Ground War

DEBKAfile outlines Hamas' strategy against an Israeli ground invasion and occupation of Gaza. They hope to wear the Israelis down by inflicting steadily mounting casualties until Israel can no longer muster the political support to maintain its occupation and are forced to withdraw. Read how they hope to accomplish this at the link.

Israeli sources claim that Hamas' apparent eagerness to engage an Israeli ground assault is bluster intended to boost morale and that, in fact, Palestinian forces are scared and ill-prepared to face a modern armored attack.

The Times Online is reporting that the ground invasion is expected tonight.

There's lots of interesting information on this conflict at all of the above links.

RLC

Pre-emption

Hamas militants are videotaped loading rockets onto a truck to transfer them to launch sites where they would be used in an attempt to kill Israeli women and children. Fortunately for the intended victims, but unfortunately for these particular terrorists, the taping was being done by a missile-armed UAV. Things end badly for the terrorists.

RLC

Protest Roundup

Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs has a roundup of many of the protest demonstrations launched in the wake of the Israeli attacks on the terrorists in Gaza. It's disturbing to see how much irrational antipathy there is among American Muslims and left-wing anti-war people for Christians, Jews, and America in general, and these were demonstrations held in American cities. Evidently (read some of the comments at the link), it's far worse in Europe where Arab populations are greater and anti-semitic hatreds are once again becoming fashionable.

What is particularly disturbing is the prevalence of the view that it's a shame, essentially, that one person keeps shooting bullets into his neighbor's house, but that if his neighbor, frustrated that no one makes the shooter stop, chooses finally to fight back, he's guilty of an atrocity.

Given the failure of the rest of the world to do anything effective to stop Hamas from terrorizing Israelis, and given Hamas' obvious goal of killing as many Israelis as they can until they have destroyed the Jewish nation, Israel has no recourse but to destroy Hamas or to commit national suicide. Much of the rest of the world, apparently, wishes they would opt for suicide, and they despise Israel for not going along.

RLC

The Difference Between Them

Hamas has, according to some reports, prevented many Palestinians in Gaza from fleeing to Egypt for medical care, but the hospitals in Gaza are already overfull from the Israeli bombing, so where are injured and sick Palestinians going for care? Israel. One wonders how many Israelis would ever be treated in a Palestinian hospital.

RLC

My 2008 Netflix Queue

Moviewise, 2008 was a year for old favorites and first time delights. The old films enjoyed again, some for the third or fourth time, were:

• Leap of Faith
• The Mission
• Driving Miss Daisy
• Amadeus
• Life Is Beautiful
• Crash
• Being There
• The Third Man

There were also a number of older films I had never seen before, but which I finally got around to watching:

Innocent Voices

Lonesome Dove

The Silence

Through a Glass Darkly

Persona

Saraband

End of the Spear

Saints and Soldiers

The Nativity Story

The Butterfly

The Long Walk Home

Jane Eyre: BBC Version

Gone Baby Gone

And then there were newer films that I managed to squeeze in. Among the best of these were:

The Kite Runner

Bella

Dark Knight

Charlie Wilson's War

Vantage Point

Babel

Most

No Country for Old Men

Kung Fu Panda

Facing the Giants

All of the above were, in my opinion, good to very good films, and I'd recommend them all with the caveat that some are R-rated.

Movies that ranged all the way from "okay" to "painful to watch" were:

Au Revoir Les Enfants

The Great Debaters

Night on Earth

8 1/2

Inside Man

The Brave One

Deja Vu

Man on Fire

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

There are many more good films out there, of course, and if anyone has any recommendations please don't be reticent about passing them along.

From Bill and I best wishes for a great 2009.

RLC

Good for the Gander

Gary Varvel offers us cartoon commentary on recent developments in the news. The opinions expressed in the text are ours:

It is perplexing, don't you think, that the Israelis simply fail to understand that if the Hamas terrorists want to kill them it's not very civilized of them to do anything substantive about it.

If Mr. Madoff goes to jail for his Ponzi scheme which defrauded thousands of people of their life savings, and he should, then so, too, should every person in congress who resists social security reform and/or who obstructed serious investigation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and/or who used their legislative influence to force banks to make high risk home mortgage loans.

RLC

Spend Less, Pay More

Jason shares with us an article in the Albany Democrat-Herald which informs us of a clever idea hatched in the fertile mind of Governor Ted Kulongoski:

"As Oregonians drive less and demand more fuel-efficient vehicles, it is increasingly important that the state find a new way, other than the gas tax, to finance our transportation system."

According to the policies he has outlined online, Kulongoski proposes to continue the work of the special task force that came up with and tested the idea of a mileage tax to replace the gas tax.

The governor wants the task force "to partner with auto manufacturers to refine technology that would enable Oregonians to pay for the transportation system based on how many miles they drive."

The task force's final report came out in November 2007. It was based largely on a field test in which about 300 motorists in the Portland area and two service stations took part over 10 months, ending in March 2007.

A GPS-based system kept track of the in-state mileage driven by the volunteers. When they bought fuel, a device in their vehicles was read, and they paid 1.2 cents a mile and got a refund of the state gas tax of 24 cents a gallon.

The residents of Oregon get fleeced coming and going. The more they cut back on fuel consumption to save both gas and money, the less revenue their voracious government rakes in. But voracious government can never be expected to cut their spending. Oh, no. Elected public servants cannot be asked to forego their great retirement and medical insurance programs, or any of the other entitlements and emoluments of their esteemed office. Better it is to compensate for revenue shortfalls by taxing the mileage driven by the poor saps who purchased fuel-efficient cars.

Perhaps we should look at this, though, not from the standpoint of the lowly taxpayer, but from the point of view of a politician. Why should they simply raise the gas tax, if revenues have fallen, when they can create a whole new parasitic bureaucracy affording rich opportunities to descend yet again upon the long-suffering public like a horde of hungry paper-pushing wood ticks? And, of course, once the mileage tax is enacted, the gas tax can be raised anyway. If only a way could be found to tax the air we breathe surely our political leaders would rejoice and levy the tariff forthwith.

Exit question: Can you guess the party affiliation of the governor of Oregon whose brainchild this is? Here's a hint: He has a letter to the citizens of his state on his website .... from his dog. Oregon's voters have no one to blame but themselves.

RLC

End of the Year Book List

The end of the year is always a good time for reflection on movies watched and books read. As I look over the books I managed to finish this year I notice a distressing lack of classic fiction, a lack I hope to remedy in 2009. What fiction I did read was mostly unremarkable. I confess to having read and, dare I admit it, even mildly enjoyed, a couple of high testosterone Vince Flynn thrillers. I also endured Stephen King's logorrheic and highly overrated The Stand. William Young's very popular The Shack was a nice enough story despite its implausibility, and The Fossil Hunters by John Olson was an intermittently entertaining tale of the competition between teams of paleontologists and the dangers inherent in doing field work in hostile countries. That's pretty much the extent of the year's fiction.

There were some other forgettable books which I have duly forgotten, but here are twenty five others (including some of the novels mentioned above) which I've rated on a scale of one to four stars (*poor, **fair, ***good, ****outstanding). A caveat: The rating reflects only my interest in, and enjoyment of, the book and my opinion of its importance. A book on science or philosophy that I rank with 4 stars might seem a complete waste to someone who cares nothing for those subjects:

1. Life's Ultimate Questions, Ronald Nash ***: A good introductory text in philosophy geared to students at a Christian college. Its only drawbacks are Nash's treatment of the early Greeks, which is a bit tedious, and his dismissive treatment of views with which he disagrees.

2. Intelligent Design, Dembski and Ruse ***: Arguments by various scholars pro et contra intelligent design.

3. Theory and Reality, Peter Godfrey-Smith***: A fine survey of the last one hundred years of argument about the nature of science.

4. The Design Matrix - A Consilience of Clues, Mike Gene ****: An explication of the concept of "front-loaded" evolution. In my opinion, Gene has made an important contribution to the debate about intelligent design.

5. Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg ****: Perhaps the most important book I read this year, it makes a compelling case that fascism is a phenomenon of the political left, not, as most people assume, the right.

6. Jesus for President, Shane Claiborne **: Claiborne gets good grades for enthusiasm and for sincerely trying to live up to his understanding of the gospel, but receives low marks for the quality of his reasoning.

7. The Life of the Mind, Clifford Williams ***: This little book would make a nice gift for an academically-oriented student heading off to college.

8. Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright ***: A condensation of his much more voluminous Resurrection of the Son of God.

9. A Primer on Postmodernism, Stanley Grenz ****: An excellent and very readable overview of the major figures and ideas associated with postmodern thought.

10. Moral Choices, Scott Rae ***: A good introductory text on ethics from a Christian perspective.

11. The Case for Civility, Os Guinness **: Os makes a plea for greater civility in our politics while diminishing his case by taking jabs at the Bush administration whenever the opportunity presents itself.

12. Devil's Delusion, David Berlinski ***: An amusing critique of modern anti-theism written by an agnostic mathematician.

13. Fossil Hunters, John Olson **: A sometimes interesting but uneven story of a paleontological hunt for a prehistoric fossil in an Islamic country.

14. The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins **: Perhaps the most overrated book of the decade. Dawkins gives us a polemic against God that seems to attack everything but its intended target.

15. The Reason for God, Tim Keller ***: The pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City seeks to answer questions about Christianity posed by seekers among his congregants.

16. God and Other Minds, Alvin Plantinga ***: In one of the most important and influential books in philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century, Plantinga shows that we know of God's existence in the same way we know that other minds exist. Not for the beginner.

17. The Nature of True Virtue, Jonathan Edwards **: Edwards brings his logical skills to bear in this 18th century discussion of what it means to be virtuous. The book is written in a dense style that makes it less accessible to modern readers than one might wish.

18. The Shack, William Young ***: Young has written an enormously popular tale of a man who manages to overcome terrible grief through a weekend spent with the Trinity.

19. Last Lecture, Randy Pausch **: A book of advice written by a terminally ill computer prof for his children who will grow up without him. Poignant, wise, and funny.

20. The Stand, Stephen King *: Don't bother.

21. Getting it Right, William F. Buckley ***: WFB puts the internecine struggles of the nascent conservative movement in the 1950s and 60s into a charming novel. Ayn Rand fans will be dismayed.

22. Who Walk Alone, Percy Burgess **: Burgess recounts the life of an American soldier who contracts leprosy while fighting in the Philippines during WWI. The reader of this book will learn a lot about the disease and what life was like for people who suffered from it.

23. Abraham Kuyper - God's Renaissance Man, James McGoldrick **: A straightforward biography of a fascinating character in the history of reformed Christianity. Kuyper was a pastor, a theologian, a parliamentarian and eventually the president of the Netherlands.

24. The Language of God, Francis Collins **: Collins was the scientist who headed the team which elucidated the sequence of nucleotides that comprise the human genome. In the book he talks about his journey from atheism to faith and also lays out his blueprint for harmonizing faith and science.

25. Why the Universe Is the Way it Is, Hugh Ross ***: The first part of this book relates some astonishing facts about the fine-tuning of the universe. The second part is more theological and speculative.

RLC

Re; Personal Generosity

In a recent post titled Personal Generosity, we discussed a NYT op-ed in which Nicholas Kristoff wrote about studies by Arthur Brooks which reveal that conservatives are much more generous than liberals. Kristoff quoted a remark made by a critic of Brooks' findings to the effect that it may be true that conservatives give more than do liberals but that most conservatives are religious and their giving goes to build church buildings and not to help people. The comment demonstrated a complete unfamiliarity with what churches do, and a reader named Andrew writes to illustrate why the remark belies an unfortunate ignorance on the part of the critic who made it:

I go to a "mega church" here in Lancaster. I've grown up there actually. My family has been attending since there were only 200 members. Anyway, I've often wondered myself why we spend so much on the building, or flat screens for the youth rooms, or the light systems for the services. I used to wonder... wouldn't that money be better spent helping someone needy?

[But] this year members at my church supported over 2200 children in an area of Kenya called Securu. Our 5th and 6th graders raised $165,000 for a charity called Hoops of Hope to go to that same area of Africa to drill deep bore hole wells. Earlier this year we raised around $30,000 to open a few rehabilitation clinics in Vietnam for a vet who attends our church. Our members prepared over 2500 shoeboxes full of essentials to send away to children in need and bought hundreds of presents for needy families in our own area. These are just the things I can remember, and all this on top of the other ministries we run and the time we volunteer.

Yes, maybe some of the money conservatives give goes to build big fancy churches, [but] better a big building where people come to care, and serve, and give than an empty art museum.

In other words, the money that's spent by Andrew's church on physical structure is an investment that ultimately empowers them to do more to meet human need around the globe. Meanwhile, as Kristoff pointed out, much of what secular liberals donate goes to fund art museums, theaters, concert halls, and museums - nice things to have in one's community, to be sure, but hardly institutions likely to do much to help the poor and downtrodden. Indeed, this sort of "charitable giving" is simply a means for the well-off to make their own comfortable lives even more enjoyable.

RLC

Ken Miller's Straw Man

I don't know how many of our readers are really into biology, especially as it relates to the Intelligent Design/ Darwinism debate, but if you are there's a must read on the subject by Casey Luskin at Evolution News and Notes.

Biochemist Michael Behe made an argument in his book Darwin's Black Box that a portion of the human blood clotting cascade was irreducibly complex. Biologist Kenneth Miller claims to have refuted Behe's argument to the satisfaction of presiding judge John Jones at the Kitzmiller trial two years ago. Now it's true that Miller satisfied Jones, who was eager to be satisfied by the plaintiffs, but it's not true that he refuted Behe, and Luskin explains why.

This is important because Miller and others are going around the country claiming that Behe has been refuted, and thus ID has been discredited, when in fact neither he, nor it, has been. As Luskin points out, Miller did not address Behe's argument at all, but rather mischaracterized it and then critiqued the mischaracterization. This is called a straw man argument, and Miller's skill in the use of it does him no credit.

RLC

Apocalypse

Hot Air links to this video of a computer simulation of an asteroid collision with the earth. It's best watched full screen with the captions on. The asteroid in the sim is about 300 miles in diameter (about as wide as Pennsylvania is long):

The video notes that this is believed to have happened about six times in the earth's history. One such collision, which struck more of a glancing blow to the earth, is believed to have ejected enough molten rock from the earth's crust to have formed the moon. Another impact, smaller than the one depicted, is believed to have wiped out the big dinosaurs.

Such collisions would be even more frequent were it not for the fact that the earth orbits the sun in the same plane as the large outer planets, Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus. These, as well as our large moon, act as cosmic vacuum sweepers whose powerful gravity sucks debris into themselves preventing it from striking the earth. This is one of the many facts about life on earth that often gets overlooked in discussions of the possibility of finding life in other solar systems. Any planet which would give rise to life has to meet an extraordinary number of conditions, among which is that it has to be shielded from impacts such as this one by larger planets in the same solar system.

Few, if any, other planets in the galaxy, or even in the entire universe, meet all the criteria necessary to sustain life which is why scientists Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee titled their book on the subject Rare Earth.

Until just a decade or so ago, scientists pretty much accepted the principle of mediocrity which held that the earth was an unexceptional planet of an unexceptional star situated in an unexceptional galaxy. It was believed that such characteristics must be common in the universe and that therefore life, too, must be common. With the dawning realization, however, that the earth is anything but ordinary and that living things require hundreds if not thousands of specific conditions unlikely to be found together in any one place anywhere else in the cosmos, scientists have of late had to change their thinking, and the principle of mediocrity is being silently laid to rest.

The earth is an extraordinary place. One might almost think, if he didn't know better, that it was all intentionally set up that way.

RLC

What Africa Needs

Matthew Parris at The Times Online is an atheist which makes this article rather remarkable. He writes, surprisingly but correctly, that the best hope for Africa is Christianity. Here's part of his essay:

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

After discussing how Africans are enchained to a kind of group think that reveres the strongman and how the typical African resigns himself to his wretchedness and adopts a stultifying passivity toward life and its challenges, Parris says:

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the know-how that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

Of course, Christians have been saying for two thousand years that Christianity provides a liberating worldview that nothing else, certainly not materialistic atheism or tribal polytheism or animism, does. It's good that some non-believers are finally seeing for themselves and telling others that it is indeed so, but it reminds me of the closing line of Robert Jastrow's God and the Astronomers when Jastrow, talking about the arduous trail of scientific discovery that led finally to the conclusion that the universe exploded into being ex nihilo just as Christian thinkers have been saying for two thousand years, says:

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

For "scientists" substitute "secular liberals" and you have the situation in Africa that Parris describes.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Hacker Wars

If anyone thinks that if Israel would just be reasonable and give the Palestinian Arabs all they want, i.e. put a gun to their collective head and pull the trigger, there'd finally be peace on earth and good will toward men they should read this. If it weren't so serious it'd be funny, especially the last sentence:

The war that worries most people in the Middle East is the one going on between Shia Iran and Arab Sunnis. This conflict ultimately takes over every other conflict. For example, Iran has been trying to get a Cyber War going against Israel. Prizes were offered for the most daring attacks on Israeli web sites by Moslem hackers. But the effort went sideways last year when some of the Shia hackers began attacking Sunni websites in retaliation for some Sunni attacks on Shia sites. For the Shia, this was also payback for the increasingly anti-Shia tone of Sunni mass media. This, in turn, was in response to Iran's nuclear weapons program, and increasingly belligerent Iranian claims that it should be the leader of the Islamic world.

For the last three months, Shia and Sunni radicals have escalated their attacks on each other's web sites. What really got things going was a Shia attack on the two main web sites for Sunni radical religious propaganda (including al Qaeda) on September 11, 2008. Sunni hackers retaliated shortly thereafter by defacing 300 web sites belonging to Shia clergy and religious organizations. Shia hackers then came back with more attacks on Sunni clergy, media and religious sites. The two main Sunni radical propaganda sites, Al-Ekhlaas.net and Alhesbah.net, have been down most of the time since September 11. Since some 80 percent of Moslems are Sunni (versus about ten percent Shia), the Shia soon began taking more damage than they were dishing out, by a margin of more than two to one.

At first Arab media and religious leaders pleaded for the hackers to stop. Some chastised the hackers for fighting fellow Moslems, rather than going after infidels (particularly Israel.) But Moslem hackers don't like tangling with the Israelis, who have a much deeper bench in the hacking department.

Meanwhile, Iran has been trying to get Moslem hackers united against Israel. For two years now, the Hamas office in the capital of Iran, has sponsored a hacking contest. Whoever makes the most spectacular attack on the most important Israeli web sites (belonging to a government agency or one of the major political parties), wins a prize of $2,000. Not that a lot of Moslem hackers need much encouragement for this sort of thing. But the Islamic radical groups have noticed that they are not getting the best hacking talent, and the Israelis typically respond much more forcefully. It has been found, however, that a prize, and a formal competition, tends to bring in the more skilled, if less religiously radical, Moslem hackers.

It was hoped that this contest would defuse the Internet based war between Sunni and Shia Moslems. Although most Hamas members are Sunni, Shia Iran is a major backer of Hamas. So it makes sense for Hamas to come up with something to stop the Internet war between Shia and Sunni Moslems, and unite everyone against Israel. It hasn't worked, and Israeli and Western counter-intelligence agencies appear to have joined in, making attacks on Shia and Sunni sites, and letting paranoia take its course.

Far be it from me, who can scarcely boot up a computer let alone hack into someone else's, to laugh at this kerfuffle, but the thought of Israeli and other Western operatives provoking the two sides to war against each other is kind of funny.

RLC

Getting the War They Wanted

Hamas wants war with Israel, and the world should let them have it. The status quo is untenable. Hamas has launched 300 rocket and mortar attacks against Israeli civilians in the last week and 3000 in the past year while the world stood by and did nothing. Imagine if Mexico or Cuba were launching such strikes into the U.S. How long would the American people tolerate it? How many American children would have to die before the people demanded that the government do something to stop the killing and the terror?

Israel has finally run out of patience. Since the Israelis handed Gaza over to the Palestinians in 2005 the Palestinians have expressed their appreciation by launching over 5000 missiles at Israel. The Israelis have suffered through a recent six-month "cease-fire" that was no cease-fire at all. They've seen their children terrorized, maimed and killed by thousands of Palestinian rockets and mortars in just the past year.

Now, finally, they've had enough, and today they've launched airstrikes at Hamas security stations in Gaza, but not before signaling Palestinian civilians to clear out of houses where weapons are stashed or Hamas fighters might be hiding. This is one major difference between the Israelis and the Palestinians: The Israelis will try to minimize civilian casualties, Hamas, like Muslim terrorists everywhere, tries their best to inflict them. Indeed, the latest barrage of missiles and mortars rained down on Israel after they had sent 90 trucks laden with food and medicine into Gaza to bring relief to the Palestinian people.

It's not known how long this current offensive will last but Israel should be done with half measures. Hamas is a cancer that threatens Israel and oppresses its own people. Israel should take out not only Hamas' military but the leadership as well.

DEBKAfile offers this analysis of what they think is next:

While Israel's air attack is counted a success, its war chiefs are taking care not to be trapped by an early achievement into the sort of blunders which led to the Lebanon war's unsatisfactory conclusion in 2006. That campaign was commanded by a former airman, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, who saw no point in a ground operation after Hizballah's command center was razed by air - until it was too late.

The first objective of a ground force in the coming hours will be to destroy "Lower Gaza," the underground city designed by an Iranian general and spread under most of the enclave's area. This subterranean sanctuary kept the bulk of the Hamas army, 15,000 men, their officers and leaders, out of harm's way during the Israeli air offensive Saturday. Their resistance must be broken before Hamas can be brought to surrender. Until then they will fight on.

The second Israeli objective must be to sever the Gaza Strip from Egypt by recapturing the Philadelphi border strip.

Hezbollah will not sit by and let Hamas take this punishment so the Israelis expect reprisals out of Lebanon to the north. Such attacks should be answered with an all-out attempt to destroy Hezbollah which is another festering boil on the rump of civilization.

It'll be interesting to see how Barack Obama, who campaigned as a friend of the Palestinians, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who once kissed the wife of uber-terrorist Yasser Arafat, will respond to Israel's action.

RLC

Mass Density

We wrote the other day about how the dark energy of the universe is fine-tuned to a value of 1 part in 10(120) and exclaimed about the incomprehensible precision of such a value. Yet dark energy is not the only quantity in the cosmos whose value must be unimaginably precise in order for the universe to be a place capable of sustaining life. There are dozens of additional parameters, forces, and circumstances that must be set just right in order for life to arise and survive somewhere in the vastness of the cosmos.

For example, there is a huge amount of mass in the universe, but there cannot be just any amount if the universe is going to be suitable for life. The amount has to be precisely what it is. If it were off by 1 part in 10(60) at its inception the universe would have been rendered unfit for life. This is, astonishingly, an amount of mass equal to just one dime.

If a dime's worth of mass (actually mass-energy) had been added or subtracted from the total at the initial creation event it would, among other things, have caused the universe to either expand too fast (if the mass were less) or cause all stars to be too big (if the mass were greater). In either case life could never have arisen.

As we've pointed out before, skeptics have only one way to avoid the conclusion that this universe is not an accident - that it's the product of purpose and brilliant design - and that is to assume, without any evidence whatsoever, that there are an infinite number of worlds with an infinite variety to them. If that were so then one of them would have to have the properties our world does, no matter how astronomically improbable that may seem, and we just happen to be in it.

In other words, the skeptic scoffs at believers for thinking there's a Creator who designed the universe while they, in their desperation to avoid that conclusion themselves, embrace the theory that there's an infinity of universes for which the only real evidence is the fact that if there isn't this "multiverse" then there must be a Cosmic Designer. Pretty funny.

RLC

Crash Course

Bill passes along a link to a course on global economics given by Chris Martenson. The course consists of twenty sessions, each a few minutes long, in which Martenson takes the viewer through the basics of economics and along the way teaches some very important lessons about the peril we find ourselves in in today's global environment.

Readers who wish to develop a better grasp of economics but who are unable or unwilling to take a class or read a book on it, will find Martenson's short, punchy explanations a welcome and helpful tool.

The first two chapters are each less than two minutes long. The third one, which may literally stun you, is about six minutes. Check them out.

RLC

Good Year in Iraq

Strategy Page summarizes the last year in Iraq and assesses the current situation. Problems remain, but Iraq is a far better place than it was a year ago and Barack Obama's opposition to the surge, his pronouncements of it's failure, and his early promise to end the war on his first day in office all make him look myopic, naive, and foolish.

He has already backed away from his promise to end the war immediately, and I expect that by the time he takes office he'll have had a Damascus Road experience that will result in his prosecution of the fight against Islamic terrorism being pretty much indistinguishable from that of George Bush. It'll be great fun to read the excuses the liberal media will conjure for his change of heart and to listen to the yawping of the far left which will certainly feel betrayed by the man whose election they made possible.

RLC

Dark Energy

Ever since the discovery of a mysterious property of the universe called "dark energy" scientists have feared that the fabric of the universe was, in time, going to rip apart, but Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at the University of Arizona, allays our fears in this story.

Dark energy is very weird stuff. For the first 5 to 7 billion years after the Big Bang the universe expanded at ever-decreasing rates as gravity acted as a brake on the exploding sphere of space-time, but then about 7 billion years ago the expansion began to accelerate, as if someone pushed the gas pedal all the way to the floor.

It turns out that the universe acts like a rubber band in reverse. As a rubber band is stretched the elasticity decreases and acts as a drag on further stretching. The "elasticity" of the universe, however, actually increases the more it stretches.

Imagine the universe as an inflating balloon with everything that we can observe resting on the surface of the balloon. The balloon is inflating faster and faster and although it doesn't appear that it will burst as it was originally feared, it does appear that the expansion rate will continue to accelerate until everything on the universe's surface is speeding away from everything else at close to or even more than the speed of light.

This, by the way, is why theories of an oscillating universe are no longer accepted. Once the universe expands to a certain point, it cannot collapse and thus cannot oscillate.

This means that eventually, billions of years from now, earth-bound observers would be able to see no other objects in the sky because they'd all be moving away at speeds so fast that the light from them would never reach us. Since the sun is one of those objects from which we would receive no light then, of course, there'd actually no longer be any earth-bound observers.

At any rate, here's the most fascinating thing about this. Scientists have determined that the amount of dark energy present in the universe cannot vary from the actual value by more than one part in 10(120). That's a one with 120 zeroes after it. If it did deviate from its actual value by more than this amount life would not be able to exist in the universe that would result. That is an unimaginably precise setting. It's the equivalent of the mass of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of the mass of a single electron.

What an amazing thing that this dark energy is calibrated to just the right value to allow life to survive. What an extraordinary amount of blind faith it takes to think that it's just a lucky accident.

RLC

Refuting Ayers

I think anyone who's willing to give domestic terrorist Bill Ayers the benefit of the doubt after his New York Times op-ed piece, or who still doesn't know what to make of Ayers, should read this piece at Pajamas Media.

The first part of the post is an introduction by Bob Owens to an op-ed written by an FBI informant named Larry Grathwohl who infiltrated the Weather Underground during its heyday. Grathwohl submitted his op-ed to the NYT but they refused to run it. We're left to speculate as to their reasons, but it certainly doesn't make them look like a paper interested in getting at the truth.

RLC

Nepotism

A letter writer to the New York Times observes that:

"It's amusing that Andrew M. Cuomo, who owes his whole career to his dad, may not get the senate seat of Hillary Rodham Clinton (who owes her whole career to her husband) because David A. Paterson (who owes his whole career to his dad) may give it to Caroline Kennedy (who owes her whole career to her dad). You would think that a state as large as New York could find someone who deserves something on his or her own."

You would think that, I suppose, but probably there are thousands of well-qualified inhabitants of that state who don't want anything to do with politics, and who can blame them? To be a politician means that to earn your way into office you not only have to compromise your principles along the way, but you also have to subject yourself to the indignity of a prolonged media strip search in which every cavity, no matter how irrelevant, is publicly probed and exposed. How many people would be willing to undergo what Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin, and George Bush have been put through?

No one is more adamant than I that our candidates need to be scrutinized, but the scrutiny needs to be fair, relevant and dignified. The combination of our obsession with titillation and gossip and a media that loves to feed it to us all but guarantees that a lot of decent, well-qualified people will avoid politics like picnickers backing away from a skunk. Thus, too often, we get what we deserve: a celebrity rather than competent, qualified public servant.

RLC