The New Fascism

This week has been designated by a coalition of organizations as Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. It's a week given to the discussion on campuses of the nature and threat of Islamic radicalism. Speakers at over a hundred colleges have been addressing the problems before audiences of students, faculty and interested community members. Many of those audiences have been hostile and some of them have been appallingly so.

Consider, for example, what happened at Emory University, where the concept of the free exchange of ideas is evidently anathema to the neo-fascists of the left. At Emory, students and others took it upon themselves to deny listeners the opportunity to learn about global jihad by noisily and rudely disrupting the event until the speaker, David Horowitz, himself a former left-wing radical, finally had to give up.

As this report on the incident explains, this is precisely the tactic used by the Nazi brownshirts in the Germany of the 1930s, and it has, or should have, no place in America. Unfortunately, there's very little of traditional America which remains on some of our university campuses.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the report:

Throughout the lecture, many protesters were waving their signs, and yelling "Does George Bush respect anybody's rights?" and "Are we going to talk about who killed JFK?" The colorful expressions shouted by protesters included the generic, "Racist, sexist, anti-gay. David Horowitz, go away!" and "stop the war for oil," as well as more creative "why don't we talk about fascism in America?" and "no more torture in our name." When Horowitz warned the audience of the threat of a nuclear attack, someone yelled, "Be afraid, be very afraid," nearly bursting out into an impromptu dance. The audience used a lot of rancorous laughter to disrupt the speech.

As soon as Horowitz commented on radical Islam waging war against the West, someone predictably yelled, "do you think it has anything to do with Israel's treatment of Palestine?" When Horowitz talked about Christians burning Jews at the stake during the crusades and Jews finding Muslims to be more hospitable, someone shouted "That's exactly what Ann Coulter is calling for now." When Horowitz mentioned that Jews and Christians are now treated as second class citizens in much of the Muslim world, a loud applause shot up from the audience. When Horowitz tried to bring up the treatment of women and issues such as female genital mutilation (FGM), the audience chanted, "That's not Islam."

Although the actions of campus leftists culminated during David Horowitz's lecture, in reality what transpired is indicative of what has become a toxic environment on today's university campuses. Conservative viewpoints are repeatedly stifled and censored, and often those who dare to question the left-wing orthodoxy are treated as second-class citizens on campus. Emory University is no exception, and has once again demonstrated the campus community's utter intolerance and inability to engage in civil debate.

For Horowitz's thoughts on the evening's proceedings go here.

When your ideas are intellectually bankrupt it would be counterproductive to engage your opponent in debate. All you can do is shout him down. When you hate your country as much as these people do, any enemy of your country becomes your friend, even terrorists. It's pretty sick.

RLC

Cosmic Coincidence

Newsweek's science writer Sharon Begley talks about the phenomenon of cosmic "dark energy" which is thought to be responsible for the fact that the expansion of the universe is actually speeding up rather than slowing down. This dark energy is believed to result from sub-atomic particles popping into existence of the vaccum of space, but there's a problem. The energy that would be produced by this process is calculated to be 10 to the 55th power greater than the dark energy of the universe. Something must be cancelling out the surplus and doing so with an astonishing level of percision. Were there just a little more dark energy the universe would rip apart. As Begley puts it:

[S]omething else cancels out all but a smidgen of the energy from the popping particles. That something else is anyone's guess. Worse, the precision of the required cancellation-erase the ink on every magazine ever printed except for exactly one comma, here-strains credulity.

Indeed it does, and add to this incredible fine-tuning the fact that dozens of other cosmic parameters are similarly precise and it just boggles the mind. For example, it has been calculated by Roger Penrose that the initial entropy of the universe had to be exact to one part in ten to the 10 to the 123rd power or else a universe suitable for life would not have formed.

This sort of unimaginable number is an embarrassment to the materialist who is compelled by his metaphysical beliefs to argue that such incredible calibrations are merely a fortuitous accident. Many materialists, however, are so uncomfortable with this line of thinking that they've retreated to the refuge of the "many worlds" hypothesis. This theory, for which there is absolutely no empirical evidence, states that there are as many as 10 to the 500th power universes of all different types. With so many possibilities, the argument goes, there has to be at least one suitable for life and we're it. In other words, by raising the number of worlds we can lower the improbability of the existence of a world as finely calibrated as this one is.

Begley writes:

...unless "the" universe is actually only one of many universes. Cosmologists are seriously entertaining that possibility. In the big bang that started our universe, little bits of space might have pinched off, said physicist Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas. Each pocket universe could have different features. In one-ours-the improbable cancellation of most of the cosmological constant would have occurred, leaving just enough to explain the dark energy.

The irony of the many worlds hypothesis is that it's not a scientific idea because there's no way to test it, and neither is there any evidence for it. It's an ad hoc metaphysical theory developed to lower the astronomically high improbability that our universe exists purely by chance. Since it's a philosophical hypothesis it is on the same plane as its only real rival, the concept of cosmic design. This is bad news for the materialist, to be sure, since there is a way to test competing metaphysical claims - Occam's razor, i.e. the principle that the simplest explanation that fits all the facts is the best.

In the present case the simplest explanation is that there's just a single universe which has the parameters and laws that it does because it has been intentionally designed to support life. The alternative, that there are a near infinite number of undetectable universes which exhibit the entire range of possible values for their physical parameters, is refuted by its own extravagance. If it weren't that this theory is the only way scientists and philosophers could rescue their materialism, no one would be caught dead endorsing it.

In order to avoid the conclusion that the universe is intentionally designed materialists have to resort to a highly speculative and ad hoc theory that makes a shambles of the principle of simplicity. Not only that, but it doesn't really help anyway because it raises more difficult questions: If there are all these universes what is producing them and why should we expect they would have different parameters than our universe? Why not expect that they be identical to ours? And what's generating these different universes and their parameters and laws in the first place?

Perhaps Ms Begley will write about those questions in a future column.

RLC

Re: Taking a Bite Outa' Crime

A student of mine responds on our Feedback page to our post titled Taking a Bite Outa' Crime. He shares some interesting thoughts. Check it out. RLC

A <i>Water Pistol</i>?

Just as a psychopath has no conscience, some people seem to be born with utterly no common sense. Consider, for example, the school administrators in this report:

A New Jersey second-grader's drawing of a stick figure shooting a gun has earned him a one-day school suspension.

Seven-year-old Kyle Walker's mom told an The Press newspaper of Atlantic City that her son was suspended for violating the district's zero-tolerance policy on guns. She said her son told her he'd drawn a water pistol.

Kyle gave the picture to another child on the school bus, and that child's parents complained about it to school officials.

The case is not the first in New Jersey in which students were suspended for depictions of weapons.

Four kindergarten boys were suspended in 2000 for playing cops and robbers, even though they were using their fingers as guns.

It's no wonder boys are becoming increasingly disaffected and alienated from our schools. The people that run them have no idea what a boy is and are trying to turn them into something they're not. Either we start weeding out the administrators who make school a form of earthly purgatory for these kids or we start segregating schools by sex and staffing boys' schools with men who were themselves once boys and who understand that you don't suspend a boy from school for drawing a picture of a water gun.

I wonder if Kyle would have been suspended if he'd drawn a picture of two men engaging in lewd conduct. I doubt it. They probably would have put him on the honor roll. No wonder people home school their kids.

HT: Hot Air

Devolution

A friend passes this along to me, and I thought it interesting enough to post:

About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government."

"A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury."

"From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years"

During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:

1. From bondage to spiritual faith;
   
2. From spiritual faith to great courage;
   
3. From courage to liberty;
   
4. From liberty to abundance;
   
5. From abundance to complacency;
   
6. From complacency to apathy;
   
7. From apathy to dependence;
   
8. From dependence back into bondage"
   

Where do you think our society falls in this progression? I'd put us somewhere between 5 and 7, but maybe I'm being unduly pessimisstic. I hope.

RLC

The Kurds

Michael Totten has an excellent article on the Iraqi Kurds in Azure.

There's much to learn from reading it and you won't find this kind of information many other places. Here are just a couple of excerpts:

Ethnic Kurds make up around 20 percent of Iraq's population. They, along with Persians, are indigenous to the upper Middle East, having lived there long before Arabs invaded from the south and Turks from the east....The majority live in the northern mountains, high above the dusty plains of Mesopotamia, in the officially recognized and constitutionally sanctioned Kurdish Autonomous Region. There, the war is already over. In fact, the war was hardly fought there at all.

Erbil, the largest city in Kurdistan, has suffered three terrorist attacks since coalition forces terminated the Baath regime in 2003. The second-largest city, Suleimaniah, was struck only once. The third-largest city, Dohuk, has never been hit at all. More people have been wounded or killed by terrorists in Spain than in Iraqi Kurdistan since 2003. No one has been kidnapped.

Indeed, it is hard to overstate how pro-American the people of Kurdistan are. They are possibly more pro-American than Americans themselves. If Bill Clinton was America's first "black" president, people in at least one part of the world say Bush is the first "Muslim" one: He is sometimes referred to in Kurdistan as "Hajji Bush" (meaning that he made the Muslim pilgrimage, or Hajj, to Mecca), an undeniably high honor for a Republican Christian from Texas. No, Kurdistan is not a "red state," and Kurds are not Republicans. Nor does it occur to most of them to prefer America's conservatives over its liberals. Rather, their warm feelings of gratitude and friendship extend to all Americans and both political parties for having liberated them from the totalitarian dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

So Saddam launched the genocidal Anfal Campaign in 1986 to ethnically cleanse the Kurds from his country. "They wanted to remove all the Kurds from everywhere in Iraq," Rostam said. "They just destroyed whole villages and provinces and moved people into collective towns and concentration camps. Some of the Turkmen villages around here were demolished for the same reason. The point was to make it an Arab area, and no other."

Iraq's Kurdish cities were devastated by air strikes, artillery, and chemical weapons. Forests were clear-cut. Concrete was poured into wells. Between 100,000 and 200,000 people were murdered in massacres, and 85 percent of Kurdish villages were destroyed. Tens of thousands, including children, were tortured to death in prison blocks.

"We believe if the Americans withdraw from this country there will be many more problems," Colonel Mudhafer said. "The Sunni and Shia want total control of Iraq. We are going to get involved in that. Iran is going to be involved in that. Turkey is going to be involved in that. Syria is going to be involved in that. The Sunni and Shia fighting in Baghdad will pull us in. We are going to be involved. Turkey and Iran will make problems for us. It is not going to be safe. All the American martyrs will have died for nothing, and there will be more problems in the future. Americans should build big bases here." For obvious reasons, the idea of the American military garrisoning its forces in Kurdistan is wildly popular among the Kurds.

Those who work with the United States in the Iraqi government, the Iraqi army, and the Iraqi police are already on the hit lists of numerous death squads, terrorist cells, and militias. Doctors, lawyers, writers, journalists, and countless others have already been singled out for extermination for choosing democracy and civil society over politics by bullets and car bombs. The terror that plagued Pol Pot's Cambodia in the 1970s and Algeria in the 1990s now stalks every decent person in the center and south of Iraq.

There's much more information on the Kurdish people and their role in Iraq at the link.

RLC

The Myth of the Naked Public Square

There is a myth that has circulated throughout our culture for over a generation now to the effect that we must be vigilant to keep our public-policy debates free of all religious assumptions. Religion, we've been told over and over, has no place in our public conversation. It's all about the separation of Church and state, don't you know.

This myth does great harm to our civic life because it essentially undercuts the possibility that any position one takes on an issue will be grounded in anything more substantial than personal taste. Consider a controversial social issue like capital punishment and imagine two people, Joe and Carl, debating it. Joe says he's opposed to capital punishment, and Carl asks why. What does Joe say?

He may respond by insisting that it's wrong to kill people, but, if so, Carl can simply ask him why killing people is wrong. Ultimately, Joe is going to have to rest his opposition to capital punishment on something other than his own subjective preferences, but the only solid ground he could rest it on is a conviction that God forbids killing. In the naked public square, however, that option is forbidden. The most that anyone can give as a reason for their position on capital punishment, or any of the issues we debate, is that "I don't (or do) like it," but that's hardly a compelling reason why anyone else should agree.

In other words, in a public forum which has been scrubbed clean of all religious references all debate comes down to a dispute over personal tastes and feelings, and in such a debate no one has any more moral authority or insight than anyone else. There's no possibility of appeal to transcendent objective values which could help inform our decision-making.

Indeed, the only way to prevail in public disputes is by amassing on one's side enough people who share one's feelings that one has the political clout to impose them by law on those who don't. In a world in which God has been banished from political discourse we don't win debates by persuasion, we win them by coercion. The person who can shout the loudest or who can gather the biggest mob is the victor.

Genuine public debates can only be carried out among people who share a common value system. If everyone agrees that God disdains killing then we can debate whether there may be reasonable exceptions to that principle. But if we expel God from our civic and social life we have no basis even for thinking that killing of any sort is wrong and, that being so, there's no place to stand if we wish to argue that capital punishment, or torture, or abortion, or gay marriage, or anything else, is wrong.

The irony of this is that the only people who can engage each other in the public square, the only voices anyone should bother to heed, are those of people who share a common belief in God. The atheist is really irrelevant because all he's doing when he says that X is wrong is telling us that he doesn't like X, and that may be an interesting biographical tidbit but it's nothing to build a policy upon.

RLC

Another Myth Laid to Rest

Darwinians have for a generation or so regaled us with the statistic that we share 99% of our genes in common with chimpanzees and that this is strong evidence that both species have evolved from a common ancestor and are closely related.

Now it's turning out that the 1% difference is incorrect. Not only that, but researchers have discovered that most humans differ genetically from each other by about that same amount. In other words, even were the 1% figure true (It appears that the correct difference is closer to 6.5%) we would have to conclude that humans were as genetically different from each other as they are believed to be from chimps, and that therefore chimps would be as closely related to us as are our fellow humans.

This is nonsense, of course, and most scientists are quietly putting the human/chimp myth to rest in the same graveyard as the myth of the vestigial appendix has been recently interred.

RLC

A Little More Honesty, Please

ProteinWisdom offers some examples of how the left is framing President Bush's SCHIP veto:

"I disagreed with the president's position because he wants to leave out all the children." Dennis Kucinich, Democrat Presidential candidate

"We're holding these members of Congress accountable for standing with President Bush and against our children." Noah Winer, head of MoveOn.org's health care campaign.

"You don't have money to fund the war or children. But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president's amusement." Congressman Pete Stark

"Why does President Bush hate American kids?" Keith Olbermann host of MSNBC's Countdown

As each of these men knows, the President actually wants to increase, not cut, the number of children covered by the program, but he wants to keep the focus of coverage on children in the lowest rungs of the middle class. The Democrats want taxpayers to pick up the coverage of millions of children who are already covered by private insurance. The President wants to expand SCHIP by 5 billion dollars, the Democrats by 35 billion.

Over this disagreement his opponents are willing to say the kinds of things that are quoted above.

It really is sad that the public debate can't be conducted with more integrity than this.

RLC

IFA Week

This week has been declared Islamo-Fascism Awareness week on many college campuses across the country. Despite the efforts of Muslims and leftists to prevent or curtail it many college students will have their eyes opened by speakers and films to exactly what the Islamists have in mind for us and our children. A glimpse of that glorious future can be had here.

If ever these people have their way it will be the end of civilization. Don't watch the video with children present, but by all means watch it, especially if you're a woman. It's important that we understand the nature of the people who seek to spread their religion across the globe.

RLC

PC Mindlessness

Readers who harbor an abiding disdain for political correctness and the "white guilt," as Shelby Steele dubs it in his excellent book of that title, often spawned by it, will find nothing in the e-mail below that would elicit doubt as to whether their disdain is merited.

The writer is replying to an old Viewpoint post titled Dunderhead Watch, and the story she relates tells us much about at least one of the schools our children attend:

This article [Dunderhead Watch] hit home because I had a "Dunderhead" experience of my own when my oldest son, who is now 26, was in the sixth grade. At that time I worked as a teaching assistant for the school district in the school where this happened. One morning I came to work to find a note from my son's principal to come to the office. When I arrived at the office I was asked to sit down and wait for him to call me in. I have to say that I felt like I myself was back in school again! Once I got over my surprise of being called to the office, I looked around the room and saw another set of parents waiting. They looked a little angry and I wondered what had happened.

It didn't take long to find out ... A few moments later, my son and a black female classmate of his also came into the office. I was to find out that she was the daughter of the other parents who were also sitting in the office. Once inside the principal's office, he began yelling at me saying "do you know what your son called this girl (I honestly forget her name)? I said no, what? I was clueless. He called her a (the N word). He used the full term, but I dislike it so much I refuse to use it. He went on to say "Where do you think he has heard this before?"

Quite honestly I was in shock because neither my husband, my parents, his parents or anyone else that we were close to used that word. I am not trying to be naïve, but we just didn't. It was not in our vocabulary. Due to my shock at what he had just said, I was not able to speak so the principal went on to say "Do you know that these parents can sue you and your husband for what he said" and so on and so on. It was unbelievable!

After I finally got over my shock, I looked at my son and asked "Mike, where did you hear that word". By then he was crying, but very quietly said "we have been reading Tom Sawyer in class and that is where I heard it. I called her that after she called me White Honky Trash".

You could have heard a pin drop in the office. The other parents asked their daughter if she had called my son that and she said yes. They could not have been any nicer once the truth came out. We both apologized for what we felt was a poor way to use an educational tool by both of our children and then left.

The principal could not have apologized enough to me, but at that time I just said thank you and left to go back to work and sent my son to class. After a few days, once I had my thoughts together, I went to visit the principal. I told him that I felt that he had used terrible judgment in how he had handled the entire situation. First of all, I felt like I had been ambushed. Why had he not spoken to me and let me know why I had been called in? I was totally unprepared and apparently the other parents knew what had happened to land them in the principal's office.

I also did not appreciate how it had affected my son. He was scared to death to be called to the principal's office because not only had he been called to the office for the first time in his life, but he then had to face some very angry parents and hear how his Mom and Dad were going to be sued over something he had done!

I felt better after I spoke my mind, but to be honest I lost quite a bit of respect for the principal. That is difficult not only because I was an employee, but he was the principal of my son's school which is supposed to be what I always believed was an esteemed position and one that you hope employs someone who knows how to not only make smart quick decisions, but rational ones.

There was one other aspect of this. I had to handle this is in a very cautious way with my son around. Even though I felt one way about the man, I had to be careful about what I said to my son about it. He had to continue school there and I had another child who would also be attending in the next year. I wanted them both to still hold respect for the person who was the head of their school.

I will tell you that it was a lesson on learning that there are unfortunately "Dunderheads" out there in positions that teach, and you have to be very aware of who they are. Let's just say I was not as naïve after that experience as I once was and that was a good thing.

I don't blame the girls' parents for taking the matter to the school administration, given what they knew at the time, but of all the ways this situation could have been handled it's hard to imagine one which would have been more maladroit than the way it was handled. The principal, rather than seizing the opportunity to teach the boy that some words are hurtful and inappropriate and to teach him the virtues of apology, sought instead, I suspect, to ingratiate himself with the girls' parents by showing them that whatever some white people are like, he himself is completely pure on the matter of race and that he isn't going to tolerate any budding young skinheads and their parents in his school. It's a textbook example of what Steele talks about in White Guilt.

I wonder if the principal, having heard the little girl admit to her racial insult, lectured the girl's parents the same way he lectured the boy's mom, and I wonder if he told them that they could be sued. Probably not. Maybe he was angling at the time for a job at Duke.

RLC

Political Skepticism

In response to a post last week titled Truth Matters my friend Byron e-mails to ask me why I seem skeptical of the intentions of those on the political left. It's a good question since I am indeed skeptical of the short-term aims and long-term goals of some, perhaps most, of those in Congress, the media and the blogosphere who tend to position themselves along the portside rail of the ship of state. Here's By's query. My slightly amended reply to it follows:

The only reason I take the time to keep this little sidebar conversation going is to ask why you are so singularly cynical and skeptical of the motives and ulterior motives of the Dems? Wait, on second thought, I am not sure I want to hear why.

Too late to change your mind. Here's the root of my concern, By. Today's liberal leaders wish to move the country to the left in several ways which I think are truly harmful. They want to secularize the nation, lower or erase standards of sexual morality, define deviancy down, and socialize the economy, including health care. They also wish to emasculate American power and influence around the world and restrict individual freedom here at home. They long to banish distinctions of class and values and level everyone to the lowest common denominator. They see each of these as a desideratum, but they realize that the general public, were they aware of this agenda, would not stand for it, so they seek to implement it gradually, hoping that, like the frog in the pot, the public won't notice the rising temperature.

You might say that this is true, perhaps, of Marxists, but that it's not true of liberals. As someone once said, however, Marxists and liberals are traveling along the same road. The only difference between them is that Marxists are in more of a hurry.

People of the secular left tend to share in common the desire to push the boundaries of culture, society, the economy, foreign policy, etc., ever leftward, and there's no endpoint to the push. If there were then progressives would have to change their name to conservatives when the endpoint was reached. No matter how much change we undergo as a society it will never be enough to slake the progressive's thirst for more.

Along the way traditional institutions like marriage are undermined, and education, especially in the humanities, is diluted and debased. People who have strong family attachments are not good raw material for the progressive project nor are people who have some historical understanding of the founding principles of this nation or the major lineaments of world civilization. As I said, the march leftward is a slow trudge that takes generations to complete, and I don't mean to give the impression that it's a conscious conspiracy or that all liberals are on board for the journey - some no doubt oppose it - but the overall ebb and flow of the American culture war has been relentlessly leftward for the last 100 years.

The best way to stop this march to the cliff, perhaps, is to first recognize its manifestations and to then hold it up to the light of day. The more people see what's happening the better chance there is of heading it off.

None of this is to say that there is nothing good about liberalism. I've talked about this with you on occasion and explained that I think liberals are often much more attuned to human problems than are conservatives. Liberals also provoke conservatives to question assumptions and convictions they hold which may be indefensible. But the problem with liberalism is that their solutions to our problems - more government control, higher taxes, more spending, a weaker military, a libertarian socio-cultural milieu, a radically secular public square - are all, in my mind, dangerously wrong-headed.

So, when I see intelligent government officials and others doing and saying things that prima facie make no sense, and which would appear to people whose opinions and thoughtfulness I respect to have deleterious consequences for our nation or society, I have to wonder whether there is some reason they are saying and doing these things other than the reason they give. What is it, exactly, that they're trying to gain by doing what they do?

Anyway, even though you didn't want to hear it, that's why I'm skeptical of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid et al. They're the pawns and front men for people even more radical than themselves, and what they have in mind for my children and grandchildren is not what I hope for them.

RLC

The Perversity of Modern Culture

James Watson the co-discoverer, along with Francis Crick, of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, is an atheistic Darwinian evolutionist. He has recently created a furor in England with his comments that black Africans are simply not as intelligent as Europeans. The Sunday Times in London writes:

[Watson] says that he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really", and I know that this "hot potato" is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".

He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because "there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don't promote them when they haven't succeeded at the lower level". He writes that "there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."

Watson's remarks raise several interesting questions. Let's focus on just one for now: Which view of human origins is most likely to lead to genuine racism, the view that men have evolved the traits they have because those traits had survival value in the competition for resources, or the view that all men are created by God in His image and are loved equally by Him?

Ideas have consequences. The idea of materialistic Darwinism, what some scientists call "the greatest idea anyone has ever had," leads directly, as Richard Weikert has pointed out in his masterful book From Darwin to Hitler, to eugenics, racism, and final solutions. The Christian idea of equality before God, on the other hand, leads to the notion that all men have equal dignity, worth, and rights in the eyes of God.

The paradox and perversity of modern culture is that it wants desperately to condemn racism while at the same time embracing Darwinian assumptions that logically entail it. Moreover, modern culture, while professing its abhorrence of racism, is nevertheless eager to minimize, mock and reject the only worldview that is philosophically incompatible with racist ideology, Christian theism.

Very curious.

RLC

Not Too Thin

One of the considerations, or perhaps reservations, expressed by people when the topic of a military strike against Iran is brought up is how we can do such a thing when our military is stretched so thin in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The fact is, according to a Newsmax report, a strike against Iran would be carried out primarily by air and naval forces, neither of which are heavily involved in the ongoing conflicts elsewhere:

The new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said that despite the commitment of U.S. forces elsewhere, the military is capable of conducting operations against Iran if called on to bomb nuclear facilities and other targets.

Adm. Michael Mullen told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday: "From a military standpoint, there is more than enough reserve to respond if that, in fact, is what the national leadership wanted to do, and so I don't think we're too stretched in that regard."

Defense and military officials have been preparing American forces within striking distance of Iran, according to the Washington Times. Attacks on the Islamic Republic would be carried out largely by the Navy and Air Force.

Officials say one target of any U.S. military action would be Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps facilities because of their role in providing insurgents in Iraq with armor-piercing roadside bombs. One official said the factory where Iranian bomb materials are being produced has been located.

A second target would be Iran's nuclear facilities, which are chiefly underground and spread across the country.

Appearing with Mullen at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it would probably spur other nations in the region to obtain those weapons themselves. That in turn would raise the risk of nuclear materials falling into the hands of terrorists.

But Adm. Mullen said the use of military force against Iran would be an option "of the last resort."

Let us hope that it remains a last resort but let us also hope that it remains a resort.

RLC

The Attack on Bhutto

Bill Roggio has details of the attack against former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. The Islamists promised they would try to kill her if she returned to Pakistan and they did. She's a very brave woman.

As the toll from yesterday's ambush on former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto convoy rises to 132 killed and upwards of 500 wounded, the details of the strike emerge. The attack was a sophisticated, coordinated strike carried out by professional terrorists. Conflicting reports exist, but it is clear at least one suicide bomber, and possibly two, conducted the attack, possibly in conjunction with snipers, a car bomb and a person throwing a hand grenade. The target of the attacks was the large truck carrying Bhutto and her senior advisors. Bhutto's convoy was surrounded by a massive cordon of police and party volunteers. The security arrangement had two rings: an outer cordon of 20,000 police and inner cordon of 5,000 volunteer's from Bhutto's political party as well as police.

At least one suicide bomber penetrated the outer cordon and hit the inner ring of security. The suicide bomb came close to hitting Bhutto's truck. "The blasts hit two police vehicles which were escorting the truck carrying Ms Bhutto. The target was the truck," senior Karachi police official Azhar Farooqui told Reuters. Witnesses said two dozen police vehicles "were completely shattered." About 15 to 20 kilograms of explosives were used in the attack.

There's more at the link.

RLC

Twilight of a Theory

Jerry Fodor is a philosopher and a cognitive scientist. He's also an atheist who has no time for creationism or intelligent design, so this article in which he concludes that it's time to discard one of the two main pillars of Darwinian theory, natural selection (adaptationism), is a bit of a shocker. Fodor says this:

The high tide of adaptationism floated a motley navy, but it may now be on the ebb. If it does turn out that natural selection isn't what drives evolution, a lot of loose speculations will be stranded high, dry and looking a little foolish. Induction over the history of science suggests that the best theories we have today will prove more or less untrue at the latest by tomorrow afternoon. In science, as elsewhere, 'hedge your bets' is generally good advice.

Traditionally the two engines that drive evolution have been thought to be random genetic mutation and natural selection. Michael Behe has delivered a blow to the hamstrings of the first of these in his book The Edge of Evolution, and now a prominent atheistic materialist is forecasting the demise of the second. Soon all that will be left of Darwin's theory will be the concept of descent by modification, but how that descent occurs will be anyone's guess.

One guess that might appear more and more frequently will be that life was front-loaded into the evolutionary process. There will be speculation, I speculate, that laws are somehow woven into the cosmos that direct the evolutionary process toward the production of man. Human beings, it will be suggested, were the inevitable outcome of the first primitive chemical reactions that lead to the genesis of biomolecules. This teleological explanation, of course, sounds very much like the view that mankind, or at least, higher life forms, were consciously intended, and once that sort of speculation breaks out people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens will be suffering apoplectic seizures.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

X-Cons

Joe Carter identifies a new taxon in the ideological zoo. It's comprised of individuals from Generation X who gravitate toward conservative ideas. He labels them X-Cons, a startling nomenclature, perhaps, given its similarities to the designation for former felons.

In any event, Carter talks about the characteristics of X-Cons here. Check it out and see if you qualify for membership.

RLC

Another Headache in Iraq

If Turkey invades Iraq to punish the Kurds and we don't stop them will that give a green light to Iran to launch raids on the Kurds? And if we do try to stop the Turks what would be the ramifications of that?

This is a real mess and how well it's handled will be a measure of the Bush administration's diplomatic adroitness. Every American should hope that Turkey relents because if they do not the whole region could go up in flames.

Fortunately, good sense seems to have prevailed in the Democratic caucus and enough Democrats are backing away from the resolution to condemn Turkey for the massacre of Armenians in 1915 to place its future in doubt. The last thing we need right now is to offend the Turks with a formal condemnation of a crime committed by the long-gone Ottoman Empire ninety years ago.

RLC

Taking a Bite Outa' Crime

Apparently the criminals in this town don't read the papers. Either that or they're suicidal. Whichever it is one thing is fairly sure, there are fewer of them today than there were a month ago.

RLC

On Time and the Age of the World

Scientists tell us the universe is some 13 billion years old while young earth creationists maintain that according to the biblical book of Genesis it's only about 10,000 years old. So which is it? It may be that both sides are correct - it all depends on how we look at time.

Time is generally considered to be an objective dimension of reality. It's believed to exist independently of our human experience of it. If there were no humans, according to this view, time would still roll on. Perhaps this is correct, but there is another possibility. Suppose that time is not an objective phenomenon at all but rather a subjective phenomenon. Suppose that time, not just our sense of time, is actually something that our minds impose upon the world just like they create color, fragrance, sound, and so on. If there were no minds there'd be no color, only electromagnetic radiations. Color is the mind's interpretation of these radiations and perhaps time, too, is a creation of the mind.

If so, then time, like color or sound, did not exist until there were human perceivers (for the sake of brevity let's ignore animal perceivers) on earth.

If this is the case, then there may have been a vast sequence of events that led up to man's appearance on earth - a Big Bang, stellar life cycles, stellar nucleosynthesis, the origin of our sun and earth, the origin of living things, etc., but these events did not occur in our time frame. They were tenseless events.

To understand this, imagine videotaping a friend going about his everyday life for, say, two hours. Your friend would experience two hours of time elapsing, and, were you to view the tape, it would take two hours to watch it. The tape, however, could be sped up so that every event is still witnessed and still stands in the same relative spatio-temporal relation to every other event on the tape, but it only takes two minutes to watch it, or two seconds. Theoretically the information on the tape could be compressed so that it takes virtually no time at all.

To your friend "in" the film time would be unchanged, but from the perspective of you the viewer "outside" the film the lapse of time would be whatever you chose it to be. You, as an observer, are not in the same time as is your friend in the video and your perspective on the amount of time it takes for the events on the tape to unfold is completely different.

Perhaps, were we an observer embedded somehow in the universe during the events leading up to the appearance of human beings, it would seem to us to have taken billions of years, but since there were no observers to these events, at least not observers in our temporal frame of reference, it's really meaningless to talk about how long it actually took to go from the moment of creation to the first appearance of human beings. All the events that precede man's arrival might be compressed like a zip file, occurring almost instantaneously, though in the same relationship with each other, and then, once human minds appear, the occurrence of those events gets "stretched out."

Our minds place the events that scientists believe happened into a temporal context so that as we extrapolate back we say that an event that would today take one year would also have taken one year before there were minds, but in fact what we mean is that the event would have taken one year if there had been human witnesses to observe it. If there were no such observers, however, it is meaningless to talk about how long events took to occur. It's like asking what is north of the north pole. The events literally took no time at all.

Perhaps, the writer of Genesis is trying to put something like this into words we can understand when he talks about the days of creation. God creates the universe in a relatively brief period of time, perhaps instantaneously, perhaps more slowly. If this is so, then the Genesis account gives us a good idea of the age of human civilization, but how much time preceded the appearance of humans is inscrutable. It may have been very long or it may have been relatively brief or there may have been no time at all. We can only say that were those same events to occur in such a way that we could observe them they would take billions of years. Whatever time it actually took, however, was determined by God's temporal context, not ours, since He was the only observer.

RLC