is right in the first place or why anyone should try to see himself in others. Why does she think that these maxims should be embraced? Is it that they're morally right? Granting that I'm being a bit unfair by putting words in her mouth, perhaps the exchange might go something like this:

Believer: Why should anyone practice the golden rule?

Mac Donald: Because it's obvious that we shouldn't treat others in ways we wouldn't want to be treated.

B: Why not, why is that wrong to do?

M: Because people get hurt that way. Living by the Golden Rule keeps us from harming each other.

B: Yes, but why is it wrong for one man to harm another?

M: Because no one wants others to harm him.

B: That's certainly true, but that's not a reason why I, for instance, shouldn't harm someone else if it's to my benefit and if I can get away with it. Why would I be wrong to do that?

M: That would be terribly selfish.

B: I agree, but why is selfishness wrong? What makes it morally wrong to act exclusively in your own interest?

M: If all people lived that way society would self-destruct and that would not be in your self-interest.

B: Maybe not, but then you're agreeing that what's right is what's in my self-interest. If it's in my self-interest to hurt someone else, and if I can do it without suffering harm to myself, then it wouldn't be wrong to do it. In fact, it would be right.

M: But it's wrong not to care about others' well-being.

B: It is? Why is it? Why shouldn't I just care about my own well-being? Even if I accept your claim that I should live by the golden rule out of my own self-interest and therefore not do anything that would make society chaotic all that follows is that I should just live for myself while encouraging others to live by the golden rule. That way I get what I want and society holds together so that I can enjoy it. There would be nothing morally wrong with doing this, would there? In other words, a man who has power and the desire to exercise that power over others is doing nothing wrong by doing so.

M: That would be tyranny.

B: Yes, but reason gives me no basis for thinking that "might makes right" is somehow wrong. I can only think that it's wrong to treat others hurtfully if others have inherent rights, and they can only have inherent rights if those rights are invested in them by a transcendent moral authority, a creator. In other words, it's wrong to treat others hurtfully because, as John Locke pointed out, we are created in the image of God and are loved by God. Each of us is His property and God forbids us to harm what He loves. If there is no God, then there's nothing wrong with being a tyrant. If there is no God, there's no right and wrong at all. Reason can tell us how best to pursue certain ends, but it cannot tell us, by itself, whether those ends are good or evil, right or wrong.

To put it differently, the skeptic has no grounds for opposing tyranny other than that she simply doesn't like it. She may believe that tyranny is not the best way to produce a happy society, but whose happiness is the skeptic concerned about? The happiness of the masses? Why, on the skeptic's naturalistic assumptions, should the happiness of the masses be privileged over the happiness of the rulers?

Ms Mac Donald's skepticism reduces her moral judgments to arbitrary expressions of personal tastes and preferences. There's no reason why others should find them persuasive unless they share her subjective predilections.

She adds this:

Suffice it to say that, to many of us, Western society has become more compassionate, humane, and respectful of rights as it has become more secular. Just compare the treatment of prisoners in the 14th century to today, an advance due to Enlightenment reformers. A secularist could as easily chide today's religious conservatives for wrongly ignoring the heritage of the Enlightenment.

To accept a claim like this, however, we must ignore an awful lot of history. We must turn a blind eye, for instance, to the bitter 20th century fruits of the enlightenment - most notably national socialism and communism with their holocausts, killing fields, and over 100 million dead around the globe.

It's true that in some ways we've become a kinder and gentler people. We no longer practice slavery, we have legal procedures to try to insure justice, civil rights legislation, and extensive welfare systems to care for the poor and the sick, but it's not clear that any of these are particularly due to enlightenment skepticism and considerable evidence to conclude that they emerged out of a maturing Judeo-Christian worldview (Indeed, as did the enlightenment itself). See, for example, the arguments made by Alvin Schmidt in his book Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization.

Ms Mac Donald concludes with this observation:

A secular value system is, of course, no guarantee against injustice and brutality, but then neither is Christianity.

This is true enough. Too many Christians in this country suffered too few qualms about slavery, the treatment of the Indians, or the use of fission and fire-bombing in WWII (products, incidentally, of enlightenment science). But I would go one step further and say that a secular value system, by removing any transcendent ground for values, makes a system founded on injustice and brutality not only more likely, but also free from any possibility of moral disapprobation.

If Christians act unjustly or brutally they're acting contrary to their fundamental beliefs and principles. If an atheist acts unjustly or brutally he violates nothing other than the arbitrary and subjective standards established by others and which have no moral authority over him whatsoever.

It is the conservatism's' recognition of this which places Ms Mac Donald's views in the minority among her fellow conservatives.

Racist Ray in Chocolate City

Tropical storm Ernesto appears to be headed right for ... New Orleans. New Orleanians re-elected Racist Ray Nagin as mayor on Racist Ray's promise that their city will be "a chocolate city at the end of the day", and maybe he'll soon see his prophecy fulfilled. If Ernesto progresses to a hurricane and hits New Orleans, the only people who'll be living amidst the chocolate brown flood waters by next summer will be the people too poor and too helpless to move anywhere else. These people, as we were endlessly reminded by the news media last fall, are primarily African-American.

I'm sure that this time around Mayor Nagin will show more leadership and foresight than he was able to summon last year and make certain that he has enough federal officials on hand to plan for the evacuation, turn the keys in the school busses, and drive those citizens who need transport to safer regions out of town.

Why does he need the feds to do that, you ask? Why can't city officials be mobilized to do what's necessary to assist their taxpayers? Well, when you're busy doing important stuff like turning your city into a racially homogenous community you can't be expected to do little things like plan how to handle an evacuation. That's what the federal government is for.