Historical Perspective

A reader at Andrew Sullivan's blog draws some interesting comparisons between George Bush, Abraham Lincoln, and other war-time presidents:

I believe that if you compare the conduct of the Iraq war by the Bush administration with the record of Lincoln during the Civil War and Roosevelt during World War II, the record will show that Bush is doing a better job than either Lincoln or Roosevelt.

Check out Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson, a history of the Civil War era. Lincoln faced continuous vilification by the Democrats and did not think until late in the campaign that he would win re-election. The Union military during the Civil War lost dozens of major battles and suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties due to incompetence and bad decisions going all the way up the chain of command to Lincoln.

Reading Battle Cry of Freedom, you realize nothing ever changes, and that Bush is doing better than Lincoln when the two are compared. The confederate raiders like Quantrill were as bad or worse than the insurgents operating today, and Lincoln's suddenly changing the reason for going to war, from saving the union to freeing the slaves, was as controversial and criticized as the decisions made by Bush. The critics in 1862-1864 ridiculed the idea that slaves could be made free men, even as critics today ridicule the idea that Arabs can have a modern democratic government.

Ku Klux Klan terrorists were active in the post Civil War south to such a large extent that President Grant, 1869-1877 kept large numbers of federal troops in the South and needed to conduct fairly large military campaigns against the Klan. When President Rutherford Hayes withdrew federal troops from the South as part of his deal with the southern states to win the presidency, the KKK was able to terrorize and keep black Americans deprived of their civil rights until the 1960s. Even though the remnants of the confederacy were still fighting 100 years after the civil war, Lincoln is not regarded as incompetent for failing to prevent the depradations committed by the KKK.

In World War II, the US marine corps suffered major casualties at Iwo Jima and Tarawa because of bad planning and leadership, on even simple matters of sending in reinforcements and pre-landing bombardment. Hundreds of army soldiers drowned in a D-day practice landing because their backpacks were too heavy. The Army suffered heavy casualties at Omaha beach on D-day because it was not scouted properly. The Army was undermanned at the battle of the Ardennes in 1944 because the USA deployed 100 fewer divisions than the planners said was necessary. The lines were stretched so thin because of the shortage of infantry that the Germans successfully broke thru during their 1944 winter offensive, Bradley and Montgomery gambled that the Germans would not attack in the Ardennes sector.

When the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe after WW II, Roosevelt (and Truman) were blamed for awhile for not preventing this in the aftermath of the war. In addition, communist governments took over in China, North Vietnam, and North Korea, as a result of the destruction of pre-existing dictatorships in Japan and Germany. Even though Roosevelt failed to plan against the communist takeovers in Eastern Europe, China, Korea, and Vietnam, he is not considered incompetent.

I would argue that by any fair, realistic comparison with past wars, the Bush administration has run the Iraq war with a minimum of American military and Iraq civilian casualties, and has accomplished as much as Lincoln or Roosevelt accomplished in their wars. The news media of the time never complained about America's firebombing of Japanese and German civilian populations.

Another apt comparison, perhaps, is with George Washington (See David McCullough's 1776) who as Commander of the Continental Army was vilified, abandoned, under-supported and unable to gain a victory over the British until the Battle of Trenton. Yet he has gone down in history as one of America's greatest wartime leaders.

The Skeptical Evolutionist

You might think that the following passage appeared in a creationist text like Of Pandas and People. It's certainly very much the same thing that creationists like Duane Gish and the late Henry Morris have been saying for decades:

We agree that very few potential offspring ever survive to reproduce and that populations do change through time, and that therefore natural selection is of critical importance to the evolutionary process. But this Darwinian claim to explain all of evolution is a popular half-truth whose lack of explicative power is compensated for only by the religious ferocity of its rhetoric.

Although random mutations influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss, alteration, and refinement. One mutation confers resistance to malaria but also makes happy blood cells into the deficient oxygen carriers of sickle cell anemics. Another converts a gorgeous newborn into a cystic fibrosis patient or a victim of early onset diabetes. One mutation causes a flighty red-eyed fruit fly to fail to take wing. Never, however, did that one mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear.

Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation. Then how do new species come into being? How do cauliflowers descend from tiny, wild Mediterranean cabbagelike plants, or pigs from wild boars?

This is not, however, the superstitious ravings of one of those benighted folk at the Institute for Creation Research. This was written by committed evolutionists Lyn Margulis and Dorian Sagan in 2003 (Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of the Species, pg. 29, Basic Books, 2003)

In other words, the classical mechanisms of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, genetic mutation and natural selection, in the minds of these writers, just aren't credible as primary engines of evolutionary change.

Evolutionists disagree on the rate of evolution and the mechanisms responsible for it. The only thing they agree on is that it happened, and, even though they don't know how it happened, they're convinced that no non-physical causes were involved. This is very odd. Given the degree of uncertainty about the major elements of the theory, why are evolution's proponents so adamant that naturalistic processes are solely responsible for it? Obviously a metaphysical bias for materialism or physicalism is driving their science, but, if so, on what grounds is pure physicalism preferable as an explanation to a partial physicalism that leaves room for intelligent agency?

Cobra II

A friend passes along a link to a fascinating interview at Democracy Now with the authors of Cobra II, a book on the lead-up to the war in Iraq written by General Bernard Trainor and journalist Michael Gordon. At one point in the interview General Trainor says:

Well, I think you have to step back and look at the situation as it existed. The international community, all the intelligence agencies were all convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And this administration saw that as a threat that required preemptive action, because -- not that Saddam Hussein was going to pop a nuclear weapon or chemical weapon here in the United States -- but he saw that after 9/11, the threat of amorphous terrorism, with terrorists getting chemical, biological weapons and ultimately nuclear weapons without any national fingerprint on it. And how do you deal with something like that?

So the policy was, we have legitimate right to defend the United States. We have the responsibility to defend the United States. And in this instance, we have to preempt the Iraqis from providing the wherewithal to terrorists. And so, that convinced a lot of people. It convinced the Congress. And it convinced the average man on the street that this was something that should be done. Obviously, there were certain people that did not agree. But the fact is, the Congress supported the whole thing.

The Secretary of State's position wasn't quite as crude as you describe it, as waiting for a second election. He wanted to give diplomacy a chance. It wasn't that he was opposed to going into Iraq. It was a matter of timing. And that's what he was insisting on. See if we can't build up a coalition, whereas the troika (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld)felt that they could pretty much act independently and a coalition would follow after the defeat of Saddam Hussein.

The whole interview is interesting because Gordon and Trainor, though not trying to defend the administration, really absolve it of the charge that they deliberately mislead this country into war.

Big Expensive Ad

The universe of good beer advertisements is not large, but this one is a hoot. Be sure to turn on the sound. Music lovers will appreciate the use of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip.

The White House's Biggest Failure

Tim Hames of the Times Online has an article which he closes with this trenchant observation:

The tragedy of what went wrong in Iraq, therefore, is that the failure to locate WMD has made action against Iran or North Korea far harder to advance to Western public opinion. This would have been true even if Iraq, post invasion, was now a land of peace and plenty.

The final tragedy is that while many will prosper within Iraq over the next three years, the price of inept peacetime policies between 2003 and 2005 is that there will be no more Iraqs in the foreseeable future. To that extent, the Stop the War coalition, assisted, ironically, by the Pentagon, will be satisfied.

And what does this mean in practice? It means no more sadistic totalitarian dictators removed from office. It means no more free and fair elections for those who have never had them. It means no more openings for civic and religious liberty. It means no more chances of a cultural reawakening. Democracy might well progress in parts of the Middle East but, alas, mostly in the states that were most benign to begin with. There is little reason to suppose that the ruling elites in Damascus, Tehran or Tripoli have the cause for fear that they must have briefly felt three years ago. Nor have the people under their yoke any reason for optimism that they might yet escape servitude.

It has become fashionable in certain American neo-conservative circles to declare that Iraq has been "lost" and to wash their hands of the enterprise. Personally, I have never been part of that fraternity. It seems to me that their logic is dubious. Iraq has not been "lost", there is still a reasonable chance that by the actual seventh anniversary of the incursion the vast majority of people there will be more content than at any time in their history. It is the enslaved Middle East beyond Iraq that has been "lost" and thus remains an intense threat to our security.

Hames is almost certainly correct that the left has won a strategic victory in Iraq. It's a case of having lost the battle and won the war. They were unable to prevent the Iraq invasion, but by souring Americans on that undertaking they have almost guaranteed that whatever circumstances obtain in Iran or North Korea, the chances of military action in those climes are much diminished.

The administration must also be assigned some responsibility for making the left's victory an easy win, not because of their failed pre-war intelligence about WMD, because that appears to have been a universal mistake - even Saddam's top military officers were shocked to learn that they had no such weapons in their arsenal - but because the post-invasion phase of the war has been handled so badly.

Even this wouldn't have been too corrosive of American public support, though, if the administration had made a consistent, competent, articulate effort to keep the goals, necessity, and progress of the effort in Iraq in the public mind. This they haven't done, and their failure has contributed to the public perception of a land in hopeless chaos. The administration has allowed an antagonistic media to establish the psychological "wallpaper," as it were, for all thinking and public discussion on Iraq.

This is, in my mind, at least, the Bush administration's biggest failure. They forfeited this battle and ceded the field to the left when it would have been easy to keep fighting, and the consequences of their forfeiture will ripple through American foreign policy for decades.

Balancing the Budget

Andrew Sullivan has some pretty good ideas about what to do about the budget. Since they are good ideas they'll never be acted upon by congress, but they should be, or at least most of them should be:

Kevin Drum has challenged me to detail how I'd balance budgets while keeping Bush's tax cuts. (A small clarification: I'd keep the estate tax as it once was; and I'd add a buck to the gas tax pronto.) I'd prefer experts like Brian Riedl or Veronique de Rugy to propose detailed cuts. But my back-of-the-envelope wish-list is that I'd repeal the Medicare drug entitlement, abolish ear-marks, institute a line-item veto, pass a balanced budget amendment, means-test social security benefits, index them to prices rather than wages, extend the retirement age to 72 (and have it regularly extended as life-spans lengthen), abolish agricultural subsidies, end corporate welfare, legalize marijuana and tax it, and eliminate all tax loopholes and deductions, including the mortgage deduction, (I'd keep the charitable deduction).

For good measure, I'd get rid of the NEA and the Education Department. I'm not an economist, so I do not know whether this would do the trick entirely, and I'm open to debate on any of the particulars. But you get my drift. Maybe someone out there could do the math. I'm also fascinated by Charles Murray's new proposal to abolish the entire welfare state and replace it with with cash grants to individuals. I look forward to conservatives continuing to insist I'm a lefty. I also look forward to ferocious opposition from the left. But the bottom line is that the middle class and the prosperous elderly are far too pampered by government in this country. They need to get rid of their debilitating and unaffordable dependency.

The gas tax might not be such a good idea since it'd be highly inflationary, raising the cost of everything we buy, and the estate tax is unjust should be largely done away with. Other than that, Sullivan's proposals sound very attractive. The NEA and Education Departments are as useless as they are costly, and it is simply insane that the president doesn't have a line-item veto.

In any event, these ideas have as much chance of going anywhere as Dick Cheney has of winning the Democratic party's nomination in 2008.

Legacy in the Balance

Like a flock of disoriented geese, President Bush's approval numbers have been heading south this spring, but the Democrats shouldn't take too much solace from the fact. The primary reason for his drop into the mid-thirties is disaffection among Republicans and other conservatives fed up with a White House that refuses to cut spending or stop the flood of illegals pouring across our borders. Republican outrage at the Dubai port deal was really a consequence of the frustration many feel at Bush's apparent insoucience concerning secure borders. The failure of Republicans to get behind his Social Security reforms last year was the fruit of having been pressured against their better judgment to earlier support the administration's profligate medicare bill.

Fiscal conservatives are not pleased that Bush is passing out money as though it were beads at Mardi Gras, and they want it stopped. Neither are they pleased that Mexicans continue to breach our borders like tourists pouring through the turnstiles when Disney World opens for the day.

So why isn't this necessarily good news for Democrats? Two reasons: First is that conservative voters are not likely to hold their legislators responsible for Bush's perceived shortcomings in the November election. Republicans are not going to punish their congressmen because of their pique with Bush. Congressional candidates who run on fiscally and socially conservative principles will get plenty of support from the base.

The second reason is the Harriet Miers syndrome. Conservatives were outraged when Bush nominated Miers to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, but all was quickly forgiven when he recovered his balance with Samuel Alito. Republicans want to like George Bush. If he changes course and adds to his sterling record on tax cuts, judgeships, and the GWOT, by kicking the immigration and spending monkeys off his back, his numbers will bounce right back up to the mid- to upper-forties.

This is a very big "if," however, and it's doubtful that Bush has any inclination to reform. His legacy hangs in the balance, though, so we'll see.

Islamic Tolerance

The spirit of the Taliban still lives in Afghanistan:

An Afghan man who recently admitted he converted to Christianity faces the death penalty under the country's strict Islamic legal system. The trial is a critical test of Afghanistan's new constitution and democratic government. The case is attracting widespread attention in Afghanistan, where local media are closely monitoring the landmark proceedings.

Abdul Rahman, 40, was arrested last month, accused of converting to Christianity.

Under Afghanistan's new constitution, minority religious rights are protected but Muslims are still subject to strict Islamic laws. And so, officially, Muslim-born Rahman is charged with rejecting Islam and not for practicing Christianity.

Appearing in court earlier this week Rahman insisted he should not be considered an infidel, but admitted he is a Christian. He says he still believes in the almighty Allah, but cannot say for sure who God really is. "I am," he says, "a Christian and I believe in Jesus Christ."

Rahman reportedly converted more than 16 years ago after spending time working in Germany. Officials say his family, who remain observant Muslims, turned him over to the authorities.

On Thursday the prosecution told the court Rahman has rejected numerous offers to embrace Islam. Prosecuting attorney Abdul Wasi told the judge that the punishment should fit the crime.

He says Rahman is a traitor to Islam and is like a cancer inside Afghanistan. Under Islamic law and under the Afghan constitution, he says, the defendant should be executed. The court has ordered a delay in the proceedings to give Rahman time to hire an attorney.

Under Afghan law, once a verdict is given, the case can be appealed twice to higher courts. This is the first case in which the defendant has admitted to converting and is refusing to back down, even while facing the death penalty.

If convicted, the case could ultimately force President Hamid Karzai's direct intervention. The president would have to sign the papers authorizing Rahman's execution, a move that could jeopardize Mr. Karzai's standing with human rights groups and Western governments.

So far, President Karzai has not commented on the case. But political analysts here in Kabul say he will be under significant pressure from the country's hard-line religious groups to make an example of Rahman.

What kind of religion is it that has to threaten people with death if they leave it? It reminds us of the old East Germany of the 1960s and 1970s whose soldiers would shoot fellow citizens who sought to flee across the Berlin wall to the West. East Germany was a sick, dysfunctional society. A religion that kills those who seek to flee to other faiths is equally sick and dysfunctional.

Michelle Malkin has links and phone numbers for the Afghanistan embassy for those who wish to call on behalf of Abdul Rahman. We urge all our readers to call and entreat the Afghan government to spare this man's life and, for heaven's sake, set him free.

Taking a Bite Out of Crime

How to reduce criminal recidivism:

A man who was attacked by would-be robbers at the upscale Village of Cross Keys shopping center in North Baltimore Friday afternoon grabbed his own gun and fatally shot one of the assailants in a parking lot, city police said.

Investigators believe that the man who opened fire just before 2 p.m. might have been on his way to a bank when he was attacked by three men who jumped out of a white car in front of a Williams-Sonoma store.

During the brawl, the man who had been attacked was able to pull away to retrieve a handgun concealed inside his Honda Accord, and then he fatally shot one of the attackers, said Agent Donny Moses, a police spokesman.

Bullets shattered windows of his car. The other two assailants hopped back inside their car and sped off with a fourth man driving, Moses said. The four men did not appear to be armed, police said.

Police did not release the name of the man who was attacked. But several employees at the center and a high-ranking police official with knowledge of the investigation described him as a gas station owner in his 50s who regularly makes deposits at the Columbia Bank and who might have been targeted.

The shooting victim, whom police had not identified Friday night, was taken to Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Moses said. Within 30 minutes of the shooting, Moses said, police had found the white vehicle used by the attackers, abandoned at Cold Spring Lane and Greenspring Avenue. The men were being sought Friday night.

Moses said the man who was attacked had a permit for the gun and would probably not face criminal charges. The city state's attorney's office reviews fatal shootings.

There's not much doubt that the gas station owner has insured that at least one thug won't be let back out onto the streets to bludgeon another business owner. There's more on this story at the link.

Why the Fizzle?

If it's true that the war's popularity has plummeted along with Bush's approval ratings then why did the anti-war protests marking the third anniversary of the war's onset pretty much fizzle in the U.S. and Europe Saturday?

There are several possible answers, among which three seem most likely:

1) Americans are not being killed, maimed, or personally inconvenienced at rates that would generate deep and serious opposition to the war.

2) The war's opponents offer no credible alternatives to continuing the effort to build a democracy in Iraq.

3) There's no draft.

All three of these are no doubt important factors, but perhaps the most important is that the premise in the first sentence above is simply incorrect. Americans will back the war as long as they think there's a chance it'll succeed, and although they'll tell pollsters that they're tired of the war and that it's time to bring our troops home, it's doubtful that most Americans will really feel strongly about that until it becomes clear that Iraq is a lost cause. The media is trying to portray it that way, of course, and the Democrats are telling us it is every chance they get, but it appears that the majority of American people are not yet convinced of it.

This is remarkable, actually, because the administration's efforts at winning the American people's support for their undertaking in Iraq has been little better than absolutely pathetic. Indeed, were this the late sixties or early seventies Washington would be brimful with protestors, but for the reasons mentioned above, it's not.

There is one other way things are different today: In 1970 there was no alternative media. Once the big three television networks and the major newspapers turned against the Vietnam war, the government had few resources with which to make the case for sticking it out. Today, talk radio and the blogosphere are potent alternatives to the miasma of defeatism that pervades liberalism and the Democratic party. Because of the influence of talk radio and the internet, the prophets of doom, defeat, and dissimulation are gaining very little traction, and, in fact, are more likely to look like fools and buffoons than like oracles. Witness, in this regard, the fate of lefties such as Dan Rather, Michael Moore, and Cindy Sheehan.

The American people being what they are, this could all change in a trice, but as of now it just doesn't look like the left has the muscle, either political or intellectual, to force us out of Iraq. Nineteen seventy, after all, was a long time ago.

The Yale Taliban

The fireworks over Yale's acceptance of a former Taliban official into its student body continue unabated, as well they should. John Fund brings us up to date on the latest details.

When one considers all that the Taliban stands for in terms of political and religious oppression and mass murder, the tyrannization of women, the extermination of homosexuals, and its hostility to every other allegedly liberal value, we cannot imagine why Yale would accept onto their campus an unrepentant representative of that worldview. The Taliban Yalie, by the way, possesses no more than a fourth grade education. To make room for this cretin, Yale had to deny some far more deserving student a slot.

We wonder why all those who were so incensed about the U.A.E. buying a toe-hold in the U.S. through the ports deal are not equally incensed over Yale's perfidious behavior. Perhaps Yale alumni all across the country will be sufficiently outraged at their alma mater's incomprehensible stupidity to withhold future financial support from this once great institution.

Starboard Side Lunacy

Evidently the lunatic fringe is a big tent. Even some erstwhile respectable commentators on the right have wandered under its canopy. Here, for example, is former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and former contributing editor at National Review Paul Craig Roberts waxing delusional about how George Bush will fabricate a pretext to attack Iran with nuclear weapons:

[A] low yield, perhaps tactical, nuclear weapon will be exploded some distance out from a U.S. port. Death and destruction will be minimized, but fear and hysteria will be maximized. Americans will be told that the ship bearing the weapon was discovered and intercepted just in time, thanks to Bush's illegal spying program, and that Iran is to blame. A more powerful wave of fear and outrage will again bind the American people to Bush, and the U.S. media will not report the rest of the world's doubts of the explanation.

There's more evidence of Roberts' slide into nuttery at the link. It's very sad.

Nelson v. Sarkar

Intelligent Design advocate Paul Nelson discusses his recent debate with Sahotra Sarkar on the merits of ID at UT-Austin here. Sounds like they had fun.

Sexual Anarchy

In one of the earliest posts in our nearly two year history here at Viewpoint we argued that gay marriage was greasing the tracks for polygamous marriage and that group marriages would follow hard after. Now comes this report in Newsweek:

Marlyne Hammon, who's involved in a polygamous relationship, is a founding member of the Centennial Park Action Committee, a group that lobbies for decriminalization of the practice. She's among a new wave of polygamy activists emerging in the wake of the gay-marriage movement-just as a federal lawsuit challenging anti-polygamy laws makes its way through the courts and a new show about polygamy debuts on HBO. "Polygamy rights is the next civil-rights battle," says Mark Henkel, who, as founder of the Christian evangelical polygamy organization TruthBearer.org, is at the forefront of the movement. His argument: if Heather can have two mommies, she should also be able to have two mommies and a daddy. Henkel and Hammon have been joined by other activist groups like Principle Voices, a Utah-based group run by wives from polygamous marriages. Activists point to Canada, where, in January, a report commissioned by the Justice Department recommended decriminalizing polygamy.

As we observed in that post almost two years ago, if our courts and legislatures allow efforts like these to go forward there will soon be no place to draw a line, even if anyone should want to. Once the gender of those entering into marriage no longer matters neither will their number. When neither gender nor number matters there will be no logical rationale for proscribing any form of union whatsoever, certainly there will be no compelling argument against group or incestuous marriage nor will there be much stomach for fighting to preserve laws prohibiting sexual relationships between adults and consenting minors.

We are on the cusp of a societal revolution that will usher in a kind of sexual anarchy, and it's doubtful that marriage as it has been known throughout our history will survive the turbulence.

Bush's selection of John Roberts and Samuel Alito is looking better all the time, but, of course, we're sure Al Gore or John Kerry would have made equally wise choices for the bench.

Thought For Today

I got an email from a friend this week and thought I would pass it on to our readers.

Subject: ARE YOU JESUS?

A few years ago a group of salesmen went to a regional sales convention in Chicago. They had assured their wives that they would be home in plenty of time for Friday night's dinner. In their rush, with tickets and briefcases, one of these salesmen inadvertently kicked over a table which held a display of apples. Apples flew everywhere. Without stopping or looking back, they all managed to reach the plane in time for their nearly missed boarding.

ALL BUT ONE !!!

He paused, took a deep breath, got in touch with his feelings, and experienced a twinge of compassion for the girl whose apple stand had been overturned. He told his buddies to go on without him, waved good-bye, told one of them to call his wife when they arrived at their home destination and explain his taking a later flight. Then he returned to the terminal where the apples were all over the terminal floor.

He was glad he did. The 16 year old girl was totally blind! She was softly crying, tears running down her cheeks in frustration, and at the same time helplessly groping for her spilled produce as the crowd swirled about her, no one stopping and no one to care for her plight. The salesman knelt on the floor with her, gathered up the apples, put them back on the table and helped organize her display.

As he did this, he noticed that many of them had become battered and bruised; these he set aside in another basket. When he had finished, he pulled out his wallet and said to the girl, "Here, please take this $40 for the damage we did. Are you okay?" She nodded through her tears. He continued on with, "I hope we didn't spoil your day too badly."

As the salesman started to walk away, the bewildered blind girl called out to him, "Mister...." He paused and turned to look back into those blind eyes. She continued, "Are you Jesus?"

He stopped in mid-stride, and he wondered. Then slowly he made his way to catch the later flight with that question burning and bouncing about in his soul: "Are you Jesus?"

Do people mistake you for Jesus? That's our destiny, is it not? To be so much like Jesus that people cannot tell the difference as we live and interact with a world that is blind to His love, life and grace. If we claim to know Him, we should live, walk and act as He would. Knowing Him is more than simply quoting Scripture and going to church. It's actually living the Word as life unfolds day to day.

You are the apple of His eye even though we, too, have been bruised by a fall. He stopped what He was doing and picked you and me up on a hill called Calvary and paid in full for our damaged fruit.

Let us live like we are worth the price He paid.

Tough Line of Work

How stupid are these knuckleheads? They're probably asking themselves that same question right now. With all the cruise ships and freighters out there just waiting to be pirated they decide to tangle with two U.S. warships. Dumb, dumb, dumb -- but gratifying:

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (March 18) - Two U.S. Navy warships exchanged gunfire with suspected pirates Saturday off the coast of Somalia, and one suspect was killed and five others were wounded, the navy said. Seven other suspects were taken into custody after the early-morning shootout, said Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Brown, spokesman for the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet.

No sailors were wounded in the battle, which occurred at about 5:40 a.m. local time, approximately 25 nautical miles off the Somali coast in international waters.

The battle started after the USS Cape St. George and USS Gonzalez, which were patrolling as part of a Dutch-led task force, spotted a 30-foot fishing boat towing smaller skiffs and prepared to board and inspect the vessels.

The suspected pirates were holding what appeared to be rocket-propelled grenade launchers, the navy said. When the suspects began shooting, naval gunners returned fire with mounted machine guns, killing one man and igniting a fire on the vessel.

Three suspects were seriously wounded and being treated on one of the Navy ships, Brown told The Associated Press. A Dutch Navy medical team was en route. The suspects' nationalities were unknown.

The Navy boarding teams confiscated an RPG launcher and automatic weapons, the statement said.

The Cape St. George, a guided-missile cruiser, and Gonzalez, a guided-missile destroyer, were conducting maritime security operations in the area. They are based in Norfolk, Va.

The International Maritime Organization has warned ships to stay away from the Somali coast because of pirate attacks, which surged to 35 last year from two in 2004.

On March 15, the U.N. Security Council encouraged naval forces operating off Somalia to take action against suspected piracy. Pirate attacks against aid ships have hindered U.N. efforts to provide relief to the victims of a severe drought in the area.

The pirate raids are part of the anarchy wracking Somalia, which has had no effective government since 1991, when warlords ousted a dictatorship and then turned on each other.

Looks like piracy suddenly got to be a tough business. We expect that the "surge" mentioned three paragraphs above will dramatically reverse direction in 2006.

The Instantaneous Universe

Physicists have discovered the first solid evidence of what's called "cosmic inflation":

Physicists say they now have the smoking gun that shows the universe went through extremely rapid expansion in the moments after the big bang, growing from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space in less than a trillion-trillionth of a second.

Think about that for a moment. The universe, in less time than we can possibly imagine, went from essentially nothing to the size of a marble, and then, in a trillionth, trillionth of a second, it grew at a speed far faster than the speed of light to a size larger than what we can observe today. In other words, before a billionth of a second had passed in the creation of the universe, all of its forces, laws, parameters, and constants had been fixed. All the matter that would eventually precipitate out from the primordial energy existed potentially.

There were no stars or galaxies yet, of course, but these are relatively minor details in the creation narrative. All the foundational necessities, all the heavy lifting, was done in far less than an instant. The rest was just the pretty colors of a fireworks rocket. The real work was building the rocket. And this was done ... instantly. If a human had been around to see it happen it would have looked as if the essentials of the universe all came into existence instantaneously.

It would seem as if God said, "Let there be a cosmos," and there was a cosmos.

Nebular "DNA"

Click on this link and look at the photo. If you like awe-inspiring astronomical phenomena you're sure to like this.

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the tip.

Horserace in PA

Here's some remarkable political news:

The latest poll of Pennsylvania voters shows that Republican Lynn Swann is tied with incumbent Democatic Gov. Ed Rendell.

Strategic Vision, LLC, an Atlanta-headquartered public relations and public affairs agency announced the results of a three-day poll of 1,200 likely voters in Pennsylvania on various political issues. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

In a match-up between Governor Rendell and Republican Lynn Swann, the results were Rendell 44 percent; Swann 44 percent; and 2 percent went to "other candidate," with 10 percent undecided.

Just a few short weeks ago Swann was trailing Rendell by about twenty points. If Swann pulls this off, if a conservative, black Republican beats a white, liberal, Democrat incumbent, it could portend a mass exodus of blacks from the Democrat party, at least in Pennsylvania. Or is that just wishful thinking?

Templeton Prize Winner

This year's winner of the Templeton Prize, an award worth about $1.4 million, has been given to astronomer John Barrow whose work on the Anthropic Principle has done so much to convince people that the universe is not merely a grand accident. The Prize was founded in 1972 by philanthropist and global financial pioneer Sir John Templeton and is given annually to a living person to encourage and honor the advancement of knowledge in spiritual matters. It's the world's best known religion prize and the largest annual monetary prize of any kind given to an individual.

In establishing the prize's monetary value, Sir John stipulated that it always be worth more than the Nobel Prizes as a way to underscore his belief that research and advances in spiritual discoveries can be quantifiably more significant than work done in the disciplines recognized by the Nobels.

For more on Barrow and the Templeton go here.

Our Government At Work

That's probably an oxymoron. Kind of like "non-essential government workers" but I digress.

From the link

The Senate voted Thursday to allow the national debt to swell to nearly $9 trillion, preventing a first-ever default on U.S. Treasury notes.

The bill passed by a 52-48 vote. The increase to $9 trillion represents about $30,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States. The bill now goes to President Bush for his signature.

There are several notable observations here.

As for the $781 billion increase in the debt limit, Grassley said: "It is necessary to preserve the full faith and credit of the federal government."

Hah! What faith and credit? The debt is already more than can ever be paid unless the government inflates our currency into oblivion to pay it off with even more worthless dollars. More on this thought in a moment. Maybe that's one reason the rest of the world is looking to alternatives to the U.S. dollar like the Euro.

And...

Before approving the bill, Republicans rejected by a 55-44 vote an amendment by Max Baucus, D-Mont., to mandate a Treasury study on the economic consequences of foreigners holding an increasing portion of the U.S. debt.

These macaroons don't even care what the consequences are of foreign countries holding ever increasing amounts of U.S. debt. What's with that?

And here's a good one...

Treasury Secretary John Snow authorized the government to use the $15 billion available in the exchange stabilization fund on March 3 and issued a ``debt issuance suspension period'' to temporarily stop investments in the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund. The Treasury also redeemed some of the fund's current investments.

In other words the government raided the retirement accounts of the government workers and replaced it with IOUs just like they did with Social Security. Those accounts belonged to the employees of the government but they have just been hijacked.

This brings up an interesting thought. The government has demonstrated time and again that it will raid accounts for funds wherever it can find them and replace them with meaningless IOUs. Social Security, and now government employee retirement accounts do not appear to be off limits. I wonder when they will set their sights on IRAs.

There are only two ways any government debt can be paid back. The traditional way is for the GDP of the country to raise creating wealth to meet the obligation. The other way is to monetize the debt simply by printing currency to cover it. I wonder if this has anything to do with the Fed's plan to discontinue reporting M3 later this month.

Given the current state of affairs regarding the U.S. economy the first option isn't likely. The national debt crossed the $1 trillion mark in 1981 under President Ronald Reagan and grew to $3.2 trillion during the presidency of George H.W. Bush. During the administration of Bill Clinton, it hit $5.5 trillion, but government surpluses enabled Congress to pay down some of the debt. Since President George W. Bush has been in office, the figure has climbed from $5.6 trillion to the new $9 trillion mark.

Here's the take home message dear reader. Since 1981 our economy has obviously not grown sufficiently to cover its borrowing. If it had, we wouldn't be looking at a $9 trillion deficit. Why would any thinking person believe the trend is going to change now?

The debt is going parabolic and the only recourse will be to print the fiat dollars to pay it down. The result will be a U.S. dollar that is essentially worthless and given the rate at which the debt is accelerating, it won't be long before this happens.

There's only one way Americans can protect themselves from incompetent government bureaurocrats determined to destroy America...

Got gold?

Claude Allen

Ann Coulter skewers the New York Times for racial gerrymandering -- in the articles it chooses to run on its front page. Although she shines a light on the Times' own racial and ideological quirks, the real point of her piece is to sympathetically highlight the character of Claude Allen:

I guess the only way we'll ever find out how many blacks have worked in the Bush administration is to wait for them to get in trouble someday so we can read the breathless, triumphant stories on the front page of the New York Times about a black Republican scofflaw. It's amazing that anyone has ever heard of Condoleezza Rice -- she's never even been arrested for jaywalking.

Claude Allen, whom I first heard of this week, was a top adviser to President Bush for more than 4 1/2 years. Soon after Bush was elected in 2000, he made Allen the No. 2 official at the Department of Health and Human Services. Allen later became Bush's domestic policy adviser, meeting with the president several times a week.

In 2003, Bush nominated Allen to a federal judgeship on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals -- which nomination was then blocked by the party that wouldn't exist without black votes. Deploying their usual strategy against black Republicans, Democrats raised questions about Allen's "legal credentials": Democrat-ese for "He's black, so he's probably not very smart." Allen went to Duke Law School, where he was remembered fondly by law professor Walter Dellinger, later Clinton's solicitor general.

During the entire time this talented, intelligent, magnificently conservative black man held high positions in the Bush administration, he was mentioned in only 11 articles in The New York Times. (A small part of Times Executive Editor Bill Keller dies every time the paper is forced to mention any black top officials in the Bush administration. It might remind people that the most highly placed black in the Clinton administration was his secretary, Betty Currie.)

It's worth reading the rest of it.

As GM Goes...

so goes America. If GM was a horse it would be shot to put it out of its misery.

From the link:

General Motors Corp. shares sank more than 3 percent Friday after the world's largest automaker increased its previously-reported loss for 2005 by $2 billion to reflect fresh estimates of the costs of bailing out its former parts-making unit and revamping its loss-riddled North American operations.

How in the world can any U.S. company compete when burdened with such buffoonery as this? The answer is simple. It can't and it won't.

The only question I have is why anyone would continue to own shares in a company who's future has no future. And sadly, GM's future is a foreshadowing of America's future.

Wake up America! The term globalization is synonymous with the destruction of America. Our government is not only allowing it to happen, they are making it happen.

Barren Future

Liberalism has no future. This article in USA Today explains why:

Childlessness and small families are increasingly the norm today among progressive secularists. As a consequence, an increasing share of all children born into the world are descended from a share of the population whose conservative values have led them to raise large families.

Today, fertility correlates strongly with a wide range of political, cultural and religious attitudes. In the USA, for example, 47% of people who attend church weekly say their ideal family size is three or more children. By contrast, 27% of those who seldom attend church want that many kids.

In Utah, where more than two-thirds of residents are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 92 children are born each year for every 1,000 women, the highest fertility rate in the nation. By contrast Vermont - the first to embrace gay unions - has the nation's lowest rate, producing 51 children per 1,000 women.

Similarly, in Europe today, the people least likely to have children are those most likely to hold progressive views of the world. For instance, do you distrust the army and other institutions and are you prone to demonstrate against them? Then, according to polling data assembled by demographers Ron Lesthaeghe and Johan Surkyn, you are less likely to be married and have kids or ever to get married and have kids. Do you find soft drugs, homosexuality and euthanasia acceptable? Do you seldom, if ever, attend church? Europeans who answer affirmatively to such questions are far more likely to live alone or be in childless, cohabiting unions than are those who answer negatively.

This correlation between secularism, individualism and low fertility portends a vast change in modern societies. In the USA, for example, nearly 20% of women born in the late 1950s are reaching the end of their reproductive lives without having children. The greatly expanded childless segment of contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and '70s, will leave no genetic legacy. Nor will their emotional or psychological influence on the next generation compare with that of people who did raise children.

Meanwhile, single-child families are prone to extinction. A single child replaces one of his or her parents, but not both. Consequently, a segment of society in which single-child families are the norm will decline in population by at least 50% per generation and quite quickly disappear. In the USA, the 17.4% of baby boomer women who had one child account for a mere 9.2% of kids produced by their generation. But among children of the baby boom, nearly a quarter descend from the mere 10% of baby boomer women who had four or more kids.

This dynamic helps explain the gradual drift of American culture toward religious fundamentalism and social conservatism. Among states that voted for President Bush in 2004, the average fertility rate is more than 11% higher than the rate of states for Sen. John Kerry.

So, liberal families are no more fecund than liberal ideas. How fitting. There's much more interesting information on the consequences of the lack of fruitfulness among liberals at the link.

World War III

Haim Harari gave a speech in 2004 on the current conflict with Islamism that is one of the best analyses of this struggle I've seen. He states that the battle, contrary to what many people think, is not about Israel:

Yes, there is a 100 year-old Israeli-Arab conflict, but it is not where the main show is.

The millions who died in the Iran-Iraq war had nothing to do with Israel.

The mass murder happening right now in Sudan, where the Arab Moslem regime is massacring its black Christian citizens, has nothing to do with Israel.

The frequent reports from Algeria about the murders of hundreds of civilian in one village or another by other Algerians have nothing to do with Israel.

Saddam Hussein did not invade Kuwait, endangered Saudi Arabia and butcher his own people because of Israel.

Egypt did not use poison gas against Yemen in the 60's because of Israel.

Assad the Father did not kill tens of thousands of his own citizens in one week in El Hamma in Syria because of Israel.

The Taliban control of Afghanistan and the civil war there had nothing to do with Israel.

The Libyan blowing up of the Pan-Am flight had nothing to do with Israel, and I could go on and on and on.

The root of the trouble is that this entire Moslem region is totally dysfunctional, by any standard of the word, and would have been so even if Israel had joined the Arab league and an independent Palestine had existed for 100 years.

Harari goes on to elaborate upon the dysfunctionality of the Arab world:

The 22 member countries of the Arab league, from Mauritania to the Gulf States, have a total population of 300 millions, larger than the US and almost as large as the EU before its expansion.

They have a land area larger than either the US or all of Europe.

These 22 countries, with all their oil and natural resources, have a combined GDP smaller than that of Netherlands plus Belgium and equal to half of the GDP of California alone.

Within this meager GDP, the gaps between rich and poor are beyond belief and too many of the rich made their money not by succeeding in business, but by being corrupt rulers.

The social status of women is far below what it was in the Western World 150 years ago.

Human rights are below any reasonable standard, in spite of the grotesque fact that Libya was elected Chair of the UN Human Rights commission.

According to a report prepared by a committee of Arab intellectuals and published under the auspices of the U.N., the number of books translated by the entire Arab world is much smaller than what little Greece alone translates.

The total number of scientific publications of 300 million Arabs is less than that of 6 million Israelis.

Birth rates in the region are very high, increasing the poverty, the social gaps and the cultural decline.

And all of this is happening in a region, which only 30 years ago, was believed to be the next wealthy part of the world, and in a Moslem area, which developed, at some point in history, one of the most advanced cultures in the world.

It is fair to say that this creates an unprecedented breeding ground for cruel dictators, terror networks, fanaticism, incitement, suicide murders and general decline. It is also a fact that almost everybody in the region blames this situation on the United States, on Israel, on Western Civilization, on Judaism and Christianity, on anyone and anything, except themselves.

Hariri argues that we are in the midst of World War III and that much of the world, especially Europe (and the American left, we might add), seems unaware of the fact.

There are four pillars supporting and sustaining this war against civilization, each of which Hariri explains in considerable and engrossing detail: Suicide murder, lies, money, and utter lawlessness. The article is a little long but well worth the time it takes to read.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Eight years ago I wrote a piece for the local paper on the significance of St. Patrick, and I thought I'd share it with you on the eve of this year's observance:

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, will soon be celebrating their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day. We are indebted to Thomas Cahill, and his best-selling book How the Irish Saved Civilization, for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating.

As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by doing so, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 A.D., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later.

Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland, where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the gospel and abolish slavery. Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D., and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages. Throughout the continent unwashed, illiterate hordes descended upon the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt, and the literary heritage of the classical world went up in smoke or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the efforts of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts, such as the incomparable Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin.

Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, Irish Christians applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on. For a century after the fall of Rome, monks sequestered themselves away in cold, damp, cramped mud and stone huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans.

Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be ready once again to receive them. These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed.

Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges. Clutching their precious books to their hearts, they sailed to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write and make books of their own.

Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Muslim incursions that arrived a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilizations germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the goths and the vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of matter.

From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational mind and was thus not capricious, random or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish. A legacy from Patrick. It is worth pondering on this St. Patrick's Day what the world would be like today had it not been for the Irish thirteen centuries ago.

Buiochuas le Dia ar son nan Gaeil! (Thank God for the Irish), and happy St. Patrick's Day.

A Reprieve?

According to this article, the launch of the Iranian oil bourse has been postponed.

It looks like we might have to wait and see how this unfolds.

Axis of Evil Update

Good news:

Iran's clerical and business establishments, deeply concerned by what they see as reckless spending and needlessly aggressive foreign policies, are increasingly turning against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Within this context, many see the president's long-running confrontation with the United States and Europe over Tehran's nuclear program as an attempt to demonize the West and distract the Iranian public from pressing domestic problems.

"His appeal was to those for whom class discrimination is important, and his simple lifestyle gave an air of credibility to his claims," said Nasser Hadian, a political analyst at Tehran University who attended high school with Mr. Ahmadinejad. Mr. Hadian predicted that senior Iranian clerics would continue to support Mr. Ahmadinejad -- or at least not move against him -- for about a year because of that popular support. But privately, he said, they feel he is isolating Iran internationally and putting its economy at risk. Also at the back of their minds is the fear that his anti-corruption drive ultimately threatens their own considerable privileges.

The value of Tehran's stock market had fallen by $10 billion under Mr. Ahmadinejad as of February, the Los Angeles Times reported. Other recent Western news reports say that the nation's vibrant real-estate market has withered and that capital outflows are increasing. Mr. Ahmadinejad's spending has pushed the inflation rate to an estimated 13.5 percent, and several estimates say it could go as high as 30 percent this year. Economic analysts note that inflation will be felt most acutely by the poor, undermining the president's support among his most important constituency.

Mr. Ahmadinejad's detractors say the broad coalition against him is attracting many of the regime's powerful personalities and may include even the supreme leader himself, despite his superficial statements in support of the president. They point to a recent decree by Ayatollah Khamenei giving the Expediency Council, headed by former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, oversight of the presidency. The clerical establishment has close ties with the capitalist class and is said to be appalled at the rapid slide of the economy since Mr. Ahmadinejad's inauguration. The clerics are also thought to be deeply apprehensive about the president's aggressive foreign policy.

Mr. Ghaninejad said that by confronting Iran over its nuclear program, the West was in fact throwing a lifeline to Mr. Ahmadinejad. "If they keep piling on the pressure, Ahmadinejad will become a national hero," the newspaper editor said. "Let the Iranians deal with him. If you leave him alone, he will become a bankrupt politician within a year. With greater pressure, only the extremists will benefit."

Bad news:

North Korea has the right to launch a pre-emptive attack against U.S.-backed South Korean forces because the two Koreas are technically still at war, the communist state's official media said on Tuesday. The comments came as North Korea shows its displeasure with annual joint South Korean-U.S. military exercises, which Pyongyang has said are a preparation for an invasion of its territory.

A spokesman for the North's Korea People's Army (KPA) said distrust is high between the United States and North Korea, and Pyongyang "will never remain a passive onlooker to the U.S. pre-emptive attack on the DPRK," its official news agency reported. DPRK is short for North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

"The KPA side is of the view that a pre-emptive attack is not (the) monopoly of the U.S. and the DPRK, too, has the right to pre-empt an attack as the most effective and positive act for self-defense in the light of the hard reality that the DPRK and the U.S. sides are still technically at war," the spokesman was cited as saying.

The question that occurs to us is, if Ahmadinejad's government will collapse if just left alone, why hasn't North Korea's government suffered similar collapse already? North Korea is much poorer, more oppressive, and more isolated than Iran. Yet they just keep chugging along, murdering their people and threatening to murder everyone else, just like Iran. Maybe the "leave them alone" advice isn't so good.

Racist Prodigy

Michelle Malkin, whose blog, in my opinion, is the best on the net, has a good piece on the racist poet Autum Ashante. Autum is all of 7 years old, but:

...as New York Post education reporter David Andreatta reported this weekend, she was invited to perform at public middle and high schools in Peekskill, N.Y., for Black History Month. After asking white students to remain seated while she led black students in a recitation of the Black Panthers' Black Child's Pledge, Autum (now home-schooled by her single father, a Nation of Islam member and poet) angrily read this original poem:

White Nationalism Put U In Bondage

White nationalism is what put you in bondage

Pirate and vampires like Columbus, Morgan, and Darwin

Drank the blood of the sheep, trampled all over them with

Steel, tricks and deceit.

Nothing has changed take a look in our streets

The mis-education of she and Hegro - leaves you on your knee2grow

Black lands taken from your hands, by vampires with no remorse

They took the gold, the wisdom and all of the storytellers

They took the black women, with the black man weak

Made to watch as they changed the paradigm Of our village

They killed the blind, they killed the lazy, they went So far as to kill the unborn baby

Yeah White nationalism is what put you in bondage

Pirates and vampires like Columbus, Morgan, and Darwin

They drank the blood of the sheep, trampled all over them with Steel laden feet, throw in the tricks alcohol and deceit.

Nothing has changed take a look at our streets.

Leaving aside churlish questions like whether a seven year old would have ever come up with a word like "paradigm" on her own, Malkin notes that:

Complaints from shocked students and parents led to a tape-recorded apology sent to all parents apologizing for the performance. Autum's father condemned white district officials as "racist crackers." Autum defended her poem by explaining to the Westchester Journal News that white people are "devils and they should be gone. We should be away from them and still be in Africa."

Michelle reminds us of the media outrage over the two white thirteen year old girls who sing racist lyrics and wonders how much outrage there'll be over Ms Ashante's diatribe.

Easy answer to that one.

Go to Michelle's page for the whole story and related links.

Learning the Hard Way

Here are a couple of reports on how low our economy has sunk under the incompetent supervision of George W. Bush:

WASHINGTON - Jobs grew at a healthy clip in February, the government reported Friday, helping boost wages to their highest year-over-year increase in more than four years while encouraging more jobless people to reenter the labor force.

The stronger-than-predicted net increase of 243,000 jobs was the largest gain in any of the last 12 months except for November, when the economy was rebounding from the effects of Hurricane Katrina.

The report signaled that wage growth, which has lagged behind inflation even as the unemployment rate has tumbled, might finally be making a comeback. "The growth in most workers' wages is probably just about to catch up with inflation, resulting in the first inflation-adjusted wage gains in years," he said.

------------------

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks rose sharply on Tuesday, with the Dow and S&P 500 indexes hitting their highest in nearly five years as U.S. Treasury yields fell and record profit from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. boosted shares of financial companies.

The liberals have been telling us for years that those tax cuts wouldn't work but we obstinately refused to listen. Now we're learning the lesson the hard way and getting just what we deserve for not heeding the economic sages in the Defeatocrat party.

Thought Experiment

Steve Petermann at Telic Thoughts invites us to try a thought experiment:

Suppose there is an alternate universe where there is also a trial in Dover, PA. However, in this universe a few things are different. In this universe this is how evolution is currently taught in high school biology classes:

Evolution means change over time. Observation suggests that life has evolved with some form of common descent. It also suggests that change occurs because of mutations in the genome where the environment has some effect on what gets passed on from one generation to the next. Except for materials on fossils and genetics, that's it.

Now in Dover a majority of the school board members believe that this explanation of biotic emergence is scientifically inadequate. They claim that the best scientific explanation is that mutations occur strictly by chance, that they are unguided and purposeless. These board members are known as evangelical atheists and deists. They vote to include this additional level of explanation in high school biology classes. But some parents of students sue because they believe that this additional material does not belong in science class and is instead an attempt to smuggle atheism or deism into public schools. A trial ensues.

The plaintiffs offer expert witnesses who argue that the additional material is not scientific because it cannot be tested or falsified. They also challenge the defense experts claim to be able to scientifically detect what is unguided and purposeless in evolution. Then they call witnesses who testify that the board members who pushed for the new syllabus have often talked about how a knowledge of science naturally leads to atheism or deism.

The defense calls expert witnesses who claim to offer scientific evidence that unguidedness and purposelessness in evolution can be detected. They claim it offers the best scientific explanation available and therefore should be included in science classes. They also assert that the religious beliefs of board members are irrelevant to the issue.

Given that this universe has the same constitution as in ours, how should the judge rule?

Well, regardless of how he should rule, if he's Judge John Jones he would rule exactly opposite of the way he decided in the real Kitzmiller case, of course. He would find in favor of the school board since they're the defenders, in this hypothetical case, of materialist metaphysics.

But Petermann's point is well taken. The belief that the development of life is an unguided, purposeless process is no less "religious," and no more scientific, than is the contrary claim that life is the product of intelligent planning. Sooner or later even Judge Jones will realize this.

Lost Cause

Ralph Peters has returned from Baghdad and he's not happy. With the media. Here's what he says:

During a recent visit to Baghdad, I saw an enormous failure. On the part of our media. The reality in the streets, day after day, bore little resemblance to the sensational claims of civil war and disaster in the headlines.

No one with first-hand experience of Iraq would claim the country's in rosy condition, but the situation on the ground is considerably more promising than the American public has been led to believe. Lurid exaggerations and instant myths obscure real, if difficult, progress.

I left Baghdad more optimistic than I was before this visit. While cynicism, political bias and the pressure of a 24/7 news cycle accelerate a race to the bottom in reporting, there are good reasons to be soberly hopeful about Iraq's future.

Much could still go wrong. The Arab genius for failure could still spoil everything. We've made grave mistakes. Still, it's difficult to understand how any first-hand observer could declare that Iraq's been irrevocably "lost."

He then goes on to give eight examples of how "what everyone knows" about Iraq is false:

Consider just a few of the inaccuracies served up by the media:

Claims of civil war. In the wake of the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a flurry of sectarian attacks inspired wild media claims of a collapse into civil war. It didn't happen. Driving and walking the streets of Baghdad, I found children playing and, in most neighborhoods, business as usual. Iraq can be deadly, but, more often, it's just dreary.

Iraqi disunity. Factional differences are real, but overblown in the reporting. Few Iraqis support calls for religious violence. After the Samarra bombing, only rogue militias and criminals responded to the demagogues' calls for vengeance. Iraqis refused to play along, staging an unrecognized triumph of passive resistance.

Expanding terrorism. On the contrary, foreign terrorists, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, have lost ground. They've alienated Iraqis of every stripe. Iraqis regard the foreigners as murderers, wreckers and blasphemers, and they want them gone. The Samarra attack may, indeed, have been a tipping point--against the terrorists.

Hatred of the U.S. military. If anything surprised me in the streets of Baghdad, it was the surge in the popularity of U.S. troops among both Shias and Sunnis. In one slum, amid friendly adult waves, children and teenagers cheered a U.S. Army patrol as we passed. Instead of being viewed as occupiers, we're increasingly seen as impartial and well-intentioned.

The appeal of the religious militias. They're viewed as mafias. Iraqis want them disarmed and disbanded. Just ask the average citizen.

The failure of the Iraqi army. Instead, the past month saw a major milestone in the maturation of Iraq's military. During the mini-crisis that followed the Samarra bombing, the Iraqi army put over 100,000 soldiers into the country's streets. They defused budding confrontations and calmed the situation without killing a single civilian. And Iraqis were proud to have their own army protecting them. The Iraqi army's morale soared as a result of its success.

Reconstruction efforts have failed. Just not true. The American goal was never to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure in its entirety. Iraqis have to do that. Meanwhile, slum-dwellers utterly neglected by Saddam Hussein's regime are getting running water and sewage systems for the first time. The Baathist regime left the country in a desolate state while Saddam built palaces. The squalor has to be seen to be believed. But the hopeless now have hope.

The electricity system is worse than before the war. Untrue again. The condition of the electric grid under the old regime was appalling. Yet, despite insurgent attacks, the newly revamped system produced 5,300 megawatts last summer--a full thousand megawatts more than the peak under Saddam Hussein. Shortages continue because demand soared--newly free Iraqis went on a buying spree, filling their homes with air conditioners, appliances and the new national symbol, the satellite dish. Nonetheless, satellite photos taken during the hours of darkness show Baghdad as bright as Damascus.

Peters isn't naive. He recognizes that Iraq can still implode, but:

[T]he foreign media have become a destructive factor, extrapolating daily crises from minor incidents. Part of this is ignorance. Some of it is willful. None of it is helpful.

Read the rest of his essay at the link. The short version is: Iraq is a lost cause only to those who want it to be.

Pombo Bill

The House of Representatives last September passed a piece of legislation authored by Richard Pombo (R-CA) which would effectively gut the Endangered Species Act. It puts at risk the ability of the Federal government to protect threatened species of living things as well as habitat critical for the fluorishing of these organisms.

The bill is now in the Senate which must vote to pass it, or a compromise measure, in order for it to become law.

If you believe that allowing our wildlife and wild places to be extirpated and asphalted is irresponsible, profligate, and myopic, write or call your Senator to tell him or her so. You can find their e-mail, snail mail, and phone addresses here.

Political Sucker-Puncher

New York Times reports on Senator Feingold's dismay with his fellow Democrats:

Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold accused fellow Democrats on Tuesday of cowering rather than joining him on trying to censure President Bush over domestic spying. "Democrats run and hide" when the administration invokes the war on terrorism, Feingold told reporters.

Feingold introduced censure legislation Monday in the Senate but not a single Democrat has embraced it. Several have said they want to see the results of a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation before supporting any punitive legislation.

Republicans dismissed the proposal Tuesday as being more about Feingold's 2008 presidential aspirations than Bush's actions. On and off the Senate floor, they have dared Democrats to vote for the resolution.

"I'm amazed at Democrats ... cowering with this president's numbers so low," Feingold said. The latest AP-Ipsos poll on Bush, conducted last week, found just 37 percent of the 1,000 people surveyed approving his overall performance, the lowest of his presidency.

Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., tried to hold a vote Monday on Feingold's resolution but was blocked by Democrats. He said Tuesday that Feingold should withdraw the resolution because it has no support. "If the Democrats continue to say no to voting on their own censure resolution, then they ought to drop it and focus on our foreign policy in a positive way," Frist said in a statement.

Feingold's resolution condemns Bush's "unlawful authorization of wiretaps of Americans within the United States without obtaining the court orders required" by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Of course, his Democratic colleagues are not the only ones who have failed to display the courage of their convictions. Senator Feingold himself left the Senate chamber after introducing his resolution, leaving it to others to debate it for him. The Senator, evidently an accomplished political sucker-puncher, whacks the president with an allegation of criminal activity and then flees. Gutsy.

On Friendship

It is in the friendship of good men that feelings of affection and friendship exist in their highest and best form. -- Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics.

I had occasion recently to reflect upon what I thought to be the ingredients of friendship. I ventured that friendship requires that two people share an affection for each other based upon similar values and interests, mutual esteem, and shared experience. To the extent that two persons hold common intellectual, moral, and spiritual values and are bonded by similar personality traits and shared experiences in life, to that extent their friendship will be deep. The less they share in common, either in terms of values, personality, or experience, the more superficial will be any relationship between them.

Atleast that's what I think. There are many other opinions on the matter much more profound and compelling than mine. Of those that I'm aware of, the loveliest expression of the nature of friendship is found in Augustine's Confessions. Augustine, describing his grief at the death of a dear companion, writes of his friends that:

All kinds of things rejoiced my soul in their company - to talk and laugh and do each other kindnesses; read pleasant books together, pass from lightest jesting to talk of the deepest things and back again; differ without rancour, as a man might differ with himself, and when most rarely when dissension arose find our normal agreement all the sweeter for it; teach each other or learn from each other; be impatient for the return of the absent, and welcome them with joy on their home-coming; these and such like things, proceeding from our hearts as we gave affection and received it back, and shown by face, by voice, by the eyes, and a thousand other pleasing ways, kindled a flame which fused our very souls and of many made us one.

This is what men value in friends, and value so much that our conscience judges them guilty if they do not meet friendship with friendship, expecting nothing from their friend save such evidences of his affection. -- Confessions Book IV: viii, ix

Beautifully put.

What Was She Thinking?

Democrats can't win no matter how hard they try. Every time they assay to land a whopping insult on the presidential kisser they just wind up making themselves look laughable. The latest exhibit is this photo of Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan trying to call attention to the president's inadequacies on the Senate floor.

No doubt Michigan Republicans are archiving this shot for use in future campaign ads.

Al-Qaeda on the Run

Maybe Tim Russert should interview Oliver Poole, the reporter who penned the following article in Britain's Telegraph. Given that it contains some positive developments in the war against al-Qaeda, however, Mr. Russert would probably not be interested.

Insurgent groups in one of Iraq's most violent provinces claim that they have purged the region of three quarters of al-Qa'eda's supporters after forming an alliance to force out the foreign fighters. If true, it would mark a significant victory in the fight against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'eda in Iraq, and could partly explain the considerable drop in suicide bombings in Iraq recently.

Considerable drop in suicide bombings? We thought the country was going all to pieces.

"We have killed a number of the Arabs, including Saudis, Egyptians, Syrians, Kuwaitis and Jordanians," said an insurgent representative in the western province of Anbar. The claims were partly supported by the defence ministry, which said it had evidence that Zarqawi and his followers were fleeing Anbar to cities and mountains near the Iranian border.

Iran? Why Iran? Iran wouldn't harbor terrorists would it? The left will soon be snorting that this claim is just disinformation put out by Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld, the Satanic trinity, to create a pretext for war with Iran.

It is this move that is believed to have prompted a statement a fortnight ago from the insurgent groups in the central city of Hawija that they were declaring war on al-Qae'da. It is being interpreted by intelligence experts as a response to an unwanted influx of foreign fighters seeking refuge. Iraq's Sunni Muslim insurgents had originally welcomed al-Qa'eda into the country, seeing it as a powerful ally in its fight against the American occupation.

But relations became strained when insurgents supported calls for Sunnis to vote in last December's election, a move they saw as essential to break the Shia hold on government but which al-Qa'eda viewed as a form of collaboration. It became an outright split when a wave of bombings killed scores of people in Anbar resulting in a spate of tit-for-tat killings.

In reaction, the insurgent groups formed their own anti-al-Qa'eda militia, the Anbar Revolutionaries. The group has a core membership of 100 people, all of whom had relatives killed by al-Qa'eda. It is led by Ahmed Ftaikhan, a former Saddam-era military intelligence officer. It claims to have killed 20 foreign fighters and 33 Iraqi sympathisers. Many more are said to have fled. The United States has confirmed that six of Zarqawi's deputies were killed in Ramadi.

Osama al-Jadaan, a tribal chief, has claimed that with the support of the Iraqi army his supporters have captured hundreds of foreign fighters, and has sought to prevent jihadis entering the country from Syria.

So the insurgency has had it with al-Qaeda and is cleaning them out, or claiming to. Of course, this will make it much more difficult for the malcontents to fight against the coalition and more likely that they'll eventually start laying down their arms. It's going to be messy there for a long time, but the trend lines, despite what we hear from the defeatist media, are pointing in the right direction. Iraqi security forces are gaining in numbers, competency, and operational experience. Attempts to build a government continue. The people want peace. But it would all fall apart if we were to pull out too soon and leave a vacuum that the most ruthless would fill.

The nay-sayers, having had their hopes of a civil war dashed in recent weeks, are now promoting the case that the administration's incompetence and bull-headedness made the situation much more difficult to manage than it needed to be, and perhaps they're right, but how do we know? How can we say for certain that had we sent in more troops to keep the peace after toppling Saddam that the results would have been significantly different from what they are? I tend to believe that we should have used more troops, but whether they would have prevented the insurgency or not, who knows?

An Evil Twin?

Here's an interesting wrinkle in the case of presidential advisor Claude Allen who has been charged with fraud in a scheme to steal goods from a Target store in Gaithersburg, MD: Allen has an identical twin. Michelle Malkin wonders why the left thinks that's funny.

We take no position, of course, on the significance of this development with respect to Allen's (Claude) guilt or innocence. We just thought you might like to know about it.

Senator Quixote

Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI), often portrayed as a serious voice along the left-most aisle of the Senate chamber, has made himself look more like a ridiculous Don Quixote tilting at windmills with his attempt yesterday to curry favor among the MoveOn crowd. Feingold introduced a resolution into the Senate calling for censure of President Bush on the grounds that the president has broken the law by directing the National Security Agency to listen in on phone calls made by suspected terrorists to people in this country who may be accomplices.

Feingold claims that Bush did not follow the protocols established to govern such eavesdroppings and therefore deserves censure. This is absurd, of course, but absurdity does not have much deterrent effect upon the Ahabs on the left obsessed with their pursuit of Moby George.

It is absurd because 1) It's not at all clear that the president lacks the authority to do what he has done; 2) In any case, his actions were taken to protect the American people, not to benefit himself in any way; 3) He hasn't done anything that everyone of his predecessors both themselves approved of and carried out without complaint from the Democrats; 4) Senate leaders of both parties were kept apprised of the existence and findings of the program.

Feingold, the only Senator to oppose the Patriot act in 2001, left the chamber immediately after introducing his proposal, not even sticking around to debate its merits. Presumably he was in a rush to leap astride his steed and search out further villainous windmills in Washington to impale upon his sturdy lance. Or perhaps he left in order to spare himself the embarrassment of watching his fellow Democrats moonwalking away from his risible resolution.

Know Them By Their Fruits

I was reminded of Matthew 7:21-23 when I read this story of people who call themselves Christians but who demonstrate at funerals of dead soldiers in the most vile and despicable ways, exploiting the grief of bereaved families in order to make a hateful socio-theological statement:

Five women sang and danced as they held up signs saying "thank God for dead soldiers" at the funeral of an army sergeant who was killed by an Iraqi bomb. For them, it was the perfect way to spread God's word: America was being punished for tolerating homosexuality.

For the hundreds of flag waving bikers who came to this small town in Michigan Saturday to shield the soldier's family, it was disgusting. The fringe group of fire and brimstone Baptists from Kansas has been courting controversy for more than 15 years, traveling the country with their hateful signs and slogans.

Pastor Fred helps said he and his congregants are targeting the funerals because God's way of punishing an "evil nation" of "fags and fag enablers" is to "pick off its children."

"I don't have any sympathy for these parents. They're all going to hell," Phelps said. "The family's in pain because they haven't obeyed the Lord God."

The Westboro Baptist Church first gained national notoriety when they picked the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a Wyoming student who was murdered in 1998 for being gay. In Flushing, Michigan they turned their leather-clad backs to the five women and held flags and tarps up so that mourners walking past wouldn't see the signs saying "God hates fags," "fag vets" and "America is doomed."

Many found it hard to hide their anger when Margie Phelps, the daughter of Westboro's founder, called out "All this for little old us? Oh, you shouldn't have. I feel so special," before she started singing "the Pope, the Pope, the Pope is on fire. He don't get no water let the heretics burn" in front of a Catholic church.

Jesus says in the passage in the gospel of Matthew mentioned above that:

You will know them by their fruits. Not everyone who says to me, "Lord, Lord" will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, "Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name cast out demons, and in your name perform many miracles?" And then I will declare to them, "I never knew you. Depart from me you who practice lawlessness."

Perhaps the worst photo of the Westboro haters appeared in our local paper. It was of a child holding up a sign at the funeral of a young man who was killed in Iraq. The sign had the words THANK GOD FOR IEDs.

Christ also has a word for people who would put children up to that sort of evil. He said: "Whoever causes one of these little ones who believes in me to stumble, it is better for him that a millstone be hung around his neck, and that he be drowned in the depth of the sea." (Matt. 18:6).

The people at Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas will some day have a lot to answer for, not the least of which is the unChrist-like image of Christianity that they have presented to a world eager to believe the worst of Christians. Pastor Phelps is an answer to their prayers.

Stanching the Flow

Omar at Iraq the Model tells us that:

Sheikh Usama said today that the "Nakhwa" 4,000 man-strong tribal force he's supervising has succeeded in capturing yet another 169 infiltrators coming mostly from the Jordanian borders during the past week.

The sheikh also spoke of disbanding 9 terror groups working with Zaraqawi's al-Qaeda in Iraq and confirmed that the recently captured infiltrators were mostly non-Iraqi Arabs with some Iraqis guiding them in and providing logistics and that they brought weapons, explosives and sophisticated maps with them with a selection of targets pointed on those maps.

"Our main problem is the vast size of Anbar as well as having shared borders with 3 countries; Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria and recently we have that more and more infiltrators are coming through the borders with Jordan rather than the other two countries...We have rid about 90% of the province of Zaraqwi's criminal thugs and we are coordinating our work with the ministries of defense and interior and we had several meetings with Iraqi officials as well as General Casey. Now we believe Zarqawi had escaped to Salahiddin province and we are cooperating with the tribes of Salahiddin to find out where this criminal is hiding."

Our question is what happens to all these infiltrators once they're captured. Are they returned to Jordan? Are they turned over to the coalition authorities? Are they sent on their way to their assignation with seventy two virgins? What?

Iran Prepares For War

Iran is convinced that the West lacks the will to block its production of nuclear weapons but is nevertheless preparing for a half-hearted gesture in that direction:

Iran's leaders have built a secret underground emergency command centre in Teheran as they prepare for a confrontation with the West over their illicit nuclear programme, the Sunday Telegraph has been told. The complex of rooms and offices beneath the Abbas Abad district in the north of the capital is designed to serve as a bolthole and headquarters for the country's rulers as military tensions mount.

The recently completed command centre is connected by tunnels to other government compounds near the Mossala prayer ground, one of the city's most important religious sites. Offices of the state security forces, the energy department and the Organisation of Islamic Culture and Communications are all located in the same area.

The construction of the complex is part of the regime's plan to move more of its operations beneath ground. The Revolutionary Guard has overseen the development of subterranean chambers and tunnels - some more than half a mile long and an estimated 35ft high and wide - at sites across the country for research and development work on nuclear and rocket programmes.

The opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) learnt about the complex from its contacts within the regime. The same network revealed in 2002 that Iran had been operating a secret nuclear programme for 18 years. The underground strategy is partly designed to hide activities from satellite view and international inspections but also reflects a growing belief in Teheran that its showdown with the international community could end in air strikes by America or Israel. "Iran's leaders are clearly preparing for a confrontation by going underground," said Alireza Jafarzadeh, the NCRI official who made the 2002 announcement.

As the United Nations Security Council prepares to discuss Iran's nuclear operations this week, Teheran has been stepping up plans for confrontation. Its chief delegate on nuclear talks last week threatened that Iran would inflict "harm and pain" on America if censured by the Security Council.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hardline president who has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map", also said that the West would "suffer" if it tried to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions. As the war of words intensified, President George W Bush said that Teheran represents a "grave national security concern" for America.

In Iraq, which Mr Ahmadinejad hopes will develop into a fellow Shia Islamic state, Iran is already using its proxy militia to attack British and American forces, often with Iranian-made bombs and weapons. As tensions grow, Teheran could order Hizbollah - the Lebanese-based terror faction that it created and arms - to attack targets in Israel.

The regime is also reviewing its contingency plans to attack tankers and American naval forces in the Persian Gulf and to mine the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 15 million barrels of oil (about 20 per cent of world production) passes each day. Any action in the Gulf would send oil prices soaring - a weapon that Iran has often threatened to wield.

The Pentagon's strategic planning is focused on the danger that Iran might try to mine the strait and deploy explosive-packed suicide boats against its warships. In May, American vessels in the Gulf will take part in the Arabian Gauntlet training exercise that deals with clearing mines from the strait, which has a navigable channel just two miles wide.

The naval wing of the Revolutionary Guard has in recent years practised "swarming" raids, using its flotilla of small rapid-attack boats to simulate assaults on commercial vessels and United States warships, according to Ken Timmerman, an American expert on Iran.

The Pentagon is particularly sensitive to the dangers of such attacks after al-Qaeda hit the USS Cole off the Yemen with a suicide boat in 2000, killing 17 American sailors. Last month the White House listed two foiled al-Qaeda plots to attack ships in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

US intelligence believes that if Iranian nuclear facilities were attacked by either America or Israel, then Teheran would respond by trying to close the Strait of Hormuz with naval forces, mines and anti-ship cruise missiles. "When these systems become fully operational, they will significantly enhance Iran's defensive capabilities and ability to deny access to the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz," Michael Maples, the director of the Defence Intelligence Agency testified before the Senate armed services committee last month.

A senior American intelligence officer said that the US navy would be able to reopen the strait but that it would be militarily costly. Hamid Reza Zakeri, a former Iranian intelligence officer, recently told Mr Timmerman that the Iranian navy's Strategic Studies Centre has produced an updated battle plan for the strait.

Its most devastating options would be to use its long-range Shahab-3 missiles to attack Israeli or American bases in the region or to deploy suicide bombers in Western cities under its strategy of "asymmetric" response. "The price to the West for standing up to Iran is clear," Gen Moshe Ya'alon, the former Israeli defence chief said last month in Washington. "It includes terror attacks, economic hardship... and consequences resulting from fluctuations in Iranian oil production. Indeed, the regime believes that the West - including Israel - is afraid to deal with it."

Indeed, the West should be afraid to deal with Iran, but then courage is the doing of that which one is afraid of doing. Attacking, and destroying, Iran's nuclear program and replacing its government and fearsome tasks, fraught with all manner of peril, and should be our next-to-last resort.

The last resort is letting the mullahs and Ahmadinejad have the weapons they seek.