Open to Amnesty

National Review's David Frum, like many conservatives, is open to discussing amnesty for illegals. Here's how he puts it:

I for one am absolutely open to considering an amnesty plan at any date after the FIFTH anniversary of the completion of border control measures, including an effective employment verification system.

I am open to an amnesty plan after the flow of new illegals has been halted and we have seen significant attrition from the existing illegal population.

I am open to amnesty after - and only after! - federal judges start assisting local law enforcement agencies that wish to enforce the law rather than forbidding them to do so.

I am open to amnesty after a US president demonstrates a willingness to respond with some modicum of respect to the immigration concerns of the American public - and is not looking for any transparent gimmick that will get him from here to the bill signing.

Hey, here's a thought: Why doesn't President Bush condemn the decision by federal judge Colleen McMahon to require the town of Mamoreneck, NY, to pay $550,000 to illegal aliens and create a center from which they may violate the immigration laws of the United States conveniently, publicly, and with impunity? If ever one legal case destroyed what little "confidence" remained in the seriousness of the US government on immigration, this was that case. And the president has said ... what exactly?

If we have learned anything from the hard experiences of the recent past it is that amnesty must be the last step in any intelligent program of immigration enforcement. When it is the first step, it rapidly becomes the only step - or rather, the first step to the next amnesty and the next after that.

We have learned, too, that the political leadership in Washington wants a radically different outcome to this immigration debate from that desired by the large majority of the American people.

Confidence? Well in the words of an expert on the subject (President Bush):

"Fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again."

Amnesty for illegals is not something most people reject out of hand, but they do reject an amnesty that doesn't secure our borders and which puts illegals on a path to citizenship. There's no reason why the American taxpayer should be saddled with the enormous expense that illegal immigrants will impose on our nation if they are entitled to the benefits of citizens. Indeed, it has been estimated by some to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Politicians are learning that the times have changed. No longer can they do whatever they please without the American people knowing about it. With talk radio and the blogosphere they're under a magnifying glass and they don't like it. Too bad.

RLC

Zero-Tolerance Dopiness

We need to follow rules, certainly, and we need the stability that rules bring to a society, but some people seem to believe that mindlessly adhering to rules is some sort of virtue. For a certain kind of person rules serve as a substitute for common sense and thoughtfulness.

No where is this more evident, unfortunately, than among public school administrators. Consider for example the actions taken by these educators:

Fifth-graders in California who adorned their mortarboards with tiny toy plastic soldiers this week to support troops in Iraq were forced to cut off their miniature weapons. A Utah boy was suspended for giving his cousin a cold pill prescribed to both students. In Rhode Island, a kindergartner was suspended for bringing a plastic knife to school so he could cut cookies.

It's all part of "zero tolerance" rules, which typically mandate severe punishments for weapons and drug offenses regardless of the circumstances.

Lawmakers in several states say the strict policies in schools have resulted in many punishments that lack common sense, and are seeking to loosen the restrictions.

"A machete is not the same as a butter knife. A water gun is not the same as a gun loaded with bullets," said Rhode Island state Sen. Daniel Issa, a former school board member who worries that no-tolerance rules are applied blindly and too rigidly.

Some have long been aware of the problems of zero tolerance. For the last decade, Mississippi has allowed local school districts to reduce previously mandatory one-year expulsions for violence, weapons and drug offenses.

More recently, Texas lawmakers have also moved to tone down their state's zero-tolerance rules. Utah altered its zero-tolerance policy on drugs so asthmatic students can carry inhalers. The American Bar Association has recommended ending zero-tolerance policies, while the American Psychological Association wants the most draconian codes changed.

It is astonishing that these school districts have had to reword their rules so that asthmatics can carry inhalers and water guns. Why can't administrators figure out for themselves that these are not the sort of items that the rules were intended to prohibit? How much intelligence does it take to realize that an asthmatic kid is not the same as a drug dealer or user?

How can these people possibly think that suspending elementary school students for the infractions given above is a rational interpretation of a zero-tolerance policy? Perhaps there's more to these stories than what we're being told, but we hear so many of them that we have to wonder.

In any event, if there's not more to them then it's very hard to think very highly of the intellectual powers of these administrators. Indeed, its a good thing for them that school districts don't have a zero-tolerance policy for dopiness or a lot of educators would be out of a job.

RLC

Arrogant Indifference

As everyone knows by now Michael Nifong, the prosecutor in the Duke "rape" case, has been found guilty of gross professional misconduct and disbarred.

Incredibly, the guy was so arrogant and so indifferent to the harm he was inflicting on the young men he charged, that he broke 27 of 32 rules of professional conduct in order to try to get his conviction. How he thought he would get away with it is beyond me.

Go here to see a list of his derelictions. It really is amazing.

Disbarment may be the least of his worries right now. No doubt the parents will press suit against him and take him for everything they can get. When next we see Mr. Nifong he'll be wearing a barrel and holding a cup on the street corner.

It's too bad there's not some way to disbar the Duke president, Richard Brodhead - who's now making himself sound like a victim - and the faculty members who went out of their way to pronounce these students guilty when there was no evidence against them except the completely unsubstantiated claim of an unstable black woman that she had been raped. In the intellectually arid precincts of left-wing faculty lounges any allegation of a minority against rich white kids is evidence enough, I suppose, but that seems likely to change after this sleazy episode. If so, then something good will have come from Nifong's abuse of prosecutorial power.

UPDATE: Duke University has settled with the families of the victims. The report doesn't name the amounts, but one wishes that they'll garnish the salaries of the faculty who were ready to hang these kids from the nearest tree to pay for it.

RLC

God and Family

Mary Eberstadt of the Hoover Institution advances an interersting thesis in an article in Policy Review.

Most people, she says, assume that religion induces people to have bigger families. Eberstadt believes this gets it backward:

People who have larger families tend to be more religious. In Europe the decline in religiosity began after the decline in family size. In America where families still tend on average to be larger than their European counterparts religion is still relatively popular, though family size and religious popularity are both in decline.

To begin sketching an explanation of religious belief complementary to this one, one must answer this question: What could it be about the experience of the natural family that might make an individual more disposed toward religion than he is without it? Though merely a preliminary attempt at an answer, several lines of explanation suggest themselves.

You can read her reasoning at the link.

Oddly, Eberstadt omits perhaps the biggest reason why family-oriented people are more committed to church. This is the recognition by parents that children need all the moral instruction they can get and they're not likely to get it in any other institution in our society. If religion or the church should ever die it won't be too many generations afterward that the family will die as well.

Eberstadt makes a very good point when she notes that women are usually more invested in family than men and are also usually more invested in church than men. Churches are like a glue that helps hold families together. When churches are vibrant and strong the families which attend them are generally stronger. Women, on balance, are more conscious of their family's welfare and are much more likely to turn to the church for the help it can give.

Take away religion, as the secularist urges, and human beings soon come to see themselves as nothing more than autonomous random particles bouncing aimlessly through their meaningless lives until death puts an end to their empty, absurd existence. There's not much point to the commitments and sacrifices required to sustain a family in the cold, sterile world the secularist would create for us.

RLC

Junk DNA

Junk DNA is the term given to long segments of DNA that scientists had assumed for many years simply had no function. It was believed to be vestigial, like an appendix, or the result of duplication of genetic material that subsequent mutations rendered inoperative.

At the same time intelligent design theorists predicted that it would one day be shown that junk DNA wasn't junk at all but rather had some function in the organism. This was a clear case of a prediction that could be verified and would lay to rest the claims of critics that ID can't be empirically tested.

Now it turns out that the predictions have indeed been verified. Junk DNA does appear to be operative during early development.

Darwinians are now retroactively asserting that this is to be expected as a result of natural selection, but the point is that ID theorists had been predicting this all along, whereas the Darwinians, including Ken Miller and Richard Dawkins, were saying the opposite.

There's a story on this at Wired which, despite its annoying tics (the author insists on calling Michael Behe a creationist), gives a good overview of recent developments in this matter.

The folks at Uncommon Descent are indulging themselves in a little understandable gloating.

RLC

Waving the Wand

Newsweek's Sharon Begley pens an article which includes some lamentably uninformed criticism of the concept of Irreducible Complexity. She writes, for instance, that:

The intelligent design camp also argues that some biological structures are just too darn sophisticated to have evolved through random mutation and natural selection. They must therefore have been designed by an intelligent agent. In particular, since complex structures have lots of components, how could the components have been just hanging around for eons waiting for the final component to emerge? Think of it this way: if you don't already have all the other components of a mousetrap, why would you keep a spring around? A spring is only useful if you also have the base, the bar and the rest. This is the argument called "irreducible complexity," and it has proved very persuasive to the public.

Which brings us to the latest discovery in evolution: DNA needed to make synapses, the sophisticated junctions between neurons, in none other than the lowly sea sponge. Considered among the most primitive and ancient of all animals, sea sponges have no nervous system (or internal organs of any kind, for that matter), notes Todd Oakley, assistant professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. But, he adds, they "have most of the genetic components of synapses."

He, Oakley and the rest of the team listed all the genes known to be operative in synapses in the human nervous system. They then examined the sponge genome. "That was when the surprise hit," said Kosik. "We found a lot of genes to make a nervous system present in the sponge."

What were genes for synapses doing in a sponge, which has no neurons and therefore no synapses? This is where the irreducible-complexity crowd makes a fatal error: they assume that whatever the function of a biological component (gene, protein, biochemical pathway . . . ) today must have been its function in the past. Maybe you noticed that my mouse trap example above wasn't very persuasive; even without a base and a bar, a spring can be a useful little device. So it goes with biological systems. For instance, of the 42 proteins known to make up the bacterial flagellum, 40 have been found to serve as ion channels or something else in bacteria. It is therefore perfectly plausible that they really were hanging around-serving some function that would have allowed evolution and natural selection to keep them around generation after generation-until they all got together and formed a flagellum.

This is called the wave of the wand method of scientific explanation. According to Begley all these proteins just happened to get together to make a flagellum, as if the fairy godmother waved her wand and magic happened. Begley omits mention, however, of the incredible obstacles the magic wand has to overcome in order for the proteins to find themselves located in just the right place, at just the right time, with just the right partner proteins with which to bind. She also neglects to tell us where the genetic plan came from which synchronizes the arrangement of these molecules in the flagellum, where the enzymes necessary for carrying the proteins to the assembly point came from, and what mechanism coordinated it all and how did it arise.

These and many more puzzles are supposed to be explained by just pointing out that some of the proteins found in a flagellum are also found elsewhere in the cell. It's like arguing that the construction of a jet plane in California can be explained in purely mechanistic terms without reference to any intelligent input by noting that many of the parts needed for the plane already exist and can be found in warehouses scattered around the state.

To watch a video of a flagellum being assembled and to get some idea of what Begley is leaving out when she says that the proteins just got together and assembled a flagellum, go here and click on movie #5. Note the timing necessary for the assembly and how the end cap protein constantly adjusts its shape to allow flagellar proteins to take their proper place.

I know incredulity is not an argument, but nevertheless - that such a system evolved by blind, random mutations of genes that established the production and placement of the proteins, the timing of their insertion into the developing flagellum, the precision of the amino acid sequence that allows the protein to take on precisely the correct shape and function, all strikes me as literally incredible. But perhaps I just lack imagination.

Begley continues:

So it seems to be with the genes for synapses. The sea sponge did not use them for their current purpose, but that doesn't mean the genes had no use. "We found this mysterious unknown structure in the sponge, and it is clear that evolution was able to take this entire structure and, with small modifications, direct its use toward a new function," said Kosik. "Evolution can take these 'off the shelf' components and put them together in new and interesting ways."

Sure. Just like parts scattered in warehouses around California, given enough time and enough tornados, floods, and other prodigies of nature to move them around, will eventually produce a fully assembled, fully functional fighter jet. People like Begley can keep waving the wand, but it just doesn't seem to a lot of us to have much magic left in it.

RLC

Bad Omen

What does this vote tell us about the chances of a revived immigration bill passing the house of representatives?

The U.S. House of Representatives this morning voted to withhold federal emergency services funding for "sanctuary cities" that protect illegal immigrants.

Anti-illegal immigration champion Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., sponsored the measure, which he says would apply to cities such as Denver and Boulder. He was elated by its passage, which stunned critics and supporters alike.

The House passed the amendment, 234 to 189, with 50 Democrats voting in favor.

Tancredo has introduced similar amendments at least seven other times since 2004, but each has failed - often by wide margins.

The amendment comes as the Senate is poised to take up debate again next week on an immigration reform plan that some opponents criticize as giving amnesty to illegal immigrants.

Tancredo said he thinks his amendment is an indicator that the House would crush the reform plan if it passes in the Senate.

"If I were (Speaker of the House) Nancy Pelosi, I'd be asking if she could pass a vote on amnesty on the House side," Tancredo said. "If she lost 50 Democrats on this one, and she says she needs 70 Republicans to pass the immigration plan, this is an interesting indicator of things coming down the pike, and that the times, they are a-changing."

The more exposure this issue gets the more of a loser the immigrant amnesty bill becomes. It seems that until about a year ago most Americans were essentially in the dark about what was happening on our southern border, but gradually they've come to learn that politicians and businessmen have formed a cabal to work toward making Mexico a de facto 51st state. Most Americans find this outrageous, and they're turning up the heat on their legislators. Evidently, a lot of congressmen are beginning to feel a little warm.

RLC

Dying Schools

Yesterday I wrote that I thought the future of public schools was bleak. Then I came across this essay by Jonah Goldberg which says the same thing except with more evidence to back it up:

Here's a good question for you: Why have public schools at all?

Ok, cue the marching music. We need public schools because blah blah blah and yada yada yada. We could say blah is common culture and yada is the government's interest in promoting the general welfare. Or that children are the future. And a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Because we can't leave any child behind.

The problem with all these bromides is that they leave out the simple fact that one of the surest ways to leave a kid "behind" is to hand him over to the government. Americans want universal education, just as they want universally safe food. But nobody believes that the government should run nearly all of the restaurants, farms and supermarkets. Why should it run the vast majority of the schools - particularly when it gets terrible results?

Consider Washington, home of the nation's most devoted government-lovers and, ironically, the city with arguably the worst public schools in the country. Out of the 100 largest school districts, according to the Washington Post, D.C. ranks third in spending for each pupil ($12,979) but last in spending on instruction. Fifty-six cents out of every dollar go to administrators who, it's no secret, do a miserable job administrating, even though D.C. schools have been in a state of "reform" for nearly 40 years.

In a blistering series, the Post has documented how badly the bureaucrats have run public education. More than half of the District of Columbia's teenage kids spend their days in "persistently dangerous" schools, with an average of nine violent incidents a day in a system with 135 schools. "Principals reporting dangerous conditions or urgently needed repairs in their buildings wait, on average, 379 days ... for the problems to be fixed," according to the Post. But hey, at least the kids are getting a lousy education. A mere 19 schools managed to get "proficient" scores or better for a majority of students on the district's Comprehensive Assessment Test.

A standard response to such criticisms is to say we don't spend enough on public education. But if money were the solution, wouldn't the district, which spends nearly $13,000 on every kid, rank near the top? If you think more money will fix the schools, make your checks out to "cash" and send them to me.

Private, parochial and charter schools get better results. Parents know this. Applications for vouchers in the district dwarf the available supply, and home schooling has exploded.

As for schools teaching kids about the common culture and all that, as a conservative I couldn't agree more. But is there evidence that public schools are better at it? The results of the 2006 National Assessment of Educational Progress history and civics exams showed that two-thirds of U.S. high school seniors couldn't identify the significance of a photo of a theater with a sign reading "Colored Entrance." And keep in mind, political correctness pretty much guarantees that Jim Crow and the civil rights movement are included in syllabi. Imagine how few kids can intelligently discuss Manifest Destiny or free silver.

Right now, there's a renewed debate about providing "universal" health insurance. For some liberals, this simply means replicating the public school model for health care. (Stop laughing.) But for others, this means mandating that everyone have health insurance - just as we mandate that all drivers have car insurance - and then throwing tax dollars at poorer folks to make sure no one falls through the cracks.

There's a consensus in America that every child should get an education, but as David Gelernter noted recently in the Weekly Standard, there's no such consensus that public schools need to do the educating.

Really, what would be so terrible about government mandating that every kid has to go to school, and providing subsidies and oversight when necessary, but then getting out of the way?

Milton Friedman noted long ago that the government is bad at providing services - that's why he wanted public schools to be called "government schools" - but that it's good at writing checks. So why not cut checks to people so they can send their kids to school?

What about the good public schools? Well, the reason good public schools are good has nothing to do with government's special expertise and everything to do with the fact that parents care enough to ensure their kids get a good education. That wouldn't change if the government got out of the school business. What would change is that fewer kids would get left behind.

Indeed, there are still some good schools, but even these often provide a quality education to only the top half of their student population. Most of the rest of that population disdains education and makes it harder and more expensive to educate those who do value it. Courts and legislatures have made it exceedingly difficult to remove this academic deadwood from our schools, so these surly, disaffected young people sit in class or roam the halls and cafeterias, intimidating students and teachers alike, and poisoning the atmosphere and morale of everyone in the building.

The situation grows worse every year, but educational bureaucrats, sounding like Saddam's spokesman Baghdad Bob, keep telling us that there's really no problem, and anyway the problems can be solved if we just give them more money.

What schools need to do, but either cannot or will not do, is take back control of their hallways and classrooms and turn their buildings into places of civility where education, not stress or crisis management, is the top priority. Until they do, parents will continue to seek alternatives.

In other words, the biggest need of schools is not money, it's discipline. Without a disciplined student body (and faculty) no learning is going to take place in even the most handsomely appointed educational edifices. Yet schools cannot expel troublesome students without jumping through costly hoops and paying to have the student educated elsewhere. Nor can they easily establish dress codes, search lockers without probable cause, or physically reprimand the insolent thugs who understand only the language of superior force.

Students know they can say anything they please to teachers, no matter how demeaning, insulting, and vulgar, and all teachers can do is ship them off to the office where an administrator may or may not decide to impose some sort of punishment. Frequently the administrator just doesn't want all the hassle of disciplining the student so he simply returns him to class more impudent and uncontrollable than before. Little wonder some teachers wake up every morning dreading having to go to school and face their classes.

Or perhaps the administrator will impose a punishment like making the miscreant sit in a room with other boneheads for three days, as if this were some sort of deterrent for bad behavior instead of a reward. In more serious cases the wretch might be sent home for ten days, which is like throwing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch.

Public schools should have a three strikes policy. If a student is sent to an administrator three times they're automatically suspended from school. If the student is suspended three times in a school year he/she is expelled. For good. And the taxpayers should not have to pay to have the incipient criminal sent to an alternative education facility. Either the family pays the cost of their student's education or the he would be required to enroll in some sort of distance learning program where he gets his education by computer at home where he's not a drag on the education of hundreds of others.

This would do wonders for teacher and student morale in many of our schools, but it won't happen anytime soon because the political left will oppose it. Instead, we will maintain the status quo, attempt to salvage our public schools by pouring more money into them, and watch helplessly as those who continue to attend these schools sink quietly into academic oblivion.

RLC

Immigration Vote Perilous for Dems

No Left Turns' William Voegeli explains why he thinks House Democrats will not support the immigration bill which the Senate recently allowed to pass into a coma. It will not surprise you that politics, Voegli thinks, is the chief motivation:

If Democrats really like this [immigration] bill, Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel could pass it in the House on a party-line vote without a single Republican. (There are no cloture votes in the lower chamber.) Their reluctance to do so says something about the politics of immigration.

There are 232 Democrats and 203 Republicans in the House. Republicans need a net gain of 15 seats in the 2008 elections to regain a majority. As Michael Tomasky has pointed out, 62 Democrats represent districts that gave majorities to Bush against Kerry in 2004, while only 8 Republicans represent districts that Kerry won. Many of those 62 Democrats are freshman in districts that have been colored red on the electoral map for a long time.

Emanuel knows, in other words, that many of these Democrats are going to be vulnerable if they vote for McCain-Kennedy and then have to explain their vote next year in a campaign against a secure-the-border-first Republican challenger. Every Republican vote for McCain-Kennedy in the House will let one more vulnerable Democrat off the hook. They can vote against the bill, mollify their conservative constituents, and blame it all on Pres. Bush and Republicans. The Democrats get to have the bill they want, with all the political benefits and none of the political dangers it entails.

House Republicans who enjoy being in the minority have clear reasons to go along with this scheme, as do those who find the policy arguments in favor of the Grand Compromise compelling, or those who lie awake at night worrying about the Bush domestic legacy. If there are 40 such Republicans, then a revived Senate bill could pass the House. If, however, the Stupid Party is not quite stupid enough to sign onto this suicide pact, then Pelosi and Emanuel will either have to gamble their majority on enacting immigration reform with Democratic votes only, or shelve the whole question.

Wanna bet they'll find an excuse to shelve the whole thing?

RLC

The Quantum and Consciousness

Denyse O'Leary links us to this article on the quantum and this one on the intellectual inadequacy of materialism.

RLC

Cheap Labor

A local talk show host read this on air the other day. He claimed that it was written by a Californian of Hispanic ancestry, but I could find no corroboration of that. It doesn't matter, though, because the argument stands on its own merits. I've edited it slightly:

As you listen to the news about the student protests over illegal immigration, there are some things that you should be aware of.

I am in charge of the English-as-a-second-language department at a large southern California high school which is designated a Title I school, meaning that its students average lower socio-economic and income levels. Most of the schools you are hearing about, South Gate High, Bell Gardens, Huntington Park, etc., where these students are protesting, are also Title I schools.

Title I schools are on the free breakfast and free lunch program. When I say free breakfast, I'm not talking a glass of milk and roll, but a full breakfast and cereal bar with fruits and juices that would make a Marriott proud. The waste of this food is monumental, with trays and trays of it being dumped in the trash uneaten.

I estimate that well over 50% of these students are obese or at least moderately overweight. About 75% or more have cell phones. The school also provides day-care centers for the unwed teenage pregnant girls (some as young as 13) so they can attend class without the inconvenience of having to arrange for babysitters or having family watch their kids.

I was ordered to spend $700,000 on my department or risk losing funding for the upcoming year even though there was little need for anything; my budget was already substantial. I ended up buying new computers for the computer learning center, half of which, one month later, have been carved with graffiti by the appreciative students who obviously feel humbled and grateful to have a free education in America.

I have had to intervene several times for young and substitute teachers whose classes consist of many illegal immigrant students here in the country less then 3 months who raised so much hell with the female teachers, calling them "putas" (whores) and throwing things that the teachers were in tears.

Free medical, free education, free food, day care, etc. Is it any wonder they feel entitled to not only be in this country but to demand rights, privileges and entitlements?

To those who want to point out how much these illegal immigrants contribute to our society because they like their gardener and housekeeper, and they like to pay less for tomatoes: spend some time in the real world of illegal immigration and see the true costs.

Higher insurance, medical facilities closing, higher medical costs, more crime, lower standards of education in our schools, overcrowding, new diseases, etc. For me, I'll pay more for tomatoes.

We need to wake up. The guest worker program will be a disaster because we won't have the guts to enforce it.

Does anyone in their right mind really think [illegals] will voluntarily leave and return?

There are many hardworking Hispanic/American citizens that contribute to our country, and many that I consider my true friends. We should encourage and accept those Hispanics who have done it the right and legal way.

It does, however, have everything to do with culture: A third-world culture that does not value education, that accepts children getting pregnant and dropping out of school by 15, and that refuses to assimilate, and an American culture that has become so weak and worried about "politically correctness" that we don't have the will to do anything about it.

Cheap labor?

Isn't that what the whole immigration issue is about?

� Business doesn't want to pay a decent wage.

� Consumers don't want expensive produce.

� Government will tell you Americans don't want the jobs.

But the bottom line is cheap labor. The phrase "cheap labor" is a myth, a farce, and a lie. There is no such thing as "cheap labor".

Take, for example, an illegal alien with a wife and five children. He takes a job for $5.00 or $6.00/hour. At that wage, with six dependents, he pays no income tax, yet at the end of the year, if he files an Income Tax Return, he gets an "earned income credit" of up to $3,200 free.

� He qualifies for Section 8 housing and subsidized rent.

� He qualifies for food stamps.

� He qualifies for free (no deductible, no co-pay) health care.

� His children get free breakfasts and lunches at school.

� He requires bilingual teachers and books.

� He qualifies for relief from high energy bills.

� If they are, or become, aged, blind or disabled, they qualify for SSI.

� Once qualified for SSI, they can qualify for Medicare. All of this is at (our) taxpayer's expense.

� He doesn't worry about car insurance, life insurance, or homeowners insurance.

� Taxpayers provide Spanish language signs, bulletins and printed material.

� He and his family receive the equivalent of $20.00 to $30.00/hour in benefits.

� Working Americans are lucky to have $5.00 or $6.00/hour left after paying their bills.

� The American taxpayers also pay for increased crime, graffiti and trash clean-up.

Cheap labor?

Whew. And people are called racist and xenophobic for wanting to do what's necessary to put an end to this?

RLC

$22.5 Million to Catholic Education - From Atheist

How bad must the public school system be if an atheist is willing to bequeath $22.5 million so that kids can afford to attend Catholic schools? Here's the story:

Philanthropist and retired hedge-fund manager Robert W. Wilson said he is giving $22.5 million to the Archdiocese of New York to fund a scholarship program for needy inner-city students attending Roman Catholic schools.

Wilson, 80, said in a phone interview today that although he is an atheist, he has no problem donating money to a fund linked to Catholic schools.

``Let's face it, without the Roman Catholic Church, there would be no Western civilization,'' Wilson said. ``Shunning religious organizations would be abhorrent. Keep in mind, I'm helping to pay tuition. The money isn't going directly to the schools.''

My opinion is that the future of public schools in America is bleak. As Denyse O'Leary says, public schools used to be the protestant alternative to Catholic schools and they inculcated protestant virtues and discipline into students. In the last fifty years, however, they have almost completely abandoned this role and in many places they are little more than holding-pens. There's very little discipline, very little, if any, moral instruction, and precious little education taking place, at least among the lower academic half of the school population.

Unless the trajectory of the public schools is miraculously reversed parents in the years ahead will increasingly turn to private schools for their children's education, leaving public schools to devolve into day care for the poor and dysfunctional.

If liberals think there's an unjust disparity between rich and poor today, wait until they see what it'll be like after a couple of generations from now. In twenty to forty years almost the only people who will be getting an education will be the children of families who have the means to send them to private schools, and the irony will be that since almost all the problems besetting public schools are due to liberal innovation and policies, beginning in the late sixties, the radical divide between socio-economic classes will be one of their own making.

RLC

Reviewing the Review

The reviews of Michael Behe's new book The Edge of Evolution are starting to appear, and some of those coming from the Darwinians are vitriolic. This is not unexpected, of course, since Darwinists are often people of the ideological left, and the left can't seem to engage people in intellectual debate without taking every opportunity to demean, degrade, and insult.

A good example of this polemical slash and burn tactic is a review by computer scientist Mark Chu-Carroll.

Despite his considerable intellectual gifts Mr. Chu-Carroll has the emotional maturity of a fifth grader, and he's not shy about proving it. Here's his concluding paragraph:

[Behe] seems to be incapable of actually really thinking about an argument in any way deeper than asking "Does this agree with my conclusion?"; and even then, he doesn't seem capable of recognizing when an argument doesn't support his conclusion. It's really appalling. Frankly, I'm really shocked that this guy ever managed to get tenure anywhere - judging by his writing, he's not particularly bright; he's a remarkably disorganized and muddled thinker; and he's incapable of comprehending or responding to arguments made by other researchers.

This is typical of his style throughout the review, but the substance of his critique also leaves us wondering how carefully he read the book. He takes Behe to task, for instance, for stating that "there is strong evidence that random mutation is extremely limited" in what it can accomplish. Chu-Carroll says:

What I found astonishing here is that he asserts his conclusions in this paragraph as settled fact, without even attempting to cite any evidence. It's typical, but pathetic...But this incredible statement: that "there is strong evidence that random mutation is extremely limited", he doesn't even attempt to support.

But the entire book is given to providing the evidence for this claim, and remarkably enough, after having excoriated Behe for not citing the evidence, Chu-Carroll acknowledges that very fact:

The rest of the book focuses an [sic] this alleged problem: that random mutation is somehow constrained, and can't produce the necessary changes to explain the diversity of life.

It's not clear that Chu-Carroll has even read himself, let alone Behe.

Anyway, being a mathematician, Chu-Carroll chooses to focus the bulk of his criticism on Behe's use of fitness landscapes in chapter three of The Edge. I have no expertise in such matters and don't know whether Chu-Carroll is being fair to him or not, but the previous passage doesn't inspire confidence that he is. Nor do I really know how crucial the landscape models are to Behe's overall argument, but Chu-Carroll evidently thinks that if he's mistaken about this the whole Edge argument falls apart. I'm not so sure, but I'll leave it to others to do the math.

Meanwhile, one of my favorite passages in Chu-Carroll's critique was one in which he blasts Behe for resorting to the huge improbabilities of mutations causing increasing and permanent fitness:

What's the favorite b******t mathematical argument of creationist a******s worldwide? Why big numbers, of course!

This is fun because it's a game two can play: What is the favorite [substitute your own pejorative here]reply of naturalists worldwide to the argument from cosmic fine-tuning? Why it's big numbers, of course! There must be a near infinite number of universes, we're told, which would mean that almost every possible universe would exist and ours would not then be unexpected no matter that it is so astonishingly unlikely.

And what is the Darwinian answer to critics like Behe who say that random mutation simply could not do the job of producing all the variety and complexity of life we see? Why big numbers, of course! Given billions of years and given uncountable trillions of mutations evolution from molecules to man is inevitable.

I wonder what epithets Chu-Carroll applies to people who employ big numbers in the service of naturalistic materialism. He probably calls them deep-thinkers.

The particular big number that has Chu-Carroll's adolescent juices flowing is Behe's calculation that the chances of mutations arising that would enable two proteins to bind together is 10 to the 20th power. Chu-Carroll thinks this is too high, but doesn't give us much of a reason for rejecting it. He then grants it for the sake of argument:

What's particularly astonishing about this is that even this rotten argument - taking an artifically inflated probability number based on the peculiarities of the biochemistry of one specific organism, and applying it to a completely different organism (waving hands furiously to try to distract from the fact that it's just nonsensical to cross that way), contains its own refutation. Yes, perhaps the odds of this happening are similar to the odds of winning at powerball. But the fact is someone wins the powerball lottery. He wants to pretend that it's unlikely by pointing at you specifically, and saying that it's like you winning the lottery. But in fact, the power of evolution is that it doesn't just try one thing. It's not a process of one mutation, wait and see if it works out and fixes in the population; it's not a process with a predetermined destination. It's a process of countless mutations happening at the some time - some propagate, some don't - and if any of them work, then they take over. The real chance of evolution producing something are like the chances of someone winning the lottery. The chances of them producing humanity taken a priori are like the chances of you winning the lottery; but since humanity was not a predestined result, the chances of the evolutionary sweepstakes producing something is like the chances of someone winning the lottery - i.e., virtually inevitable.

It's not exactly clear to me what Chu-Carroll is trying to say here, but I take him to be asserting that Behe is wrong because even though a double mutation might be highly improbable, the fact is that something will result from whatever mutations do occur.

Well, yes, but that hardly refutes Behe's point which is that beneficial double mutations are at the edge of what evolution can accomplish. The way to refute that claim is not by insisting that mutations produce genetic changes, it's by showing that Behe's figure of 10(20th) is unreasonable and this Chu-Carroll fails to do.

He continues:

Finally, I said that not just is Behe's book bad science and bad math, but it's bad theology. Behe claims to believe in an all-knowing, all-powerful God. But at the same time, his entire book is based on the argument that God created life on earth, and got it all going using an evolutionary process. But then, according to Behe, over and over again, his creation was woefully inadequate of facing [sic] the actual challenges that it would face, and so his all-powerful creator needs to constantly intervene, and tweak things in order to make them work. His God is a buffoon - a bumbling fool who isn't capable of creating worlds in a way that works. Reading his book, I'm actually shocked that he's a religious person: he's clearly never bothered to think through his beliefs, and what his theories say about them. Again and again, reading the book, I kept finding myself saying two things: "How can this guy call himself a scientist, when he argues so sloppily?", and "How can this guy be religious when he apparently believes that his creator isn't capable of getting anything right?" Following Behe's argument, it seems like it should be impossible for Behe's god to have done the things Behe claims that he did, because they're too hard for such a bumbler.

Aside from the silly, childish hubris of calling a being which could create a finely-tuned universe and the incredibly complex machinery of a cell "a bumbler," this criticism is completely unfair to Behe. Behe doesn't say that the Designer constantly intervenes. He allows for the possiblity that the Designer set the conditions necessary for evolution to proceed in the general direction it has at the outset, and that by bringing the universe into being He set the whole process going. In other words, Behe holds that some aspects of evolution could unfold along certain pre-selected paths from the initial conditions that the Designer established, but it is obvious to Behe that these conditions, and the phenomena they produce, would not exist were it not for the Designer's purposeful pre-planning.

Whatever its other merits and deficiencies might be, Behe's book will accomplish at least two things: It will expose as a canard the Darwinians' claim that one can believe in God and also in evolution. Behe believes in evolution. He believes that man evolved from primates, that the world is 4.5 billion years old, and all the rest. He also believes that natural selection plays a role in evolution. The only thing he rejects is that the emergence of living things and the appearance of higher life forms is the result of random, mechanistic chance. He believes the mutations that produced genetic variation were somehow intelligently planned. For this deviation from materialist orthodoxy he is flayed by emotionally stunted basket-cases like Chu-Carroll.

The second thing his book will surely accomplish is lay to rest the charge that Intelligent Design is the same thing as creationism. No creationist will agree with much of anything Behe believes except his claim that there is a limit to evolution and that life and the cosmos are intentionally designed.

RLC

Why We Can't Leave

Peter Rodman and William Shawcross make part of the same argument in the New York Times that we have been trying to make here at Viewpoint as to why we simply cannot do as some Democrats insist and leave Iraq. They write:

As in Indochina more than 30 years ago, millions of Iraqis today see the United States helping them defeat their murderous opponents as the only hope for their country. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have committed themselves to working with us and with their democratically elected government to enable their country to rejoin the world as a peaceful, moderate state that is a partner to its neighbors instead of a threat. If we accept defeat, these Iraqis will be at terrible risk. Thousands upon thousands of them will flee, as so many Vietnamese did after 1975.

The new strategy of the coalition and the Iraqis, ably directed by Gen. David Petraeus, offers the best prospect of reversing the direction of events - provided that we show staying power. Osama bin Laden said, a few months after 9/11, that "when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." The United States, in his mind, is the weak horse. American defeat in Iraq would embolden the extremists in the Muslim world, demoralize and perhaps destabilize many moderate friendly governments, and accelerate the radicalization of every conflict in the Middle East.

Our conduct in Iraq is a crucial test of our credibility, especially with regard to the looming threat from revolutionary Iran. Our Arab and Israeli friends view Iraq in that wider context. They worry about our domestic debate, which had such a devastating impact on the outcome of the Vietnam War, and they want reassurance.

When government officials argued that American credibility was at stake in Indochina, critics ridiculed the notion. But when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, he and his colleagues invoked Vietnam as a reason not to take American warnings seriously. The United States cannot be strong against Iran - or anywhere - if we accept defeat in Iraq.

Of course, there are many more terrible consequences to pulling out than just those these writers mention in this column. You can read our thoughts on what would likely ensue from premature pullouthere.

RLC

Teddy on Immigration

No, not Teddy Kennedy - the one on Mount Rushmore:

"In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."

Theodore Roosevelt 1907

That pretty much sums it up, I think.

RLC

Europe's Fight Against Christianity

Paul Belien has a very insightful column in The Washington Times titled Europe's Culture War. Here are the first few graphs:

Europe is in the middle of a three-way culture war, between the defenders of traditional Judeo-Christian morality, the proponents of secular hedonism and the forces of Islamic Jihadism. In Western Europe, the fight between Christians and secularists is all but over. The secularists have won. Now, the religious vacuum left by the demise of Christianity is being filled by the Muslims. Since one cannot fight something with nothing, the European secularists are no match for Islam.

Meanwhile, the dark forces of secularism, such as the European Union (EU), are waging war in Central and Eastern Europe, where they target countries such as Poland, Slovakia and the Baltic states.

On April 25, the European Parliament (EP), the EU's legislature, adopted a resolution condemning "homophobia." With 325 votes against 124 and 150 abstentions, the EP warned Poland that it will face sanctions if it adopts a law barring the promotion of homosexuality in schools. Churches, too, were reprimanded for "fermenting hatred and violence [against homosexuals]." Poland's prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, commented on the resolution: "Nobody is limiting gay rights in Poland. However, if we're talking about not having homosexual propaganda in Polish schools... such propaganda should not be in schools." Cardinal Angelo Scola of Venice retorted: "There is no homophobia in the Catholic Church and it is time that all this [recrimination of Christians in the European Parliament] ended."

It is not likely to end. The fight against "intolerance" -- i.e. adherence to traditional Christian morality -- is intensifying. On May 3, the European Court of Human Rights found Polish President Lech Kaczynski guilty of violating human rights because he banned a "gay pride" parade in Warsaw in 2005. Last March, the same court ordered Poland to compensate a woman who was denied an abortion. Last year, Poland was denounced by the Council of Europe because it prohibited the distribution in schools of a leaflet about homosexuality.

How long will it be before it is illegal in Europe to hold the moral beliefs that almost every Christian has held for the last two thousand years? How long will it be before the same oppression emigrates to our shores?

RLC

Lower Than Whale Dung

The MSM is constantly reminding us that the President's job approval hovers around 34 %, but what they don't tells us is that Bush is standing on Mt. Everest compared to the highest ranking Democrat in the Senate, Harry Reid. Senator Reid has a favorability rating of only 19%. That's almost as low as one can go. Scooter Libby is also at 19% and Paris Hilton is only a few points lower at 12%. By comparison, Vice-President Dick Cheney has a favorability rating of 38%.

You'd never know this if you only get your news from network television or most print media.

RLC

Miller's Bile

Dennis Miller can sometimes be funny, but this screed against Senator Harry Reid is neither amusing nor entertaining. It is, in fact, tasteless and repugnant. I have no fondness for Reid whom I consider to be a great liability to the Senate and the nation, but Miller's brand of political discourse has no place in a civil society, nor should conservatives, of all people, be touting his "smackdown" of Reid. His job is to be funny, and he fails, at least in this instance, because hatred and viciousness is never funny to emotionally and morally mature people which conservatives should aspire to be. If this is Miller's idea of political humor he needs to get retrained in some other line of work.

RLC

Topoisomerases, etc.

Bear in mind that the conventional wisdom is that blind, natural, purposeless forces are all that's necessary to explain how this system came to exist. Darwinians have been selling us the biological equivalent of swampland real estate for over a hundred years and we keep buying it. At some point, though, we need to stop and ask exactly what it is they're asking us to believe.

In this case, one of perhaps thousands which could be cited, they're asking us to accept that unguided random chance could have solved the problem of DNA supercoiling very early on in evolutionary history. In other words, systems like this, of which there are hundreds if not thousands in living cells, arose through pure accident, we're told. Uh huh. And the gullible among us say it must be so for nop weightier reason than that Richard Dawkins says it is.

For another astonishing glimpse at the complexity of cellular micro-structure check out this video simulation of protein translation and remember that what is being shown is only a fraction of the complexity of the system that works continuosly in every cell in every living thing in the world.

It's literally breathtaking.

RLC

Hobgoblin of Little Minds

Tony Blankley highlights the inconsistency of the arguments made by those who oppose the war in Iraq and who favor the late and unlamented immigration reform bill. After a zinger or two aimed at the puzzling inconsistencies of John Edwards and Al Gore, Blankley asks us to:

Consider the current arguments about the immigration bill. For oh so long, the supporters of the bill have been making two points: 1) It is impossible for the U.S. government to actually identify and round up all the illegals in the country; and, 2) a fence on the border is bound to be ineffective as well as being immoral. Indeed opponents of the fence have idiotically compared it to the Berlin Wall - although one protects a free country from illegal intrusion, while the other kept enslaved people from escaping their slavery.

Now, suddenly, these same people claim that the same previously nitwit bureaucracy will not only be able to find all 12 million (or 20 million) illegals, but will be able to flawlessly run background checks, positively identify each individual, as well as monitor all American businesses to make sure no new illegals are being hired and the newly legal are in perfect compliance with their limited status. Oh, yes, and they also will be able to test all 12 million to assure us they can all speak the Queen's English at least as well as does William F. Buckley Jr.

Also, suddenly, they have lost all their moral outrage about the fence: "You want a morally offensive fence, no problem, you got a fence. What, me worry about moral consistency?"

Of course, it has to be pointed out that those of us who have called for strict enforcement of existing law are now putting forward the argument that the bureaucracy that we used to think could protect the country if only the federal government would let them do their job now insist that there is no way our federal bureaucrats could possibly enforce the proposed new law.

Regarding the fence, the supporters of the new immigration law, are, with the exception of the president and Sen. McCain, mostly people who oppose the Surge in Iraq. Yet, while they require that the Iraqi surge have specific performance measures to justify continued funding (e.g., perfectly functioning Iraqi government, no more violence, etc.), they are perfectly happy to measure the success of the new proposed Mexican border fence by inputs - rather than results.

That is, once the 5,000 new border agents and the new fences are in place, they will deem the border secure, thus triggering the Great Amnesty of 2007-8. They would hardly apply that logic to Iraq. If they did, they would have to deem Iraq a success as soon as the five new surge battalions are equipped and deployed to Iraq. (Obviously, they don't care whether the border fence works or not - they just want the amnesty - and the voters that follow. And they don't want success in Iraq, so they will tightly define success with performance criteria that would measure WWII an utter failure.)

Emerson famously noted, Blankley reminds us, that being consistent can be taken too far, and can become a "hobgoblin" for small-minded people - an excuse for ceasing to think. If so, however, utter inconsistency and special pleading are frequently the hobgoblins and calling cards of demagogues more interested in political victory than in the welfare of the nation.

RLC