Contretemps Over Sex-Ed

The Obama campaign is upset by a McCain ad that takes the senator to task for favoring sex education for kindergartners. Jim Geraghty at NRO claims that the language a bill Obama voted for as an Illinois state senator certainly makes it look like the controversial ad is basically correct. Geraghty quotes from the bill these words:

Each class or course in comprehensive sex education offered in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV.

It's one thing to teach children the difference between good touch and bad touch, it's something else to teach them how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases. To be sure the bill required that the instruction be "age appropriate" but any discussion of avoiding STDs must perforce address matters of sexual intimacy and prophylaxis if it's to be at all meaningful, so the question is what need has a kindergartner for such information? Are five year olds at an appropriate age to talk about these matters at all?

RLC

The God Gene

"Professor" John Cleese presents a lecture on the God gene. The lecture, of course, is a spoof of Dawkinsian sociobiology that holds that all of our behavior is a product of genetic influences which have evolved over vast stretches of time:

Those scientists searching for a "God gene" are trying to show that if belief in God is genetic then there's no objective reason to think God really exists. The claim "God exists" is rendered trivial, it's thought, if our belief in God is genetically caused.

Unfortunately for these scientists, the attempt to discredit belief in God by showing that the belief has a genetic provenience is too clever by half. It winds up defeating itself.

If our belief in God is a product of our genes then it would seem that all of our beliefs must be similarly caused or influenced, but this means that the very belief that our genes cause our beliefs is itself caused by our genes. If that's so, then there's no reason why we should believe it. The belief that beliefs are genetically caused has no objective truth value. The claim is absurd, and Cleese's skit does a nice job of illustrating the absurdity.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

Barack's Life as an Organizer

Since Senator Obama cites his three years as a community organizer as an important element among his qualifications to be President, Byron York wanted to learn what a community organizer does and what Barack Obama accomplished in his tenure as an organizer in Chicago. So York went to the Windy City to find out, and writes about what he learned in an article at National Review Online.

He says:

[I]f you ask Obama's fellow organizers what his most significant accomplishments were, they point to two ventures: the expansion of a city summer-job program for South Side teenagers and the removal of asbestos from one of the area's oldest housing projects. Those, they say, were his biggest victories.

Neither of these achievements amounted to much, and Obama sensed that he really wasn't going to get a lot done in his role as an organizer, which is why he decided to go to law school. He believed that he needed more power and being a lawyer would confer that power. York's piece gives us the details and offers us an interesting and important glimpse of these formative years in the life of the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.

RLC

The Price of Freedom

An Iraq war vet shares his thoughts on what the war means and why he thinks Senator Obama is wrong on the war. Watch to the end:

RLC

Biden on Abortion

Senator Biden, appearing Sunday on Meet the Press, stated his position on abortion. The New York Times reports that:

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee for vice president, departed Sunday from party doctrine on abortion rights, declaring that as a Catholic, he believes life begins at conception. But the Delaware senator added that he would not impose his personal views on others, and had indeed voted against curtailing abortion rights and against criminalizing abortion.

So let's unpack this. He believes that "life begins at conception". This is a biologically awkward phrase since life is a continuum and does not "begin" in the sense that people mean it when they employ constructions like the one Biden used. I leave open the possibility that Senator Biden was uttering an inanity, but I assume he was not. I assume that what he meant was that an individual acquires the rights of a person at conception.

He then said that as a senator and potential vice-president he would not presume to impose that belief upon others. This assertion entails, one can only conclude, that if Americans thought that Jews or blacks were not full persons, the senator, entrusted with the power of legislating the laws of the land and confirming its judges, would not interfere with this opinion even were he convinced otherwise. Well, it wasn't too long ago that Jews and blacks were not considered full persons. Would Biden have refused to vote against legislation that would have criminalized the holocaust or curtailed slavery?

The child in the womb is a person, according to Joe Biden, but if the mother wants to kill it, for whatever reason, that should be her right. This is pretty stunning. It's either of a piece with the thinking of many Germans during the thirties and many Americans in the ante-bellum south or it's simply the muddled cogitation of a man who never really took his responsibilities as a senator seriously enough to think through the logic of his position.

RLC

Extremism

Over the past week some in the media have tried to place Sarah Palin out on the fringe of American life. This has been a difficult task since her opinions are pretty much the same as those of the vast number of Americans who live outside the university campus and the Washington beltway. She is pro-life, favors small government, opposes corruption, is a committed Christian, hunts, fishes, and supports the effort to defeat the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan. For some this makes her an extremist, for most it makes her a very attractive candidate.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama, whose personal associations include unreconstructed terrorists and terrorist supporters, is considered a moderate. Obama has the most extreme voting record in the Senate. He opposed the bill that banned partial-birth abortion and later criticized the Supreme Court for upholding the law. As an Illinois state senator he opposed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act which made it illegal to allow children born alive after an unsuccessful abortion to be left to die. He has promised that as president his first act would be to sign the Freedom of Choice act which would eliminate all existing restrictions on abortion, including the ban on the use of federal funds for abortions.

Never mind the fact that only a small percentage of Americans stand where Obama stands on these issues. In the minds of her media opponents it's Sara Palin who's the extremist and who must be discredited.

I really don't think the elite media understands the worldview of most Americans and certainly not that of most conservative Christians. They seem to have assumed, for example, that once Bristol Palin's pregnancy was exposed religious conservatives would abandon the mother's candidacy as if she were a moral leper. They seem to have been surprised that, on the contrary, most Christians identified with the fact that the Palins have challenges just like the rest of us and that just because our children don't always listen to the advice and counsel we offer them it doesn't mean that they, or we, are failures.

I don't know why else the media would have thought that Bristol's pregnancy was newsworthy unless they believed it somehow demonstrated hypocrisy or irresponsibility on the part of the mother and that it would erode her support among Evangelical Christians. If that's what they thought they certainly don't understand Evangelical Christians.

RLC

Unintended Consequences

Andrew writes with some interesting comments on Saturday's post titled Dumb but Funny. In the post, I quoted the editor of our local paper who made the remark that Palin's skepticism about human activity being the cause of global warming is bad for polar bears. Andrew writes:

Just a note on the polar bear comment. My dad is a hunter, and when I say hunter I don't mean taking a day or two off in late November to shoot a white tail deer. My dad hunts all over the world; Africa, New Zealand, Alaska, Tajikistan, and Canada. We were actually talking about polar bears the other day, and this is what he told me. The number of bears in Alaska right now is the highest it has ever been. However, environmentalists are afraid that global warming could hurt the population in the next 45-50 years, so polar bears were put on the endangered species list already to try to protect them in the future.

Here's the problem. Big game animals bring in big game hunters and big game hunters bring big money to these small Alaskan communities. No hunters means no money and no incentive for the locals and natives to protect the local polar bear population.

In Kenya you can't find wildlife anywhere. Years ago the Kenyan government outlawed hunting. Since the hunters were not coming to Kenya anymore there was no longer any reason for the local populations to protect the animals native to Kenya. Poaching became rampant and today there is almost no wild game in that country.

This same thing could very well happen to the polar bear in Alaska. Are they really going to be able to stop the locals from poaching the bears for food or even shooting them when they get too close to the towns and settlements? The environmentalists may well have doomed the polar bear in their attempt to save it [from] a threat that many believe doesn't even exist.

Andrew's e-mail offers us a good illustration of something called the Law of Unintended Consequences. So often the actions of government have consequences that are completely unforeseen, unintended, and counterproductive. It's a good reason to be skeptical of those who promise us that government can solve our problems.

One of the best examples of how the Law of Unintended Consequences works that I can recall occurred back in the 1980s. Congress decided that wealthy people could afford to pay more taxes on their luxury boats so they imposed a steep tax on boat purchases. This caused buyers to shop abroad for their pleasure craft which caused several New England boat builders to go out of business, thrusting hundreds of middle class workers and craftsmen out of jobs. The government didn't get their revenue, the wealthy weren't "punished" and the only thing that happened was lots of average folk wound up unemployed. That's our Congress working for you.

RLC

Authenticity

Breaking news from the Onion News Network: Jacksonville Jaguars Experience Existential Epiphany:

Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jacksonville Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life

We have it on good authority (almost as reliable as The Onion) that after the game was called the Jaguars players repaired to the locker room where they listened to their coaching staff read excerpts from Sartre's Being and Nothingness.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

Back in the US of KKK A

I was perusing the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal on Friday and was struck by a couple of the articles. One was an AP account of how community organizers are miffed at the merriment some GOP speakers enjoyed at their expense at the recent convention. The article pointed out that community organizers do good work, help poor people cope with a variety of stresses, and should not be belittled.

Well, of course they shouldn't, but that's not what was happening at the convention. What Republican speakers did was not deride people who are community organizers or the work they do, but rather deride the notion that that work is a qualification for the presidency of the United States. A community organizer is something like a secular missionary. Missionaries do wonderful work, and few would demean it, but three years in an inner city mission field is not the sort of experience that, by itself, prepares one for the Oval Office.

A second column, by an Intelligencer staffer named Jeff Hawkes, who apparently couldn't think of anything else to write about, fretted over Obama's safety during a campaign swing through Amish country last Thursday. I certainly don't wish to scoff at concern for anyone's safety, but the unspoken implication of Hawkes' overwrought essay, it seemed, was that Lancaster County is McCain territory and is therefore filled with, you know, lots of those right-wing, racist, extremist nuts. Hawkes cited a number of other fans of Barack at the Lancaster rally who harbored similar fears. One of them worried that "Every time there's somebody of promise, it's extinguished." He concluded his column by noting that "nothing bad happened" and breathed a sigh of relief as if we just missed tragedy by mere inches here in the US of KKK A.

Mr. Hawkes is perhaps unaware of the much more tangible threats against George Bush from both the rabid left and Islamic terrorists. If he is aware of them, I wonder how many anguished columns this worrywart has written about the very real risk George Bush takes every time he sets foot outside the White House, or if this is something Mr. Hawkes even thinks or cares about.

In any case, it seemed curious that Hawkes uniquely singled out senator Obama as the object of his concern. It makes one wonder if Mr. Hawkes, being a good liberal white man, may not have been exorcising the burden of his racial guilt. By going on about his profound concern for Mr. Obama's well-being, perhaps, he was assuring his minority readers and fellow liberals and perhaps himself, that, unlike so many other whites in Lancaster county, he is no racist.

That explanation may make him sound a bit pathetic, but it's a lot better than concluding that he just doesn't care about the safety of Republicans.

RLC

Bounce

The USA Today/Gallup poll, taken Friday through Sunday, shows McCain leading Obama by 54% to 44% among those seen as most likely to vote. This doesn't mean much at this point, but it is a sweeping turn-around for McCain who was down 7 points going into the convention.

Picking Sarah Palin may well have resuscitated his candidacy, and the selection is rich in irony. The party which has been portrayed by the media for years as a collection of chauvinists, misogynists and miscellaneous neanderthals has a woman on the ticket, only the second time in history a national party has done this, and all those redneck wife-beaters are wild about her. Meanwhile, organizations like the National Organization for Women which demonstrated the depth of its concern for women by remaining almost completely silent during the sexual depredations of Bill Clinton, including allegations of assault, don't even try to conceal their dismay with Sarah Palin. Oprah Winfrey, who has championed the advance of women throughout her career, refuses to allow Palin on her show.

Women who despaired that Hillary's defeat in the primaries robbed them of any hope that a woman would be president in their lifetime, now have a surprising second chance. The question is, how many Hillary supporters are there for whom abortion rights are not dispositive and who would be willing to vote for a strong successful woman who exemplifies what they think a woman should be in most other respects? How many Hillary supporters are there who are so smitten by the idea that they, or their daughters, might well see a woman in the White House after all that they will subordinate their preference on abortion to helping to make history happen?

Personally, I think voting for Palin just because she's a strong and charming woman is as irresponsible as voting for Obama just because he's black or for McCain just because he was a POW. Even so, it'll be interesting to see how many Democrats who wanted to see Mrs. Clinton at the head of their ticket, or at least on it, will pull the lever for Palin just because she's a version, albeit a mirror-image, of Hillary.

RLC

Dumb But Funny

Almost as if to highlight a post on Viewpoint the other day, one of our local papers, The York Dispatch, ran an editorial Wednesday which serves as a fine illustration of why so many are growing so disappointed with so much of the media. Here's what they said:

[Sarah Palin's] candidacy plays directly to the evangelical and far-right conservative wings of the Republican Party -- a home run for anti-abortion crusaders, the National Rifle Association, heterosexual marriage-only supporters and abstinence-only sex education.

Apparently, The editor's idea of being "far-right" is to hold views that have been mainstream in this country for two hundred years. But that aside, I wonder at the choice of "anti-abortion crusaders" as a designation for those who call themselves pro-life. It's unlikely that the editor thinks it appropriate to call pro-choicers "anti-life crusaders", so why use the pejorative for pro-lifers? Why not call people what they want to be called?

It's a GOP melange designed to float undisturbed over conservative waters -- until it strikes the reefs of sheer ignorance that comprise the ridiculous tenets of creationism, also known so well to us as intelligent design.

Well, the "reefs of sheer ignorance" must extend all the way to the editorial offices of the Dispatch. Intelligent design is not creationism. Only those who are foundering on that reef of sheer ignorance, or those whose scruples don't prohibit dishonesty, continue to conflate the two.

The good governor, it seems, favors teaching it in school as a "science."

As we mentioned in our earlier post this is simply false. Either the editorialist's ignorance encompasses not only the nature of ID but also current events, or the editorialist is simply being deliberately untruthful.

What Palin said was: "...teach both. You know, don't be afraid of education. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools."

Later, Palin clarified her remark: "I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum."

In other words, if the topic comes up it should be discussed, just like string theory should be discussed in physics classes if students show interest in it.

I will bet that if we were to survey the entire country and ask whether people agreed in principle with Palin's statement those who reply "yes" would comprise over 95% of the respondents. The other 5% would be mostly newspaper journalists.

The editorialist then embarrasses himself with this piece of incoherent pomposity:

A word to the unschooled: Science it's not. And to those who honestly believe the world was created around 6,000 years ago, another word: Fossil.

Well, shut my mouth. There's an argument for you. ID is not science because a newspaper editor says so, and if any of you yokels out there believe the earth is only 6000 years old you must have never heard of fossils. This is almost as compelling as the argument that ID isn't science because Judge Jones said it wasn't in the Dover case.

There's more:

On global warming, Ms. Palin, it seems, has yet to be convinced it's the result of human meddling. Certainly not good for polar bears in her home state and not healthy for the rest of us.

Aside from the fact that it's distressing that an editor of a newspaper seems to have difficulty writing in complete sentences, the juxtaposition of these two thoughts is difficult to decipher. If the Dispatch means that Mrs. Palin's skepticism about the cause of global warming bodes ill for polar bears and humans then it must be privy to proof that humans are causing global warming. If the editor does have such proof in hand then he's in possession of something that many in the scientific community are still looking for, and it would be helpful of him to share that proof with those of us less enlightened than he.

Gov. Palin's political merits and disabilities aside, former South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle, a Democrat, had this observation on Palin's nomination:

"Are we comfortable in having a VP who represents the extreme right wing, including the advocacy of creationism and a denial of any human responsibility in climate change?"

"No, we're not", cheers our editor, as though he were freshly back from a political rally.

Tom Daschle, and presumably our editor, are uncomfortable with an extremist in the vice-president's chair. So am I, but I'm not exactly clear on how it is that beliefs shared by more than half the country are "extremist". And if the Dispatch is so concerned about extremists in the White House why is it not editorializing against Barack Obama whose political views make him the most liberal member in the senate and place him clearly out of the American mainstream?

Evidently, for those like Daschle and the good folks at our newspaper there are just two kinds of people: There are those who agree with them and there is everyone else. Those who agree with them are enlightened moderates. Everyone else is a far right-wing extremist.

It's pretty funny. Dumb, but funny.

RLC

Update on Bob Novak

Some readers may be familiar with columnist and pundit Bob Novak, but whether you are or not you'll find his recent column interesting. Novak discovered after a minor traffic accident last July that he had a life-threatening brain tumor, in fact he was told he had only a few months left to live. He resigned from his career as a syndicated columnist, but has reemerged with this column that tells the story of his disease and the outpouring of graciousness from people he never guessed would be kind to him. It's a lovely account and reflects well on a lot of people in Washington and not so well on a few others.

You can read it here.

RLC

Keep Digging

It would be worth a couple of hearty guffaws were it not so disheartening. Some in the media, specifically CBS, CNN, and the New York Times, are spreading a story they evidently gleaned from Daily Kos that, contrary to what Sarah Palin said in her acceptance speech about being an advocate for special needs children, she actually cut the Alaska state budget for such programs by 62%.

This will doubtless disappoint those suffering the fevers of what Michelle Malkin calls Palin Derangement Syndrome (PDS), but the charge is false. In fact, the Special Education Services budget actually rose by 12% last year under governor Palin.

What happened was that one of the programs that had formerly been folded into Special Education Services, the Alaska Youth Challenge Program, was taken out of special needs and put elsewhere in the budget. This made it look at first glance as though the special needs budget had been slashed by 62% when in fact the Youth Challenge Program actually experienced a 12% increase in funding.

It took one stay-at-home mom about 30 minutes of googling on the internet to discover the explanation that eluded the vast resources of the media organs who are spreading the false information. It makes one wonder why everyone doesn't just get their news from the internet.

RLC

Finally

Climate change seems to have come to Pakistan, at least the security climate seems to have changed. President Musharaff, an unsteady ally at best in the war on terror, is gone, and the new regime seems much more committed to rooting out the Taliban and ending their ability to function as a fighting force. Stephen Brown at FrontPageMag writes that:

Finally, it's all-out war against the Taliban in Pakistan.

While the world's attention was focused on the conflict in Georgia, Pakistan's military launched a full-scale assault against the Pakistani Taliban. With former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf now out of the way, Pakistan's new military chief, General Ashfaq Kiyani, wasted little time in sending the army in force against the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (the Pakistani Taliban's proper name).

For the Bush administration, the offensive fulfills a long-desired American objective to eradicate the Taliban and al Qaeda bases in Pakistan's tribal regions. These rear areas provide major support for the enemy in the Afghan war, and it is hoped their destruction will substantially reduce that conflict's intensity, if not end it.

The severity of the fighting and the government's success can be judged by the fact the Pakistani Taliban has been "routed" in the Bajaur tribal agency, a Taliban-al Qaeda stronghold. The Pakistan army reported killing more than five hundred Taliban combatants while another 3,000 have fled into Afghanistan and 300,000 civilians have become refugees. Government forces almost nearly captured Ayman al Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda's second-in-command. On the army side, 20 soldiers are dead with another 50 missing.

Suffering setbacks, the Taliban had asked for a ceasefire, which the government, to its credit, rejected. Reflecting the new attitude in a post-Musharraf Pakistan towards Islamist militancy, the Pakistani government says it will not negotiate with the Tehrik-i-Taliban until it lays down its weapons.

The rest of the article explains the reasons for Musharaff's reluctance to go after the Taliban. Check it out if doings in the Middle East interest you.

RLC

Knocking Palin

As the campaign moves forward one of the knocks against Sarah Palin will almost certainly be that she is a "creationist". This accusation, intended to lump her in the public mind with snake handlers and other religious fanatics, will be based on her 2006 statement, given in response to a question, that we should:

"...teach both. You know, don't be afraid of education. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools."

Later, Palin clarified her remark: "I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum."

So, the evidence is clear. She's a zealot.

What we will probably not be told, however, is that Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and John Edwards all actually voted in 2001 to make teaching the controversy over evolution virtually mandatory.

Edward Sisson has the details at Evolution News and Views.

If Palin's suggestion that students at least be exposed to the debate places her out of the political mainstream in the U.S., where must we place senators who voted for this language in the Santorum amendment to No Child Left Behind:

It is the sense of the Senate that-

(1) good science education should prepare students to distinguish the data or testable theories of science from philosophical or religious claims that are made in the name of science; and

(2) where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy, and should prepare the students to be informed participants in public discussions regarding the subject.

As sensible as this amendment is it's actually much more "radical" than Palin's position which was simply to allow the controversy to be discussed if it comes up in class. It'll be interesting to see to what extent Palin is attacked for her view and whether the attackers will trouble themselves with observing that her view is mild relative to that of the aforementioned liberal senators.

RLC

Sexism

Everybody's talking about Sarah Palin's outstanding speech last night, and the talking heads can't help but remind us every third minute that she, of course, didn't write it. It was written by Matthew Scully, a speech writer for George Bush, among others. Well, so what? No politician has written his or her own speech in its entirety since Abe Lincoln scrawled the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope en route to Gettysburg.

So, we're led to wonder: How often were we told last week that Barack Obama and Joe Biden didn't write their speeches? The answer, I suspect is pretty close to zero, which, if true, raises yet another question: Why does the MSM feel compelled to tell us that Palin didn't write this one? Is it because they just don't think that a woman could have done such a fine job unless a man helped her?

Or is it because they realize that her speech is a real threat to the Obama candidacy, and they feel constrained to deflect its power by suggesting that she herself is not really capable of such rhetorical excellence?

Either way, wouldn't the repeated reminders that Governor Palin didn't write the speech, were they made by Republicans about a Hillary speech, for instance, be seen as examples of sexism?

Just asking.

RLC

The Ones We've Been Waiting for?

Barack Obama famously thrilled us with the soaring words: "We are the ones we've been waiting for." So, who are the ones Senator Obama is poised to grace us with? Who follows in his train? Thus far the list has failed to impress. It includes two wacky preachers (Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger), two unrepentant terrorists (William Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn), a crook (Tony Rezko), a financier of terrorists (Hatem El-Hady), and a senator with chronic foot-in-mouth disease (Joe Biden).

The above-mentioned Bernadette Dohrn once honored Charles Manson and his "family" with a three fingered salute symbolizing the fork they plunged into the stomach of actress Sharon Tate to kill her. "Dig it!" she told a rally in Michigan in 1969. "First they killed the pigs. Then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!" This odious woman and her husband, whose organization, the Weathermen, murdered several policemen, hosted a fund-raiser in their home to launch the political career of Barack Obama.

Senator Obama has asked us to vote for him on the basis of his judgment, but, since he has no record to speak of, the only way we can assess his judgment is to look at the people with whom he has associated. They don't inspire confidence. For his sake I hope there aren't too many more of the ones we've been waiting for waiting in the wings.

RLC

Not Smart

Comes word that Sarah Palin's 17 year-old daughter is pregnant, and the lefty blogs are in a tizzy. What political dunces. Imagine how receptive women all across this country, wrestling with trying to balance family and career, and struggling with both, are going to be to hearing these adolescent male bloggers yelling about what a bad mother Sarah Palin must be to allow her daughter to get pregnant.

It won't be pretty.

We're also hearing that the young Palin daughter's pregnancy somehow puts the kibosh on mom's argument for abstinence-only education, but I don't see how. Are we to conclude that a program is a failure if it doesn't achieve 100% success? If so, then what should we make of the fact that one out four New York City residents, most of whom are products of schools with very liberal sex education policies, is afflicted with genital herpes. Whatever we can conclude, one thing is certain: Had these herpes sufferers practiced abstinence they wouldn't have herpes.

It's ludicrous to judge a program, or the wisdom of a mother's support for it, on the basis of one young girl's mistake, but then the media interest in Bridget Palin's pregnancy is surely not about abstinence-only education. It's about doing whatever can be done to make Sarah Palin look foolish.

RLC

History in the Making

Perhaps you've seen the comments around the web to the effect that should Barack Obama win in November it will put an end to a period of our history marked by the exclusion of African Americans from the highest reaches of power. Maybe it will, but I doubt it. I think it more likely that if Obama prevails it will be seen by those who are vested in perpetual victimhood and grievance as only a partial achievement. Obama will be seen as a transitional figure since, the argument will go, he's not completely black and doesn't have "slave blood". His father, we'll be reminded, wasn't an American, and Obama was raised by whites and doesn't hail from a genuinely black family.

In other words, until an actual descendent of African slaves in America is elected president, I expect that many blacks will see Obama's presidency as little more than Moses standing on the mountain viewing the promised land from a distance. The actual arrival will have to await, we'll be told, the election of an "authentic" black man.

Indeed, I doubt that even the election of an African-American woman would be seen as the full-throated herald of a new age, although it would certainly have historic resonance. Her election would not be completely satisfying to those of a certain mindset, perhaps, since it would still tacitly highlight the exclusion of black males from the opportunities enjoyed by even their African-American sisters in our society.

Despite how this election is perceived, it's guaranteed to be a significant achievement in our social history. We will have either the first president who is not of full European descent or we will have the first vice-president who is not a male. These are interesting times.

RLC

Amazing Flying Machines

NPR interviewed Michael Dickinson about his work with fly behavior (audio and video here). According to NPR's Joe Palca, Dickinson found that these pesky little critters:

"...perform an elegant little ballet with their legs. They move their legs around to reposition their bodies so that when they do jump, they will push themselves away from the looming threat."

That ballet appears to give them a critical edge in escaping the swatter.

Dickinson says what's remarkable about this body position is how fast it happens. In less than a 10th of a second, the fly has to perceive the threat using its eyes, determine what direction it's coming from, and then make the appropriate movement with its legs so it jumps in the right direction. And all this is accomplished by a brain that's the size of a poppy seed.

"When you see a fly flitting around your hair, or your potato salad, you might see an annoyance," he says. "But in my lab you really see a marvelous machine, arguably the most sophisticated flying device on the planet."

Wow. More sophisticated, even, than aircraft designed by intelligent engineers?! Hmmmmm.

RLC