Softball

Why Chris Matthews' show on MSNBC isn't laughed to scorn just for the absurdity of its name is one of the peculiar mysteries of this political year. The last thing Matthews does with his guests is play "Hardball", unless, of course, the guest is a Republican. On last night's show his guest was Bill Ayers and all Matthews did was pitch marshmallows at him. Watching it, I couldn't help feel that Ayers may have been giving Matthews one of those tingly feelings he's become famous for:

Here's a man whose wife celebrated Charles Manson's murders, was herself implicated in the murder of two policemen, and who is a friend of Michelle Obama. He's a man whose organization (and his wife) set fire to the house of the judge presiding over the trial of black panthers while the judge's wife and young son were inside. He's a man whose organization blinded an innocent man with acid at JFK airport and which included people who spoke blithely of executing as many as 25 million Americans if their revolution ever proved successful. He's a man who as late as 2001 said that he wished he had done more during his terrorist years. He's a man who once sang that he was guilty as sin and free as a bird. And Matthews asked him about none of this.

Nor did the "journalist" Matthews ask Ayers why he hosted Obama's political christening in his home, or what the nature of his relationship with Obama was on the various boards on which they served together. Nor did he ask him about what kind of "educational reform" he's working on in Chicago.

Matthews, the host of the risibly named Hardball, asked not a single question that would make Ayers uncomfortable, not a single question that would enlighten the public on why Ayers' association with Obama is potentially significant. The interview left me puzzling over why he even bothered to have Ayers on the show in the first place. No wonder people tune into talk radio and Fox News rather than MSNBC if they want to actually learn anything.

RLC

Restless Natives

Jason directs us to Politico where it looks as if liberal discontent with our new President is already stirring, and the man hasn't yet served a day in office. The lefties are growing restless with concerns that Obama is backing away from the positions that won him their support in the first place:

Obama insists he hasn't abandoned the goals that made him feel to some like a liberal savior. But the left's bill of particulars against Obama is long, and growing.

Obama drew rousing applause at campaign events when he vowed to tax the windfall profits of oil companies. As president-elect, Obama says he won't enact the tax.

Obama's pledge to repeal the Bush tax cuts and redistribute that money to the middle class made him a hero among Democrats who said the cuts favored the wealthy. But now he's struck a more cautious stance on rolling back tax cuts for people making over $250,000 a year, signaling he'll merely let them expire as scheduled at the end of 2010.

Obama's post-election rhetoric on Iraq and choices for national security team have some liberal Democrats even more perplexed. As a candidate, Obama defined and separated himself from his challengers by highlighting his opposition to the war in Iraq from the start. He promised to begin to end the war on his first day in office.

Now Obama says that on his first day in office he will begin to "design a plan for a responsible drawdown," as he told NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday. Obama has also filled his national security positions with supporters of the Iraq war: Sen. Hillary Clinton, who voted to authorize force in Iraq, as his secretary of state; and President George W. Bush's defense secretary, Robert Gates, continuing in the same role.

The central premise of the left's criticism is direct - don't bite the hand that feeds, Mr. President-elect. The Internet that helped him so much during the election is lighting up with irritation and critiques.

To be sure most of the left is holding their fire to give him a chance, but they do seem to have their safeties off and their hammers cocked (or is a gun metaphor a little inappropriate for lefties?). Mr. Obama's honeymoon may be one of the shortest ever, and the irony is that it looks like it won't be his political opponents who'll find themselves most at odds with him but rather those who raised all the money and did all the legwork to get him elected.

They're wondering where all the hope and change went.

P.S. Glen Beck said this morning that he saw a bumper sticker in Seattle that read: Obama Is My Co-Pilot. I don't know whether to laugh at the stupidity of this or to tremble at the implications of people investing a complete unknown with Messianic attributes.

RLC

The Perfect Gift

It's long been the case in the U.S. that different groups of people choose to celebrate different aspects of the Christmas story. Merchants, of course, celebrate the giving of gifts by the Maji to the Christ child because the symbolism encourages shoppers to knock themselves out making the cash registers ring.

Secular humanists celebrate the notion of good will toward men even though they're hard-pressed to articulate a cogent reason why anyone should feel all warm and tingly toward anyone, much less complete strangers, in a godless, empty universe.

Christians celebrate the wonder of the creator of the universe becoming one of us in order to sacrifice himself for us in our lostness.

Yet, until now, there's been one aspect of the Christmas story that never gets celebrated - the slaughter of the innocents. King Herod, you'll recall, exercised his sovereignty over the children of Bethlehem by having everyone under the age of two put to the sword so that he wouldn't have to suffer a competitor to his throne.

Now comes word that in what certainly appears to be a celebration of Herod's exercise of his right as sovereign king to choose the deaths of those children, the Indiana Planned Parenthood affiliates are selling gift certificates this Christmas season which can be used for, inter alia, procuring an abortion.

It happens that lots of people are disgusted by this, but I think it's the perfect gift to celebrate that part of the Christmas narrative, Herod's infanticide, which rarely gets much positive recognition. Think for a moment of the happiness these certificates will bring in the days following Christmas. Young, expectant mommies who need to unburden themselves of an unwanted or inconvenient pregnancy will delight in the gift, as will young men on the verge of panic at having sired a child. Abortionists whose skills at ending nascent lives are inversely proportional to the compunctions of their consciences will continue to enrich themselves plying their ugly trade, and Planned Parenthood itself, a business which profits handsomely from dismembering children, will continue to rake in the cash. It won't have been such a happy Christmas for the child itself, but as anyone can tell you, the child is just a blob of tissue and doesn't count.

Indiana Planned Parenthood should be lauded for doing their part to make this an especially blessed and meaningful holiday season and for carrying on a wonderfully Herodian Christmas tradition.

RLC

President -Elect Gump

Its fairly well-known that Barack and Mrs. Obama were plagued by numerous unsavory associations throughout the Senator's campaign for the presidency. You'll remember the bigoted Reverend Wright, of course, and his fellow odd-ball cleric Michael Pfleger, and there were also the former terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn as well as convicted felon Tony Rezko, and don't forget that Palestinian terrorist sympathizer Rashid Khalidi.

Now it seems that Obama is also connected to the corrupt and foul-mouthed Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich who was arrested yesterday for trying to profit from the sale of Obama's Senate seat. There's no evidence that Obama was involved in the matters which precipitated Blagojevich's arrest, but still. Blago and the President-elect evidently go back a long way, and we have to wonder how many more crooks and nuts Obama has been holding hands with over the years.

Like a political Forrest Gump, Mr. Obama keeps turning up in the company of Illinois' most odious characters. One almost expects that by the time he's completed his first term he'll have been found to have had ties to Al Capone and Lucky Luciano.

RLC

For Tanya

One almost has to chuckle at the spate of anti-theist ads littering this year's Christmas landscape. The anti-theists are evidently not content to see Christmas simply secularized, they want to persuade Christians to abandon the celebration altogether. Such a dreary, gray, sterile world they'd have us all live in.

On the other hand, Hot Air links to an atheist at Dizzying Intellect who posts a mild rebuke of his fellow non-believers and adopts the sort of attitude toward those with whom he disagrees that one might wish all people, atheists and Christians, would adopt.

Unfortunately, a commenter at DI named Tanya spoils the mellow mood by displaying a petulant asperity toward, and a sad ignorance of, Christian belief about the afterlife. Tanya writes:

I've lived my life in a more holy way than most Christians I know. If it turns out I'm wrong, and some pissy little whiner god wants to send me away just because I didn't worship him, even though I lived a clean, decent life, he can bite me. I wouldn't want to live in that kind of "heaven" anyway. So sorry.

Tanya evidently thinks that "heaven" is, or should be, all about living a "clean, decent life". Perhaps the following tale will illustrate the sophomoric callowness of her misconception:

Once upon a time there was a handsome prince who was deeply in love with a young woman. We'll call her Tanya. The prince wanted Tanya to come and live with him in the formidable city his father, the king, had built, but Tanya wasn't interested in either the prince or the city. The city was beautiful and wondrous, to be sure, but the inhabitants weren't particularly fun to be around, and she wanted to stay out in the countryside where the wild things grow. Even though the prince wooed Tanya with every gift he could think of, it was to no avail. She wasn't smitten at all by the "pissy little whiner" prince. She obeyed the laws of the kingdom and paid her taxes and was convinced that that was good enough.

Out beyond the countryside, however, dwelt dreadful, awful orc-like creatures who hated the king and wanted nothing more than to kill him and his heirs. One day they learned of the prince's love for Tanya and set upon a plan. They kidnapped her and sent a note to the king telling him that they would be willing to exchange Tanya for the prince, but if their offer was refused they would torture Tanya until she was dead.

The king was distraught and told the prince of the horrible news. The prince, all the rejections he had experienced from Tanya notwithstanding, still loved her deeply and his heart was broken at the thought of her peril. With tears he resolved to his father that he would do the exchange. The father wept bitterly because the prince was his only son, but he knew that his love for Tanya would not allow him to let her suffer the torment to which the ugly people would surely subject her. The prince asked only that the father try his best to persuade Tanya to live in the beautiful city.

And so the day came for the exchange and the prince rode atop his horse out of the beautiful city to meet the ugly creatures. As he crossed an expansive meadow toward his enemy he stopped to make sure they released Tanya. He waited until she had fled, oblivious in her near-panic that it was the prince himself she ran past as she hurried to the safety of the city walls. He could easily turn back now that Tanya was safe, but he had given his word that he would do the exchange and the ugly people knew he would never go back on his word.

The prince continued stoically and resolutely into their midst, giving himself for Tanya as he had promised. Surrounding his steed they set upon him, stripped him of his princely raiment, and tortured him for three days in the most excruciating manner. Not once did any sound louder than a moan pass his lips. His courage and resolve to endure whatver they subjected him to were fortified by the assurance that he was doing it for Tanya and that because of his sacrifice she was safe. Finally, wearying of their sport, they cut off his head and threw his body into a pool of offal.

Meanwhile, the grief-stricken king, his heart like wax within his breast, called Tanya into his court. He told her nothing of what his son had done, his pride in the prince not permitting him to use his heroic sacrifice as a bribe. Even so, he pleaded with Tanya, as he had promised the prince he would, to stay within the walls of the wondrous and beautiful city where she'd be safe forevermore. Tanya considered the offer, but she decided that she liked life on the outside far too much, even if it was risky, and she didn't really want to be too close to the prince, and, by the way, where is that pissy little whiner anyway?

Merry Christmas, Tanya.

RLC

Foreign Competition

There have been a lot of forecasts in recent years of the coming American economic senescence. We're hearing that the United States is destined to be eclipsed by China, India, a united Europe and maybe, one can hardly say it without gasping, even Russia. Rod Hunter at The American takes a contrary view. Citing a book by economist Robert Shapiro, Hunter points out that problems each of these would-be competitors faces over the long run are intractable and will act like heavy anchors on the economy of these nations.

Take demographics for example. China, Japan and Europe all have rapidly aging populations which will need to be supported by a shrinking cohort of younger workers. This is really a recipe for economic calamity since either the elderly are going to have to be forsaken or the young are going to be heavily taxed to support them. Either scenario bodes ill for the economic vitality of a nation.

Russia is no threat at all to American economic supremacy since the productivity of the average Russian worker is the same as that of the average Botswanian.

India has little manufacturing, and, like China, has very poor infrastructure which is essential for moving goods and sustaining a vibrant economy. Moreover, the heavy hand of government stifles initiative and flexibility both these economies need in order to thrive.

The United States is poised to avoid all of these problems and others Hunter discusses as well. Read his essay to see why.

Thanks for the tip to No Left Turns

RLC

New York Is Not Mumbai

The attack that shut down the city of Mumbai would never have succeeded in an American city of comparable size - our cops are too well trained and too well armed. So writes Jonathan Foreman in a piece for the New York Post titled Mumbai's Lessons for New York.

What Foreman doesn't mention but which is almost certainly true is that a similar terrorist attack in many places in the U.S. would encounter not only an effective police response but also armed citizens who, unlike those poor Indians, would not be sitting ducks for the terrorists to pick off at their leisure.

Even so, there are other scenarios for terror attacks on our cities to which we are vulnerable and Foreman discusses some of these. Check out his essay here.

RLC

Let it Rest

The Supreme Court has refused to hear the latest challenge to President-elect Obama's constitutional right to be president of the United States, based on alleged hankey-pankey with his birth certificate. Ron Kessler summarizes the contretemps and concludes what a lot of people had concluded some time ago - there's nothing to it. It would be a big relief if the matter is now laid to rest because the last thing this nation needs is a crisis of legitimacy in the White House.

Even if Obama was born out of the country because his mother was traveling in Kenya and was unfit to return home until after her delivery - and all the hard evidence I've seen runs counter to this hypothetical - I wonder if it wouldn't still be a miscarriage of justice to deny Obama the White House on such a technicality. Conservatives rightly complain when courts overturn the clearly expressed will of the people in voter referenda because the jurists manage to espy some technical punctilio of the law that the referenda violates. Conservatives should be equally opposed to allowing a technicality to thwart the democratic process and the will of the electorate on the matter of Obama's presidency. The last thing conservatives should wish to do is sound like those on the left who threw tantrums because they thought George Bush was an illegitimate president after the 2000 election.

Yet I confess to being conflicted about all this because I believe strongly that the constitution is not just a helpful guideline but is rather an essential anchor that keeps us from being blown about by the winds of ideological fashion. I don't want to treat the constitution as though its provisions could be ignored just because they prove inconvenient.

So, let's hope that President-elect Obama has no qualificational skeletons in his closet, and let's hope as well that future candidates are much more thoroughly vetted by the media and their parties than was Obama. In his case the media was so eager to see him elected that there was just no appetite to do any digging into anything that might impede that outcome.

RLC

Black Women and Gay Marriage

Charles M. Blow lays out a strategy in the New York Times by which gays might win the support of African American women, a demographic which in California last month voted overwhelmingly against Prop 8. Blow offers up some interesting reasons why black women are opposed to gay marriage, but he dances all around what is almost certainly the main reason without really coming out and acknowledging it. He points out that black women go to church, that they tend to be socially conservative, and that they frown on interracial marriage because they believe there aren't enough good black men to go around without having them marrying each other. He never really says clearly, though, that the reason these women voted against gay marriage is because they simply believe that it's wrong and they don't want government meddling with traditional marriage.

It's hard for our educated elite to believe that in this day and age anyone would really think that any consensual act might be wrong, but there you have it. There still are, apparently, a lot of people who believe that homosexual behavior violates the natural law, that it violates the law of God, and therefore should not receive our collective stamp of approval. Imagine.

RLC

Whither Genius?

Quick. Name at least three geniuses in the history of science - three people whose ideas changed the world.

If you tried you probably came up with names like Einstein, Newton, Darwin, Edison, Galileo, etc. Robert Roy Britt at Live Science notes that among the things these world-changing thinkers share in common is that they were essentially loners:

Major breakthroughs in science have historically been the province of individuals, not institutes. Galileo and Copernicus, Edison and Einstein, toiling away in lonely labs or pondering the cosmos in private studies.

But in recent decades - especially since the Soviet success in launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957 - the trend has been to create massive institutions that foster more collaboration and garner big chunks of funding. And it is harder now to achieve scientific greatness. A study of Nobel Prize winners in 2005 found that the accumulation of knowledge over time has forced great minds to toil longer before they can make breakthroughs. The age at which thinkers produce significant innovations increased about six years during the 20th century.

This is an interesting observation. Has the move toward large research teams, made necessary by the need for funding, stifled individual genius? Or has the accumulation of knowledge made it much more difficult for great discoveries to be made because there are fewer left and those that are still out there are much more difficult to elucidate?

Britt discusses these questions in an interesting essay here. I wonder if genius isn't still flourishing but because the great thinkers are usually part of a research team they tend to be relatively anonymous compared to past giants like Einstein and Newton who worked alone.

Anyway, read Britt's essay at the link.

RLC

Paper Dragon

The conventional wisdom is that China is an economic juggernaut that'll overtake the United States by mid-century as not only the world's foremost economic dynamo but also the world's premier military power. The problem with conventional wisdom, however, is that it's so often wrong. Jonathan Wellum at Comment throws cold water on the Golden Age of China speculation and argues that China suffers from systemic moral problems that are more likely to turn it onto a path similar to that which Japan followed twenty years ago.

Here's his introduction:

With the U.S. embroiled in economic turmoil, three decades of unprecedented economic growth behind it, a seemingly endless supply of cheap labour and bulging foreign currency exchange reserves due to massive trade surpluses, Chinese growth does indeed appear unstoppable. Even the world's largest bank by market capitalization is now Chinese. Yet it is the image of the "flawless" girl lip-synching her way through the opening of the Beijing Olympics while the real singer was set aside due to her chubby cheeks and less than perfect teeth that offers insight into the challenges ahead.

Remember that 20 years ago, the same experts predicting China's inevitable coronation were forecasting that Japan would dominate the world financially. At that time, Japan housed some of the world's most highly valued corporations, including the most expensive financial institutions. Its future also seemed inevitable. But the Japanese forgot the most pedestrian of all economic realities: if you are not prepared to reproduce, you guarantee your extinction. Its low birthrate now means that, according to its own statistics, Japan will lose 70 per cent of its workforce by mid-century, and already its share of the world economy has dropped from a high of 18% in 1994 to below 10% in 2008.

Read Wellum's essay to find our what he thinks China's specific problems are.

RLC

Ending the Search for the Real Killer

O. J. Simpson has been sentenced to nine to thirty three years in jail for armed robbery. It couldn't happen to a more deserving guy, but we wonder now how anyone will find the real killers of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown now that O.J. won't be able to continue his tireless search of the nation's golf courses for the murderer.

Ron Goldman's father and sister talk about the sentence here:

For those too young to remember why Mr. Goldman is so gratified by the verdict and why the verdict is so significant you can catch up on the history here.

RLC

Fading Away

Materialists appear to be genuinely worried that confidence in their model of mind and brain - i.e. that mind is simply a word we use to describe what the brain does - is being eroded by contemporary challenges to that model.

Amanda Gefter is herself a philosophical materialist and a writer for New Scientist. She attended a September conference of neuroscientists who are skeptical that materialism can explain the problems posed by human consciousness and reports on the proceedings here. Her article includes this summary of remarks by Jeffrey Schwartz:

"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."

Gefter interviews materialist neuroscientists for their reaction, which is unsurprisingly hostile, to the speakers at the conference. Nevertheless, despite their disdain for the views expressed by those speakers, everyone of the researchers she interviews admits there's no evidence for their conviction that mind is fundamentally reducible to the operations of the material brain. Their conviction is obviously an assertion of faith, a product of their a priori commitment to materialism.

Gefter's article raises two essential questions: First, is materialism false, and, second, does substance dualism, if true, refute evolutionary Darwinism? David Chalmers, who's considered one of the top thinkers in the field, answers yes to the first and no to the second. Michael Egnor disagrees and answers yes to both of them. Egnor's article is heavy surf but it's worth the effort it takes to row through it.

The fact that so many people in the field of neuroscience are having doubts about the materialist paradigm is an intriguing development. A generation ago hardly anyone doubted it, but today dualism is experiencing a resurgence. This is significant because metaphysical materialism and naturalistic evolution comprise the two intellectual pillars holding up contemporary atheism, and both are teetering from serious challenges to which it has proven difficult for them to muster adequate responses.

It may well be that we're living in what Alister McGrath calls the twilight of atheism.

RLC

Why Johnny Doesn't Know Politics

A couple of weeks ago a man named John Ziegler commissioned a Zogby poll of Obama voters which revealed that many of them didn't have a clue about who Barack Obama was or what the political facts of life in this country are. Ziegler took some heat for this poll because it focused only on Democrats, but the criticism was somewhat unfair because it misconstrued his intent. He wasn't trying to show that Obama voters were particularly dumb, as some of his critics alleged, but rather that much of the American media, particularly the liberal outlets, have failed their audience. People who relied on the liberal media, which most Obama voters did, were obviously and grossly underinformed or misinformed.

Having been criticized for focusing on Obama voters in the original poll, Ziegler recently commissioned Wilson Research Strategies to conduct a poll of McCain voters who were asked the same twelve questions as Zogby had put to his sample, and the difference in the results is stark. The GOP voters scored much higher than did the Democrats. Zeigler is adamant that the disparity has nothing to do with one group being smarter than the other but has everything to do with where the respective groups get their information.

Voters who watch Fox news and listen to talk radio scored much better than those who watch CNN and/or network news. McCain voters largely belonged to the former group and Obama voters largely belonged to the latter. Ziegler talks about his results here and the complete results can be found at his web site (you may have to scroll down to find the most recent poll results). Here's a quick sample:

35 % of McCain voters got 10 or more of 13 questions correct.

18% of Obama voters got 10 or more of 13 questions correct.

McCain voters knew which party controls congress by a 63-27 margin.

Obama voters got the "congressional control" question wrong by 43-41.

The most amazing result Ziegler's study turned up was that those who get their news from liberal outlets were stunningly uninformed about most of the questions asked about Obama and American politics, but they scored very high on questions about Sarah Palin.

Only 13.7% failed to identify Sarah Palin as the person upon whom their party spent $150,000 in clothes. Only 6.2% failed to identify Palin as the candidate with a pregnant teenage daughter, and 86.9 % thought Palin said that she could see Russia from her "house," even though it was Tina Fey who said that on Saturday Night Live.

Check out the results. It'll make you wonder how well democracy in America is being served by a large segment of our media, particularly television networks.

RLC

Proposition 8

You're aware, perhaps, of the virulent reaction by the left, particularly the gay left, to the passage in California of Proposition 8 which effectively prevents the legalization of gay marriage. Since the Mormon church played a role in the campaign they've come in for special abuse by the erstwhile apostles of tolerance and progressivism. It is deeply ironic that some who call for tolerance of those whose beliefs on sexuality are different from our own are calling for violence against those whose beliefs on sexuality are different from their own.

Jonah Goldberg has a fine column about the very unliberal tactics employed by these folk against those who want nothing more than to preserve marriage as a union of one man and one woman.

Goldberg asks:

Did you catch the political ad in which two Jews ring the doorbell of a nice, working-class family? They barge in and rifle through the wife's purse and then the man's wallet for any cash. Cackling, they smash the daughter's piggy bank and pinch every penny. "We need it for the Wall Street bailout!" they exclaim.

No? Maybe you saw the one with the two swarthy Muslims who knock on the door of a nice Jewish family and then blow themselves up?

No? Well, then surely you saw the TV ad in which two smarmy Mormon missionaries knock on the door of an attractive lesbian couple. "Hi, we're from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints!" says the blond one with a toothy smile. "We're here to take away your rights." The Mormon zealots yank the couple's wedding rings from their fingers and then tear up their marriage license.

As the thugs leave, one says to the other, "That was too easy." His smirking comrade replies, "Yeah, what should we ban next?" The voice-over implores viewers: "Say no to a church taking over your government."

Obviously, the first two ads are fictional because no one would dare run such anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim attacks.

The third ad, however, was real. It was broadcast throughout California on election day as part of the effort to rally opposition to Proposition 8, the initiative that successfully repealed the right to same-sex marriage in the state.

There's much more at the link, and, as usual with Goldberg, his essay is good reading.

Truth to tell, the liberal opponents of Prop 8 didn't discriminate. Outraged that the demographic group most notably in favor of the ban on gay marriage was African Americans (70% of African Americans who voted in California voted to pass the ban) some of the lefty progressives even hurled vulgar racial epithets at blacks who were in fact protesting the passage of the Proposition.

Part of the left's outrage, perhaps, stems from the fact that for years progressives have been pushing against an open door in getting their agenda enacted in this country, but now, on this one issue, they're meeting resistance. Some of them are venting their frustration like spoiled children accustomed to having their way but who find themselves thwarted in a matter of particular importance to them.

Their anger is directed at the church, of course, because only people of the Book have any grounds for mounting opposition to the push for gay marriage. Secularists have long since recognized that they have no moral basis other than their own subjective preferences for opposing anything, let alone gay marriage. Realizing that their dislike of the notion of two members of the same gender engaging in connubial bliss was nothing more than a matter of personal taste, secularists quickly abandoned their opposition. Religious people remain the last impediment to the redefinition of marriage, but their opposition is intractable because it's based not on personal taste but upon what they believe to be the will of God.

Like the brat who screams that he hates his parents when they stand in the way of his obtaining something he wants, those who claim the right to reorder social arrangements that have thousands of years of tradition behind them may well increase the volume and frequency of their hatefulness toward conservative Christians and Jews if these groups continue to refuse to give them their way.

RLC

Congealed Information

Physics students have probably heard their teachers refer to matter as "frozen energy", i.e. matter is really energy that has been "compacted" to take solid form, somewhat like rain drops are condensed water vapor. It was one of Einstein's great insights that matter and energy are interconvertible, a relationship he famously expressed in the equation E=mc2.

The mass/energy relationship came to mind the other day as I was reading a paper in which the author somewhat in passing suggested that our bodies may in fact be congealed soul. This is, to me at least, an interesting thought because my view of the soul is that it's not a substance of any kind but is rather information.

I think that our soul is our essence. It's the sum of every true proposition about us. It's like a data file that contains an exhaustive description of our personal history, our personality, our likes and dislikes, our physical appearance at every moment of our lives, and so on. I envision this information existing eternally in the mind of God. Perhaps upon death this information is "downloaded" in such a way that it forms a new body of some sort in some other reality. Somewhat like the teleportation device in Star Trek reassembled atoms to reform the teleported crew of the Enterprise, perhaps bodies can be formed, at least in part, from the information comprising our soul.

Taking this thought a step further, maybe everything, the whole world, is really a manifestation of information. Perhaps God's mind is like a vast supercomputer with near infinite data storage capability. All the information about the world exists in His mind and in some corner of that Divine intellect there's a module that acts something like a computer monitor. We might imagine God, at the moment of creation, performing a mental keystroke and the data describing the world expressing itself in images on the monitor, just as the images you're viewing right now are really manifestations of the information stored on your hard drive and on the server which hosts Viewpoint. The images on the monitor in God's mind include us. Our physical bodies are, in this view, actually "congealed" information.

In any event, I think one of the manifold blessings of modern technology is that it affords us new metaphors and rich resources to help us understand better than our ancestors ever could the nature of God and the world He has created.

RLC

For Want of a Birth Certificate...

There's an item that's been simmering on the back-burner of our politics for a while and which every now and then boils up so that the public catches a glimpse. I don't know what to make of it, but I think we'll be hearing more about it as time goes on, and despite the fact that it sounds a bit crack-pottish it could turn out to be very significant.

This is the matter of Barack Obama's birth certificate. There have been a number of attempts to get the President-elect to produce his birth certificate to prove that he was really born in the U.S. as the constitution requires of all serving presidents. The allegation is that Obama was actually born in Kenya and that his claim to have been born in Hawaii is false. His campaign has produced a certificate on the internet they claim to be legitimate, but a number of lawsuits have been initiated claiming that it's not.

The Philadelphia Bulletin notes that problems with this certificate are too many to ignore:

The short list is first that the document is not signed. Secondly, it has no seal. Third, is that the security border doesn't match similar documents from the same time period. Other objections are that the race of Mr. Obama's father is listed as African. In the early '60s the State of Hawaii listed African- Americans as Negroes.

What is missing from the document is the doctor's signature and physical characteristics at birth that every original birth certificate reveals.

Some interested parties have submitted the internet document to the scrutiny of Adobe and graphic experts who all agree the document is highly questionable or a complete fraud. Is it? Who knows at this point? What is far more intriguing is the resistance being thrown at uncovering the true vault document. This is what is spawning suspicion and doubt.

Now one of the lawsuits that has been filed to force him to present a paper copy is going to the Supreme Court on Friday. Despite the fact that this sounds nutty, there are several reasons it's significant.

First, if it turns out that Mr. Obama was not born in the U.S. then he's disqualified from serving as president according to Article 2, section 1 of the constitution. He'll soon (December 15th) be certified as the president-elect by the members of the electoral college, and there's no enforcement mechanism for removing a president who has been duly certified except the impeachment process. Since impeachment certainly won't happen with a Democratic congress the constitutional provision requiring the president to be a natural-born citizen will have been effectively ignored.

This means that in 2012 there would be very little standing in the way of, say, an Arnold Schwarzenegger throwing his hat into the ring. And if the provision against non-native born presidents is to be disregarded why not dispense with the provision that requires a president to be 35 years of age and/or to have been a resident for fourteen years?

Secondly, there are questions whether anything Obama signs as president - legislation, treaties, directives - would have any legitimacy since he, himself, would be serving illegitimately. Everything would be open to challenge, and the courts would be working through the mess for years.

In other words, President-elect Obama's birth certificate could trigger a constitutional crisis of unprecedented proportions. As the Bulletin points out, he could end the controversy today and spare everyone a lot of trouble and expense by simply producing the original or by requesting that Hawaii do so. Why doesn't he?

CORRECTION: This post originally stated incorrectly that the electoral college has already officially elected Barack Obama to be our next president. It has been corrected to show that this will not occur until December 15th.

RLC

Public Education and ID (Pt. IV)

This post will conclude our examination (see previous posts in this series) of philosopher Thomas Nagel's arguement that the objections to ID are religious/theological rather than scientific and that to exclude it from public school classrooms on religious grounds is indefensible. Nagel is an atheist and a Darwinian, as we have previously pointed out, so his paper in Philosophy and Public Affairs is all the more noteworthy. He writes that:

The consequence of all this for public education is that both the inclusion of some mention of ID in a biology class and its exclusion would seem to depend on religious assumptions. Either divine intervention is ruled out in advance or it is not. If it is, ID can be disregarded. If it is not, evidence for ID can be considered. Yet both are clearly assumptions of a religious nature. Public schools in the United States may not teach atheism or deism any more than they may teach Christianity, so how can it be all right to teach scientific theories whose empirical confirmation depends on the assumption of one range of these views while it is impermissible to discuss the implications of alternative views on the same question?

The question is even more difficult for the ID critic if we keep in mind that IDers take no formal position on who the designer is. Nagel assumes it's God, but ID is officially agnostic on the point. For all anyone knows the designer might be the result of a science project conducted by a precocious student inhabiting one of the universes posited by multiverse theorists. The point of ID is not to prove that God exists but to show that this world shows evidence of having been intelligently planned and engineered and any metaphysics or science which rules out intention and purpose as an explanation is inadequate.

Nagel goes on to ask:

What would a biology course teach if it wanted to remain neutral on the question whether divine intervention in the process of life's development was a possibility, while acknowledging that people disagree about whether it should be regarded as a possibility at all, or what probability should be assigned to it, and that there is at present no way to settle that disagreement scientifically? So far as I can see, the only way to make no assumptions of a religious nature would be to admit that the empirical evidence may suggest different conclusions depending on what religious belief one starts with, and that the evidence does not by itself settle which of those beliefs is correct...

This is precisely how all controversial issues would be addressed in a healthy educational system, but the Darwinians are repelled by Nagel's sensible suggestion. They act as if they're terrified by the prospect that students exposed to the possibility that the biosphere reveals intention would quickly believe it and then a century of indoctrination in materialism would be undone.

Nagel again:

Judge Jones (in the Dover ID trial) cited as a decisive reason for denying ID the status of science that Michael Behe, the chief scientific witness for the defense, acknowledged that the theory would be more plausible to someone who believed in God than to someone who did not. This is just common sense, however, and the opposite is just as true: evolutionary theory as a complete explanation of the development of life is more plausible to someone who does not believe in God than to someone who does.

Many who followed the Dover trial were mystified by the fact that the plaintiffs and Judge Jones made such a big deal about Behe's statement because, as Nagel points out, it's simply common sense. Theists are going to be less resistant to the notion that the world was intentionally designed than would non-theists. This is hardly the gaffe it was portrayed as, but Judge Jones was so shocked by Behe's remark that he thought it all the proof he needed to rule that ID didn't qualify as science.

Either both of them are science or neither of them is. If both of them are scientific hypotheses, the ground for exclusion must be that ID is hopelessly bad science, or dead science, in Kitcher's phrase. That would be true if ID, like young earth creationism, can be refuted by the empirical evidence even if one starts by assuming that the possibility of a god who could intervene cannot be ruled out in advance.

So far as I can tell, however, no such refutation has even been offered, let alone established. What have been offered instead are necessarily speculative proposals about how the problems posed by Behe might be handled by evolutionary theory, declarations that no hypothesis involving divine intervention counts as science, and assurances that evolutionary theory is not inconsistent with the existence of God. It is also emphasized that even if evolutionary theory were false, that would not mean that ID was true. That is so, but it is still not a sufficient reason to exclude it from discussion.

If reasons to doubt the adequacy of evolutionary theory can be legitimately admitted to the curriculum, it is hard to see why they cannot legitimately be described as reasons in support of design, for those who believe in God, and reasons to believe that some as yet undiscovered, purely naturalistic theory must account for the evidence, for those who do not. That, after all, is the real epistemological situation.

Nagel's paper is altogether reasonable and fair-minded, which probably insures that it will receive little attention from those in whose hands these virtues rest awkwardly.

RLC

Why They're Not Competitive

Ramirez tells an important truth in this cartoon, but it might be more accurate if he had hooked two more trailers onto the first. One of them should be labelled government regulations and the other labelled executive mismanagement.

RLC

The Bush Legacy (Pt. II)

Jeffrey Kuhner of the Washington Times has written an excellent overview of the ideological legacy of the Bush presidency. We began a consideration of it in a previous post by looking at his fiscal and economic record, and we'll conclude today with a summary of where his social (domestic) and foreign policy place him on the ideological spectrum.

From a conservative point of view President Bush's domestic record has been mixed. His Supreme Court appointments (Roberts and Alito) were excellent - save the stumble with the abortive Harriet Miers nomination - but his refusal to do anything much about our porous borders and his willingness to grant amnesty to 20 million illegal aliens put him once again outside the conservative mainstream. So, taken as a whole, his record on the economy, spending, reducing the size of government, illegal immigration, etc. is one that liberals should laud him for but in which conservatives find little to like. Indeed, Kuhner believes Mr. Bush has almost single-handedly driven a stake through the heart of the conservative movement that had been ascendent since 1980:

Mr. Bush's enduring political legacy is the death of the conservative movement. He was not a small-government individualist in the mold of Ronald Reagan. In fact, he was the very embodiment of the "Third Way" fusing cultural conservatism and social liberalism that was espoused but never really implemented by the likes of former President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair: an activist big government combined with a defense of traditional values.

It is on foreign policy, however, that George Bush has secured the gratitude of those on the right and, indeed, should have won the gratitude of the entire nation. Conservatives generally (but not universally) supported the war in Afghanistan and, because, like everyone else in the world, they feared Saddam Hussein's WMD program and despised Saddam's tyranny, they supported the invasion of Iraq. There was disagreement among conservatives on this war, but I think it fair to say that most of them saw both Afghanistan and Iraq, unlike Korea, Vietnam, and Bosnia, as theaters of national interest. But the real source of conservative support for Bush throughout his tenure was his prosecution of the overall war on terrorism. It was because he had such a clear-eyed vision of the threat Islamism poses, coupled with the lack of a credible liberal alternative policy, that led conservatives to ignore Bush's other shortcomings, particularly his inability or unwillingness to rally the country to his side. Once more to Kuhner's essay:

Conservatives did not mount a frontal assault on the Bush administration for one simple reason: the war on terror. Most on the right supported Mr. Bush's foreign policy - and, therefore, they overlooked many of his flaws. Mostly, he was an ineffective communicator. It is not just that he mangled words, displayed a poor vocabulary, and uttered silly phrases such as "strategery" or "misunderestimated." He presided over the most rhetorically inept administration in recent memory - a public diplomacy failure that enabled his opponents to misrepresent his national security strategy and fill the vacuum with lies and half-truths, especially about the Iraq war. It eventually cost Mr. Bush his popular standing at home and abroad, thereby reducing his presidency to rubble.

Mr. Bush, however, was farsighted in foreign policy. He toppled two dictatorships in Afghanistan and Iraq, liberating more than 50 million Muslims from totalitarian regimes. His actions broke the back of al Qaeda, disrupted countless terrorist cells, and exposed Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein's corruption of the United Nations through the massive Oil-for-Food scandal.

There's an irony here. There was a time when it was liberals who championed the oppressed and tyrannized of the world. There was a time when liberals could say, as John Kennedy did in his much-quoted inaugural address, "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." Nowadays when a president takes those words seriously liberals execrate him. I suspect that no one was more surprised than George Bush when, after liberating 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq from horrific oppression, the left in this country gave him nothing more than the back of their hand.

But there's more for which the President deserves credit:

Also, his administration dismantled A.Q. Khan's international black market nuclear network. It convinced Libya to abandon its weapons of mass destruction program. It managed to contain rogue states, such as Syria, North Korea and Iran. It forged a path toward an independent Palestine - providing it embraces democracy and renounces terror. Most importantly, it achieved its primary goal: preventing another attack on American soil. Mr. Bush kept the American people safe. And he did this in the face of ferocious Democratic opposition and a hostile mainstream media.

Mr. Bush's central insight is that the key to defeating Islamic fascism is to bring democracy to the Middle East. Arab autocracies have fostered the conditions for a culture of jihadism to take root. Political and economic reform will drain the swamps of Islamist terror at its source. This is why the Iraq war is pivotal to winning the larger war on terrorism: A stable, democratic Iraq will serve as a strategic linchpin for transforming the wider region. The Bush Doctrine is similar to President Harry Truman's containment policy in one crucial respect: Mr. Bush has laid down the foundations for eventual victory - but only if his initiatives are sustained.

Just like Truman, Mr. Bush is a reviled leader. In fact, Truman's popular approval ratings were even lower when he left office than Mr. Bush's. Both men oversaw protracted, unpopular wars (Truman in Korea; Mr. Bush in Iraq). Both men ushered in transformative foreign policies opposed by media elites. Both men alienated key aspects of their base (Truman with economic liberals and Southern Democrats; Mr. Bush with fiscal conservatives and border security Republicans). And both men saw their respective political parties decline under withering partisan attacks (Truman from McCarthyism; Mr. Bush from the netroots, loony left).

Yet Truman is now viewed as a courageous, successful president. His staunch opposition to Soviet communism was vindicated. Mr. Bush's principled stand against Islamofascism will be vindicated as well.

So, what will Mr. Bush's legacy be? Two years ago I thought he had a chance to be one of the great presidents of the last 100 years, but I'm no longer so sure. I think that in too many ways he has acted unwisely and has not even attempted to explain his policies to the people, assuming, apparently, that we would all just understand why he was doing what he was doing with immigration, the surge in Iraq, the bailout and the budgetary deficits. Nevertheless, on perhaps the most important issue of our time, the threat of global terror, he has, despite vicious opposition from his political opponents, acted wisely and heroically. It will be for his farsighted determination to prevail in the most critical conflict of our time - despite ferocious opposition from the media and the Democrats - that he will be most remembered.

RLC