Rating the President

What would you consider to be the top five most important issues facing this nation today and what grade would you give the Bush administration in the handling of these issues?

Viewpoint lists the top five issues as follows:

1. The global war on terror (including the war in Iraq and Afghanistan)
   
2. The composition of the Supreme Court
   
3. Stopping the flow of illegal aliens
   
4. The economy (including reducing the deficit and spending)
   
5. Conserving natural spaces
   

Perhaps your list would be different and, if so, I'd like to hear your suggestions. Meanwhile, on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being absolutely miserable and 10 being excellent, here's how we rate the current administration on each of the above five at this point in time (President Clinton's score on these specific issues is shown in parentheses):

1. The global war on terror (including the war in Iraq and Afghanistan) ---- 8.5 (1.0)
The Bushies get high marks for having prevented a follow-up to 9/11. The job of finishing the conflicts in the Middle-East is excruciatingly difficult and overall the Bush team has done well, but they should have had more troops available after the initial invasion of Iraq and they should have clamped down hard on the insurgency when it was still in its infancy. This, however, is second guessing, and I'm willing to concede that there may have been good reasons why we didn't do these things. I just don't have any idea what they are.

2. The composition of the Supreme Court ---- 10 (1.0)
Roberts and Alito are superior picks. We're hoping Bush gets at least one more shot at an appointment.

3. Stopping the flow of illegal aliens ---- 2 (1.0)
Unfortunately, G.W. just doesn't seem to get it. We have a disaster brewing in this country. Build the fence!

4. The economy (including reducing the deficit and spending) ---- 7.5 (7.0)
The economy is doing well and deficits are coming down due to increased revenue resulting from the Bush tax cuts. Even so, they're still too high and Bush has been spending as if money grows like grass.

5. Conserving natural spaces ---- 6 (9.0)
Bush gets credit for setting aside the vast stretch of ocean near Hawaii as a national monument. Unfortunately, there has been little done that we're aware of in the continental U.S. to increase the amount of natural land that is safe from the depradations of developers. We say staff the department of the Interior with personnel from The Nature Conservancy.

Overall rating: 6.8 (3.8)

Making the Most of College

Gideon Strauss continues the series at Comment on the theme of making the most of college. He writes:

College is a time for falling in love, reading great books, and asking big questions. It is a time for adventure and exploration, discovery and delight-for "tensed leisure," as Calvin Seerveld sometimes calls it. While our deepest loves may take root in childhood, it is in our young adult years that we are most likely to begin to articulate the implications of what we love for how we hope to live. For those of us privileged to spend time at college, the provocations offered by books and movies, paintings and songs, teachers and friends encountered during these years bring us to question the answers we have inherited from our parents.

Sometimes we appropriate those answers for ourselves with deepened conviction, and sometimes-wrenchingly-we reach for other more convincing and more coherent answers. It is a time in which we can try out different ideas, ways of life, kinds of work, with a little more wiggle-room in the face of destiny, and a little more tolerance from others for backing out of options we find to be cul-de-sacs.

Strauss goes on to address seven basic questions about life to which all students should seek answers while they're in college:

• What do I love?
• What do I believe?
• Where do I belong?
• Who am I?
• What hurt needs healing in the world?
• What potential waits to be realized?
• What is to be done?

Each of these questions receives elaboration on the post. It's a good read for students and parents of students.

Iranian Attack on Israel?

Little Green Footballs reports that:

A barrage of Katyusha rockets has been launched at northern Israel, and for the first time one has reached the city of Haifa.

CNN has reported that at least one of the weapons was a long-range ballistic missile (not just a Katyusha rocket), fired by Iranian guards.

If this report is true it represents a clear act of war on the part of Iran. Iranian prime minister Ahmedinejad, out of Muslim solidarity, is threatening Israel with terrible consequences if they attack Syria, but it looks as if the Iranians may have already overplayed their "solidarity" hand.

Determining the Past

According to cosmologist Thomas Hertog the universe consists of many pasts, and it is not until an observation is made in the present that one of these fuzzy potential pasts becomes actual. It's as if the universe is like a vast quantum event made real by a particular observation.

It sort of reminds me of the movie Frequency where a man is able to communicate with his father in the past and change what actually occured. Every time this happened, however, it changed the present.

This raises a fascinating question, at least for me. If God is not bound by time, and if the present can determine the past, and if God answers at least some prayers, is it possible that God, in response to prayer, might change the past? Of course, as in the movie Frequency, if He did change the past it would revise the present and we would never know that the past had been altered, or even that we had prayed for it to be altered.

The universe is certainly a strange place.

Stop Whining

GOP outrage over a Democratic ad that shows flag-draped coffins of U.S. soldiers is almost as silly as the hue and cry over the Valerie Plame affair. I fail to see what's wrong with an ad that presses home the fact that there have been casualties in this war. Instead of whining about Democratic tastelessness Republicans should be pressing them to explain what they would do differently to prevent those casualties.

The answer of course is that they would either do nothing differently or they would cut and run. Force them to admit this in public debate and their use of the ad will be seen by voters as either hypocritical or symbolic of defeat and surrender. This seems to be a more grown up response than complaining that Democrats aren't playing fair.

Time For a Few Laughs

YouTube has an evolutionary Guinness beer commercial. The science is shaky, but it's a cool commercial nonetheless.

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the tip.

By the way, UD is a blog which deals with Intelligent design issues, but they have a video up which depicts what happens when a design is carried out by a quite unintelligent being. It'll make you laugh out loud. So will the old Ma and Pa Kettle video they've posted.

The State of the Economy

Larry Kudlow has a fascinating story on the vibrancy of the American economy. It's worth posting here in its entirety:

Did you know that just over the past 11 quarters, dating back to the June 2003 Bush tax cuts, America has increased the size of its entire economy by 20 percent? In less than three years, the U.S. economic pie has expanded by $2.2 trillion, an output add-on that is roughly the same size as the total Chinese economy, and much larger than the total economic size of nations like India, Mexico, Ireland and Belgium.

This is an extraordinary fact, although you may be reading it here first. Most in the mainstream media would rather tout the faults of American capitalism than sing its praises. And of course, the media will almost always discuss supply-side tax cuts in negative terms, such as big budget deficits and static revenue losses. But here's another suppressed fact: Since the 2003 tax cuts, tax-revenue collections from the expanding economy have been surging at double-digit rates, while the deficit is constantly being revised downward.

For those who bother to look, the economic power of lower-tax-rate incentives is once again working its magic. While most reporters obsess about a mild slowdown in housing, the big-bang story is a high-sizzle pick-up in private business investment, which is directly traceable to Bush's tax reform. It was private investment that was hardest hit in the early decade stock market plunge and the aftermath of the 9-11 terrorist bombings. So team Bush's wise men correctly targeted investment in order to slash the after-tax cost of capital and rejuvenate investment incentives.

The move paid off. Investors now keep nearly 50 percent more of their after-tax capital returns -- an enormous increase that has resulted in a remarkably profitable and highly productive business sector. While the overall economy has grown by one-fifth since mid-2003, private business investment has expanded by 37 percent.

The dirty little secret here is that record low tax rates on capital are leading to continued job and income gains, as businesses continue to expand.

"But," you might respond, "I thought job gains were soft." Well, the marquis employment report for June may have showed "only" 121,000 new non-farm payroll jobs, below Wall Street expectations. But this leads to another factoid that the mainstream media largely ignores: The household survey of job creation has been booming at a much faster clip than headline corporate payrolls.

When this last happened in 2003-04 (remember the "jobless recovery" election-year rant of Democrats?), it was corporate payrolls that caught up to the more entrepreneurial household survey -- which more accurately records job creation by small-business owner-operators. This is the source of the bulk of American job creation.

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, firms with less than 500 employees created 88 percent of the net new jobs in the United States between 1990 and 2003 (the last year for Census Bureau data). During this 14-year period, the share of total jobs created by small businesses was never less than 50 percent and was sometimes double the employment total.

Large corporations are reluctant to hire because it is so expensive to do so. Think health care and pension costs, as well as payroll add-ons for unemployment compensation and worker disability. The modern cost-cutting pressures of globalization also force large firms to take a highly cautious hiring approach. But newly minted entrepreneurs don't face all these costs -- at least not initially. And that is why the household survey has become so important in the 21st century economy.

Wages are rising today, so we know domestic labor markets must be tightening, not softening. To wit, average hourly compensation has risen to 3.9 percent over the past year, while average weekly earnings have grown to 4.5 percent. In early 2004, these wage measures were only up 1.5 percent.

The June Labor report also revealed a 2.3 percent annual gain in aggregate hours worked -- which is consistent with 3.7 percent real GDP growth and a 6.6 percent gain in wages and salaries. These hefty numbers will bolster consumer spending in the period ahead.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is recognizing the importance of the small-business-driven household survey, and has suggested averaging household jobs with the corporate payroll survey to get a clearer jobs picture. Doing this yields a strong 186,000 new jobs per month over the past year, which is the key reason why the unemployment rate stands at a historically low 4.6 percent rate, with total employment now at a record high 144.5 million.

These data points hardly suggest a slumping economy. Instead, they reveal a low-tax, durable, resilient and flexible American market system that easily shifts from one sector (housing) to another (business investment). It is this American economic dynamism that separates our ongoing prosperity from the overtaxed and overregulated stutter-start stagnation of industrial economies in Western Europe and Japan.

This cartoon by Chuck Asay illustrates how remarkable it is that the economy is as good as it is:

On the other hand, Captain Ed argues that Kudlow's numbers are not quite as impressive as he represents them since he doesn't adjust for inflation. Nevertheless, Ed agrees that the economy is robust and that the good news is underreported by the MSM.

There's no guarantee that this vigor will continue through 2008 but if it does, and if Iraq has made substantial progress toward stability, the Democrats will have no big issues left to run on, and they'll be likely to get their booties kicked.

Hezbollah

Bill Roggio at Counterterrorism Blog updates us on events in Lebanon in the course of which he says this:

Israel is left with no other option than to destroy Hezbollah and remove their presence from the Lebanon frontier. Hezbollah has no intention of keeping the peace on the border, and the Lebanese government is far too weak to handle Hezbollah and secure the south on its own. The Israeli government has indicated Operation Just Reward should be viewed in the time frame of months, not day, indicating the IDF plans to pursue Hezbollah. The operations are already being described as the most intense in Israel's history of fighting in Lebanon.

Iran and Syria may very well enter this conflict. Hezbollah is the proxy of the Iranian and Syrian governments. The destruction of Hezbollah will be a massive loss of face for Iran and Syria, who have invested enormous amounts of time and resources to secure Hezbollah's position in Lebanon, as well as the international terror network.

Terror attacks against world wide U.S. and Israeli interests may very well take place if Israel presses the hunt for Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran would very likely push Iraqi Shiite Moqtada al-Sadr to destabilize the situation in Iraq, for starters.

Hezbollah has been responsible for the deaths of dozens if not hundreds of Americans in the Middle East in the last twenty five years. It would be good were the malignancy excised. We hope that the United States doesn't try to hold Israel back.

Childlessness

No Left Turns points us to an article in USA Today which, as Julie Ponzi writes:

...tells us that in 1976 only 1 in 10 women in their 40s were without children. Today that number is 1 in 5. Another statistic cited: "In 1970, for example, 73.6% of women ages 25-29 had at least one minor child at home; 30 years later, 48.7% did." The article quotes Barbara Dafoe Whitehead (the author of the famous "Was Dan Quayle Right" article many years ago and of many good books since) who points out the obvious truth that this necessarily shapes the culture in a different direction. "People who are rearing children and have children in the household no longer represent the dominant force in society or politics," she says. And that means alot. Everything from what kinds of ads appear on T.V., to what kinds of shows, to workplace policies, to government policies will be affected and are affected by this shift. The character of these changes is still open for debate. I have my doubts about the goodness of them.

One is tempted to think that if more of the people who produce our entertainment were themselves raising children our culture might be significantly less sleazy. I think that's true despite the obvious counter-examples. Hugh Heffner's daughter now runs Playboy, after all. Having a daughter in the Playboy manse apparently didn't cause old Hugh to change much in the stuff he was putting out.

Even so, I believe it is a general fact about human nature that when people have children it makes them far more sensitive to the cultural influences that wash over us than they would otherwise have been. Parenthood tends to make people more mature, more responsible, and more concerned about the world their children will inherit. The fewer adults who parent, and the longer they delay it, the less mature, responsible, and concerned about those cultural influences our society will be.

Darwinism That Amounts to ID

Mike Gene http://www.thedesignmatrix.com/content/?p=14 deconstructs the theistic evolutionism of a major witness for the prosecution at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial last Fall, Ken Miller.

Miller sounds very much like an IDer who is unaware that that's what he is. He seems to think that an ID advocate must hold that God intervenes sporadically in order to create biological novelties.

This is not the case. Miller's views seem very similar to those of other "front-loaders" who hold that the design of all subsequent phenomena was imposed on the cosmos through the establishment by the designer of the initial conditions of the Big Bang.

See the previous link for more discussion on the different positions that IDers hold.

Israel at War

The Islamists have struck a match to the tinder and have driven Israel to just a step shy of all-out war in both Lebanon and Gaza. The terrorists are getting what they wanted and are beginning to pay a terrible price for their unconscionable atrocities. Pajamas Media has a time line and links.

The Big Question: Will Israel carry the fight straight to the source - Damascus? Hezbollah in Lebanon is a proxy of Damascus and Israel may be tired of treating the cancer with aspirin. A strike at either Hamas or Hezbollah offices in Damascus or an attack against the Syrian air force may be in the offing.

Second Big Question: How much help is Israel getting in Gaza from Fatah? It's no secret that there are high resentments in Fatah for Hamas. The Fatah party would like nothing more than to see Hamas decimated. My guess is that they are surreptitiously providing the Israelis with at least some intel on the whereabouts of key Hamas leaders like Mohammed Deif and Nabil Abu Salmiyeh.

WW III

The folks at the New York Times don't seem to understand that World War III has begun, and we're already hip deep in it.

The cartoonist Ramirez understands, however:

Maybe someone at the Times can get Ramirez's work on their editorial page.

The Widening Conflict

Some news snippets from World War III:

David Gartenstein-Ross of Counterterrorism Blog gives some important background on the Chechen Islamist terrorist Shamil Basayev who was killed yesterday by Russian troops. Gartenstein-Ross also notes an important object lesson for American troops.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah has attacked Israeli troops along the Lebanon border, killing seven and taking two captive. Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has called the attack an act of war and promises to respond with a "very painful and far-reaching response."

Bill Roggio discusses the growing Talibanization of Somalia and hints at the possibility of a United States intervention.

Confirmation Bias

Michael Shermer has an interesting piece at Scientific American on Confirmation Bias. He writes that:

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion ... draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises ... in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate. --Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620

Pace Will Rogers, I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a libertarian. As a fiscal conservative and social liberal, I have found at least something to like about each Republican or Democrat I have met. I have close friends in both camps, in which I have observed the following: no matter the issue under discussion, both sides are equally convinced that the evidence overwhelmingly supports their position.

This surety is called the confirmation bias, whereby we seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore or reinterpret disconfirmatory evidence. Now a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study shows where in the brain the confirmation bias arises and how it is unconscious and driven by emotions. Psychologist Drew Westen led the study, conducted at Emory University, and the team presented the results at the 2006 annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

During the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, while undergoing an fMRI bran scan, 30 men--half self-described as "strong" Republicans and half as "strong" Democrats--were tasked with assessing statements by both George W. Bush and John Kerry in which the candidates clearly contradicted themselves. Not surprisingly, in their assessments Republican subjects were as critical of Kerry as Democratic subjects were of Bush, yet both let their own candidate off the hook.

The neuroimaging results, however, revealed that the part of the brain most associated with reasoning--the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--was quiescent. Most active were the orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in the processing of emotions; the anterior cingulate, which is associated with conflict resolution; the posterior cingulate, which is concerned with making judgments about moral accountability; and--once subjects had arrived at a conclusion that made them emotionally comfortable--the ventral striatum, which is related to reward and pleasure.

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," Westen is quoted as saying in an Emory University press release. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts." Interestingly, neural circuits engaged in rewarding selective behaviors were activated. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones," Westen said.

The implications of the findings reach far beyond politics. A jury assessing evidence against a defendant, a CEO evaluating information about a company or a scientist weighing data in favor of a theory will undergo the same cognitive process. What can we do about it?

In science we have built-in self-correcting machinery. Strict double-blind controls are required in experiments, in which neither the subjects nor the experimenters know the experimental conditions during the data-collection phase. Results are vetted at professional conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. Research must be replicated in other laboratories unaffiliated with the original researcher. Disconfirmatory evidence, as well as contradictory interpretations of the data, must be included in the paper. Colleagues are rewarded for being skeptical. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Skepticism is the antidote for the confirmation bias.

This affirms what people have long known intuitively which is that we tend to see or believe that which we most want to be the case, especially about God. Take the classical cosmological argument for the existence of God, for example. A person who wants there to be a God will find this argument very persuasive even if they recognize that it's not a proof. They will be driven toward agreeing with the conclusion that there must be some necessary, self-existent underlying cause of all the contingent entities which comprise the universe. Things like galaxies and planets don't just pop into existence uncaused. On the other hand, a person not inclined to accept the existence of God will take refuge in the possibility that the principle of sufficient causes doesn't apply to the universe, or that perhaps the universe as a whole is the necessary entity upon which all else is contingent.

Which of these responses has most appeal to someone will depend on their prior inclinations and whether or not they want there to be a God. This is one reason why so few people are persuaded to believe (or disbelieve) in God through arguments. The most important step in conversion from one's former state of belief or non-belief is acquiring a desire either to find God or to reject Him. Once the desire is present reasons to support one's embrace or rejection will prove easy enough to come by.

Another way to put this is to say that belief is more a matter of the heart than it is of the mind.

Telic Thoughts has some thoughts on Shermer's piece as well.

What <i>Is</i> the Point Anyway?

We've been thinking the same thing:

Cartoon by Paul Nowak.

ID's Big Tent

Intelligent Design is said to be a "big tent" which has room to accomodate many different views on how the designer acts to accomplish its purposes. There are, for example, IDers who hold that the designer (who for Christians is the God of the Bible but for non-theists could be a denizen of one of the near infinity of other worlds hypothesized by theoretical physicists to exist in the multiverse) intervenes periodically in time and history to tweak the creation, creating life at one point and then consciousness, and so on. These are called progressive creationists.

There are others who believe that God acted much as described in Genesis, compressing all creative activity into a brief period of time at the beginning. These folks are called special creationists. There is a third group which holds that the designer "front-loaded" the creation into the initial events that triggered the Big Bang. In other words, the initial conditions of the Big Bang which give rise to all the laws of physics and everything that subsequently results, are foreordained in the creative event. These laws and constants eventually, through an evolutionary process, produced intelligent life.

All of these different formulations share two things in common that make them members of the ID club - they each maintain that however life came about it required an intelligent input, and they maintain that evidence of that input can be discerned in living things and in the cosmos. It is essentially this ability to detect the designer's work, by the way, that distinguishes the front-loaders from theistic evolutionists who believe that God's activity does not contravene the laws of physics and that the natural world does not reveal intelligent agency. The theistic evolutionists' belief that God exists is for them a matter solely of faith and that evidence of His existence should not be looked for in the patterns of life. Both the front-loaders and the theistic evolutionists are concerned with maintaining the uniformity of natural law (which is in some ways an odd concern since many of them believe in Biblical miracles).

I don't know who among the foregoing is correct in this matter, but I do think that if it were to turn out that God does not act the way the special or progressive creationists envision one still need not think that His action is located solely at the beginning of creation. Indeed, such a concept of God leads one in the unwelcome direction of deism, the view of God as a distant and uninvolved absentee landlord.

Imagine instead that the progress of life is like a river in a shallow stream bed meandering widely through a broad, flat valley. In mountain valleys in Alaska such rivers are often braided, i.e. they're made up of dozens of rivulets and lesser channels that weave through the valley in an intricate filigree, intersecting with, and diverging from, each other, all the while carrying the water forward. The pattern of progress appears imbricate, convoluted and completely random, guided by nothing but physical laws and forces much as evolution is guided by laws like mutation and natural selection.

But perhaps, just as the course of the water is really determined by the contours of the soil and rock which make up the channels of the stream bed, the flow of life is "embedded" in God. In other words, God guides the flow, it takes place in and through Him, not just at the outset of creation nor only sporadically throughout its history, but rather moment by moment as it wends its way over the course of deep time. God is not just a temporal cause of the development of life but also its sustaining cause. Just as there can be no river without a channel to guide and contain it, there can be no life or evolutionary development without God undergirding, enfolding, and leading it constantly and continuously toward the end He envisions.

Evolution follows the course it does because of the "invisible channels" that carry it ineluctably toward a particular telos or goal. Evolution, especially its direction, is entirely contingent upon God as the river is dependent upon its underlying substrate. Unlike the deistic God of the front-loaders and theistic evolutionists, God is both immanent, or present in the world, and necessary moment by moment, not only for the existence of life but also for its development.

Just Deserts

It appears that the man who orchestrated the Moscow theater seige and the Beslan school massacre, Shamil Basayev, has been sent off to his reward by Russian security forces. The world, at least the civilized portion of it, will not mourn his passing.

Hot Air has the details.

Flawed Analysis at TruthOut

Larry Johnson at TruthOut.Org argues that we shouldn't have an inordinate fear of terrorism because, as bad as it is, the threat from the Islamo-fascists is not nearly as serious as the nuclear threat we were under at the height of the cold war. Back then we didn't "eavesdrop" or threaten other freedoms so we have no cause to be doing it now when the threat is so much less.

Even if we grant that what the government is doing today to defend us from terrorists curtails our freedom to some extent, Johnson's argument is misbegotten. He's correct, of course, that the threat of nuclear war during the sixties and seventies was serious, but he ignores the crucial fact that it was manageable because neither we nor the Soviets wanted to use nuclear weapons. Deterrrence worked because neither side wanted to initiate and die in a nuclear exchange.

The Islamo-fascists, on the other hand, look forward to dying and don't care how many people they take with them. Unlike the Soviets, if the jihadis can get their hands on a nuke they can be counted upon to use it against someone, probably Israel or the U.S.

Nor are they particularly impressed by the concept of deterrence or mutually assured destruction. After all, who would we retaliate against if a bomb were detonated in one of our cities?

So Johnson may be on safe ground in insisting that the threat today isn't as severe as it was on any given day thirty years ago, but his claim is misleading. As soon as the Islamo-terrorists succeed in obtaining a nuclear weapon the threat analysis changes completely. Al Qaeda with nukes is an inestimably greater danger than the Soviets ever were, and we must do everything we can to keep them from procuring a nuclear weapon and from getting into position to use one. That means that they must be treated as the most serious threat to the people of the United States in our 230 year history, because, in fact, they are.

Protesting the <i>Times</i>

This photo was taken at a protest held outside the offices of the New York Times yesterday:

There are more pics here.

We're wondering where we can buy those t-shirts.

You Never Know

This surprising (to me) factoid appears at the end of a 2003 Spectator column about Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards:

Richards married for the first and only time on his 40th birthday in 1983, and it probably saved his life. His bride was the 27-year-old Patti Hansen, a home-town girl from Staten Island, New York, and a devout Lutheran. His in-laws gave a startling interview in which they portrayed Keith as an 'enthusiastic disciple of Christ' and that he 'embraced Christ as a way of life'. Under Patti's influence, Richards cut back on drugs, attended church from time to time and even started a gentle exercise regime. 'She's a wonderful girl; I ain't letting the bitch go!' he confirmed in a speech at his wedding reception. Keith may have written 'Sympathy For The Devil' back when, but these days much of his life is spent with a woman who attends a weekly Bible study group and who won't stand for swearing around the house.

Who'd 'a thunk it? I don't know what it means, for sure, but it's interesting.

Thanks to GetReligion for the tip.

Biting the Hand That Feeds You

According to Strategy Page North Korea has a peculiar strategy for winning friends - they steal their trains:

July 5, 2006: While everyone's attention was focused on North Korean missiles, the real story is the North Korean economy. It continues to fall apart, and more North Koreans are unhappy about that. Worse yet, more North Koreans are finding out how badly they have been screwed by their leaders.

Meanwhile, North Korean officials engage in even more bizarre behavior. For example, food and fuel supplies sent to North Korea have been halted, not to force North Korea to stop missile tests or participate in peace talks, but to return the Chinese trains the aid was carried in on. In the last few weeks, the North Koreans have just kept the trains, sending the Chinese crews back across the border.

North Korea just ignores Chinese demands that the trains be returned, and insists that the trains are part of the aid program. It's no secret that North Korean railroad stock is falling apart, after decades of poor maintenance and not much new equipment. Stealing Chinese trains is a typical loony-tune North Korean solution to the problem. If the North Koreans appear to make no sense, that's because they don't. Put simply, when their unworkable economic policies don't work, the North Koreans just conjure up new, and equally unworkable, plans.

The Chinese have tried to talk the North Koreans out of these pointless fantasies, and for their trouble they have their trains stolen. How do you negotiate under these conditions? No one knows. The South Koreans believe that if they just keep the North Korean leaders from doing anything too destructive (especially to South Korea), eventually the tragicomic house of cards up north will just collapse. Not much of a plan, but so far, no one's come up with anything better.

You can't blame the Koreans, I suppose. Box cars make fine apartments, by Pyongyang standards.

Oopsie

Ken Miller, a much published biologist from Brown University, was a star witness for the prosecution in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial of last Fall. It turns out that some of his most important testimony was ... ah, erroneous.

Evolution News and Views has the story.

Bush Stole Mexico!

Not only did the incompetent, doltish ninny George Bush somehow contrive to steal Florida in 2000 he also stole Mexico in 2006! How does such an idiot manage such amazing feats of electoral skullduggery? The world's keenest sleuth when it comes to detecting right-wing perfidy, Greg Palast of the Guardian, tells us exactly how, sort of.

We've always said that G. W. is a man not to be misunderestimated. Now if only Bush could work some political magic in North Korea and Iran.

Unhinged Lefty

A left-wing University of Arizona instructor of psychology, of all things, a woman by the name of Deb Frisch, carries the art of vilification and disgusting polemic to new depths where even only the sickest of her fellow lefties, a not insubstantial cohort, apparently, will follow. Frisch harrassed conservative blogger Jeff Goldstein in the grossest most disgusting possible way, even to the point of suggesting sex or violence with Goldstein's two year-old son. Then her minions flooded Goldstein's site with so much traffic that it shut down. Reports from the front suggest that the vile invective from her devotees is still flowing in his direction.

Here are some of the comments she sent to Goldstein:

"I'd like to hear more about your "tyke" by the way. Girl? Boy? Toddler? Teen? Are you still married to the woman you ephed to give birth to the tyke? Tell all, bro!"

***

"[...] as I said elsewhere, if I woke up tomorrow and learned that someone else had shot you and your "tyke" it wouldn't slow me down one iota. You aren't "human" to me."

***

" Ooh. Two year old boy. Sounds hot. You live in Colorado, I see. Hope no one Jon-Benets your baby.

Are you still married to the woman you humped to produce the toddler? "

***

Give your pathetic progeny (I sure hope that mofo got good genes from his mama!) a big fat tongue-filled kiss from me! LOTS AND LOTS OF SALIVA from Auntie MOONBAT, if you don't mind!

Somehow, Jeffy boy, I think you get off on the possibility of Frenching your pathetic progeny, even if it is a boy. You seem like a VERY, VERY sick mofo to me, bro.

Captain Ed and Michelle Malkin have the details. Michelle also has an update here.

It's hard to believe that a university teacher could be this sick. She did resign her post at Arizona, but she should also be committed to a treatment program somewhere.

Last Word on Perkiness

Byron gets the last word in our conversation on whether we're justified in calling the economy "perky" or not, given that the poor are still with us. Check out his comments on the Feedback Page.

For previous posts in this discussion thread see here, here and here.

The Racism of Low Expectations

LaShawn Barber is outraged that so many people think blacks are ignorant and helpless which is about the only conclusion one can draw from the recent objections to a Georgia law requiring voters to have an ID card:

Even if I lived a thousand lifetimes, I don't think I'll ever understand why there aren't more black people outraged by the implication that blacks are ignorant and helpless. Every time I hear or read about some white liberal arguing for lower academic standards for black children, supporting set-aside programs for black-owned businesses, and blaming "racism" for crime and other pathologies, I want to vomit.

But I retch alone.

As I'm sure most of you know, Georgia legislators recently passed a "controversial" law requiring voters to show state-issued identification before voting. When I first read about this "news," I was confused. Of course people must show ID before voting. I thought that was standard practice. Showing ID is a basic and common sense requirement. Yes, the unscrupulous will always get their hands on fake IDs; some states even issue driver's licenses to illegal aliens. But requiring ID is at least a step in the right direction, right?

Wrong. According to white liberals, requiring voters in Georgia to present state-issued identification is discriminatory to "elderly, low-income and minority voters." That's code for black people, and, thanks to lax immigration enforcement, illegal aliens. (The "elderly" can get out to vote, but they can't go to the DMV to get ID?)

Last year, a group of black politicians in Georgia walked out of the Capitol building after the law was passed. Walked out because their colleagues passed a law to protect the integrity of the voting process and to make sure those eligible to vote are voting. And they invoked Jim Crow, that repugnant system of government-mandated segregation based on skin color.

They fought the law, and the law won. For now. Last month the Department of Justice approved the law, but black liberals and their white enablers are still fighting it. What a noble cause!

Such silliness conjures up images of the poor ignorant darky caricature, too unrightously indignant to realize he sounds like a shameless fool, too ignorant to understand simple instructions or ask for help, too lazy to get up and go down to the DMV to get a FREE state-issued ID, too ingratiating and bent low to see all the white folks laughing at his sorry, indignant, ignorant, lazy, unmotivated butt.

Angry. Insulted. Disgusted. These words are too weak to convey how I feel about people (especially whites) who think blacks are too stupid to follow the rules like everybody else.

Of course she's right. The worst form of racism in today's America is the kind that says that blacks just can't be expected to do what everybody else is required to do. It's a form of racism endemic to liberalism.

Making the Most of College

If you're a college student, about to be a college student, or a parent of a college student you might be interested in this essay by Greg Veltman. Veltman talks about college life and weaving the themes of Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons and a book titled My Freshman Year together with lyrics from Dave Matthews, among others, to paint a portrait of the joys as well as the emptiness and alienation that can accompany college life. He writes:

For me, college was marked by the experience of dissolving relationships, by family's scattering about the globe, and by home-packing-up and relocating hundreds of miles away. I have rarely returned to a place. Everything seems different where I used to belong. I am a stranger. But that reality is not just in the past, it is with me in the present. And this tangled life makes me remember that a heart can hurt. But it has also given me courage to take risks, to know that the way of real redemption means taking off an old self, and being made anew. The solution cannot be to turn life into an abstraction. As we tell our stories in community, we see our entanglement, and our vulnerabilities become connections with who we are, together.

There's much of value in Veltman's essay and I commend it to our readers. I also recommend this article in Rolling Stone for a disturbing look at the seamy side of modern college life. It's not just about drinking anymore. If you're a parent you might want to consider sending your daughters to a convent.

<i>Godless</i>

Ann Coulter sometimes steps over the line of civil discourse, but she is always provocative and never, ever concerned about being politically correct. Here are some quotes, courtesy of Human Events (no link available), from her new book Godless to illustrate the point:

Coulter on the Supreme Court: In 1992, the Court ruled it "unconstitutional" for a Reform rabbi to give a nonsectarian invocation at a high school graduation ceremony on the perfectly plausible grounds that Rhode Island was trying to establish Reform Judaism as the official state religion. (Opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy.) Yes, those scheming Jews have had their eyes on the Ocean State for as long as I can remember.

On crime: Whether it is building prisons, mandatory sentencing, three-strikes laws, or the death penalty, if it has to do with punishing criminals, Democrats are against it. Liberals prefer treatment, rehabilitation, alternatives to prison, even creative alternatives to prison -- but not prison! That would be "blaming the perpetrator."

On prisons: Between 1995 and 2005, the prison population grew by 30 percent, meaning an additional half million criminals were behind bars, rather than lurking in dark alleys with switchblades. You can well imagine liberals' surprise when the crime rate went down as more criminals were put in prison. The New York Times was reduced to running querulous articles with headlines like "Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction" and "As Crime Rate Drops, the Prison Rate Rises and the Debate Rages."

On public schools: Public schools are forbidden from mentioning religion not because of the Constitution, but because public schools are the Left's madrassas... At least the crazy Muslims get funding from Saudi Arabia for their madrassas. Liberals force normal Americans to pay for their religious schools.

On the media's ignorance of religion: In another interview, [the Rev. Richard John] Neuhaus told a reporter that political corruption had "been around ever since that unfortunate afternoon in the garden." The reporter mulled it over before asking, "What garden was that?" In defense of the American educational system, every single one of these reporters knew how to put on a condom.

On abortion: No matter what else they pretend to care about from time to time - undermining national security, aiding terrorists, oppressing the middle class, freeing violent criminals - the single most important item on the Democrats' agenda is abortion. Indeed, abortion is the one issue the Democratic Party is willing to go to war over - except in the Muslim world, which is jam-packed with prohibitions on abortion, because going to war against a Muslim nation might also serve America's national security objectives.

On liberals' obsession with Fox News: Fox News isn't even particularly conservative, though it is recognizably American. I believe the one verified atrocity committed by Fox News was the wearing of American flag lapel pins after 9/11. Assuming - against all evidence - that Fox News is every bit as conservative as CBS is liberal, it is still just a small beachhead in a universe of liberal-speak. But the mere existence of one solitary network that doesn't toe the party line has driven the Left insane.

On Cindy Sheehan: Call me old-fashioned, but a grief-stricken war mother shouldn't have her own full-time PR flack. After your third profile on Entertainment Tonight, you're no longer a grieving mom; you're a C-list celebrity trolling for a book deal or a reality show. At that point, you're no longer mourning, you're "branding."

On public school teachers: We are simultaneously supposed to gasp in awe at teachers' raw dedication and be forced to listen to their incessant caterwauling about how they don't make enough money. Well, which is it? Are they dedicated to teaching or are they in it for the money? After all the carping about how little teachers are paid, if someone enters the teaching profession for the big bucks, aren't they too stupid to be teaching our kids?

On Darwinism: Liberals creation myth is Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which is about one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor. It's a make-believe story, based on a theory that is a tautology, with no proof in the scientist's laboratory or the fossil record - and that's after 150 years of very determined looking. We wouldn't still be talking about it but for the fact that liberals think evolution disproves God.

On the fossil record: The preposterous conceit that the fossil record has produced a mosaic of organisms consistent with evolution except for the occasional "gap" is absurd. Evolution is nothing but a gap. It's a conjecture about how species might have arisen that is contradicted by the fossil record and by nearly everything we have learned about molecular biology since Darwin's day.

On religion "vs." evolution: The only religious belief driving opinions about evolution is atheism. God can do anything, including evolution. But the value of Darwinism for atheists is that it is the only way they can explain why we are here. (It's an accident!) If evolution doesn't work out for them, they'll have to expand on theories about extraterrestrials or comets bringing life to earth.

On Darwinism and Nazism: Hitler's embrace of Darwinism is not a random fact, unrelated to the reason we know his name. It is impossible to understand Hitler's monstrous views apart from his belief in natural selection applied to races. He believed Darwin's theory of natural selection showed that "science" justified the extermination of the Jews.

On Darwinism's appeal to liberals: Liberals subscribe to Darwinism not because it's "science," which they hate, but out of wishful thinking. Darwinism lets them off the hook morally. Do whatever you feel like doing - screw your secretary, kill Grandma, abort your defective child - Darwin says it will benefit humanity! Nothing is ever wrong as long as you follow your instincts. Just do it - and let Mother Earth sort out the winners and losers.

I haven't read her book, but people I've talked to who have say that, aside from one or two instances where she is needlessly offensive, it's difficult to disagree with much of what she writes.

By's Reply

Byron continues our discussion on last month's post titled Perky Economy. His initial response to that post, with my replies, is here. His reaction to what I wrote there follows below in indented quotes:

I think your reply to my concern about your post [where you suggested that some will find fault with the economy and that you surmise they are so partisan that they would enjoy the suffering of the poor that a bad ecomomy brings] needs a rebuttle. I thank you, again, for taking the time to reply and clarify your views with me and your other readers.

1. You suggest that it isn't wrong to be critical of a generic group of people but less proper to name names. I suppose this gets you off the hook on this one, but I still worry about what it appears to be--forgive me if I overstate it a bit--a growing mean-spiritedness, in your willingness to do this. You follow your hunch about this and it comes out nasty, I think, presuming the worst about nearly everyone on the left. Such critique I don't think stands up to experience and simply isn't a helpful contribution.

Here's perhaps a distinction. You can choose if it is one that makes a difference: to say that there are Dems that hope the President fails is patently true, and so self-evident that I wonder why it bothers you. (Is this not the nature of partisan politics? Is there not an equally common hope, among Republicans, say, when a Democrat holds office, that he or she will flub up and be dislodged? I know politics ought not be reduced to a game---which is one reason I favor proportional representation, to get away from this "winner takes all" win/lose mentality---but can you imagine a fan not hoping his team's opponant loses? Duh.)

I think there's a vast difference between hoping the president fails in some matter which opponents think would be bad for the country (say a tax plan or an immigration bill) and hoping that the president fails in something like reviving the economy or winning the war in Iraq. Honest people can disagree over whether a tax plan would be wise and good, but no one disagrees that reviving the economy or winning the war in Iraq are essential to human well-being, both ours and that of others. To recognize the overriding importance and good of these things but to nevertheless hope that the president fails so that one's party will benefit is contemptible and there are some, I believe, who do exactly this. I would not be surprised if there were Republicans who did it when Clinton was in office, and I think it obvious that there are some who are doing it now that Bush is president. They know that success in either the economic or foreign policy sphere will spell political failure for their party and themselves. For such people political success and power are everything and securing these ends justifies almost anything. This is especially true today, in my opinion, of the secular left.

But you go further, saying that the left will be happy about the sorrow and disorder, gleeful for the suffering caused, implying that they are heartless. I believe you've implied this about the war, too, not only that Dems hope Bush fails (an obviously common situation) but that they will be happy if America is defeated, if terrorists win, if our soldiers are killed. Such a desire---to see increased suffering just for partisan victory--does not follow from those who have strongly held partisan ideals.

It certainly does. A Bush failure in the war or in the economy would entail the suffering of millions. To hope for the former, as By admits some do, demands that one be willing to accept the latter. By the way, I never said that Bush's opponents would be either "happy" or "gleeful" at the misery of others, only that they would prefer that unfortunate state of affairs to having Bush succeed. The sentence that has elicited Byron's criticism and concern was this:

"The Bush economy continues to chug along like the little engine that could despite the woeful prognostications of those who, perhaps for political purposes, seem to prefer to see it bogged down in the mire of recession."

So, again, I think it is inaccurate and unhelpful to say these negative things about the general groups of left-wingers or anti-Bush activists as you do. Of course, the vile and vicious haters on the left (who do exist, and are to be repudiated at every turn, or ignored, if that works better) do not stand for most of those who disagree with the current Administration. You can argue robustly against the views of the left without accusing them of such dark motivations or heartless desires.

Byron takes a sentence critical of the behavior of some of Bush's critics, a segment of the political population whose existence he acknowledges, and from it concludes that I am unfairly criticizing almost everyone who disagrees with the Bush administration. This is simply fallacious. It's like arguing that because some men are bad that therefore they all are.

2. That you would suggest that a growing homeless underclass does not indicate something broken in the economy is a matter that I must protest. If there is a growing number of unemployed and poverty-striken people, there is something very wrong. The Bible plainly teaches this and I think it stands to reason. If you've ever worked in a soup kitchen for more than 10 minutes, or met a recipient of a Habitat House, you know full well that many, many of those who have to go to soup kitchens are, in fact, the working poor. Or they are the children of the working poor. Of course some are irresponsible bums and some might better themselves if they had character and skills taught to them by someone who cared. But it simply is untrue that those who get food stamps, go to the soup kitchen or take WIC milk and cheese are unwilling to work; many work hard, wait for buses to get to odd jobs, and show extraordinary effort for little pay.

Nothing in the post to which Byron responds says that people in need are unwilling to work. I wrote that "their problem is not that they are unemployed but that they are unemployable." They may be unemployable for many different reasons and an unwillingness to work is only one. Many of them are mentally troubled, or they have an addiction, or they are poorly educated and unskilled, or they're single mothers who can't leave their children. The point is that the plight of these people would be the same no matter what the economy is doing. Imagine we were at full employment which we almost are. Imagine that everyone who could work was working for at least a subsistence wage. Would the predicament of these people be any different? I don't think so. They're not unemployed because there are no jobs for them but rather because they are unable or unwilling to do the jobs there are.

To cite the problems of the underclass as reason to think the economy is not doing well is misleading.

(Oddly, you suggest that they could take the jobs the immigrants are so willing to take. That presumes they live in a part of the country where there are many undocumented workers; poor moms with children in an urban city school---I'm thinking of our own town of York--can't just go off to be a migrant worker, you know, even if some immigrant families seem willing to take up that nomatic lifestyle.

Byron seems to think that illegal immigrants are mostly California farm laborers. This of course is hardly the case as New York City Mayor Bloomberg's remark the other day shows. Bloomberg said that without illegal aliens working in the city the economy of New York would collapse. I doubt that Bloomberg had migrant workers in mind.

It surely isn't fair to expect a slightly emotionally disturbed guy I know, fired from a job at a convenience store, unable to pay his rent, needing to get economic assistance, to move to LA and become a nanny, like some Central American illegal immigrants do. That is just a nutty suggestion and serves to dismiss the realities of the un or underemployed in our community.) So, I believe you too easily dismiss my claim that an economy with many poor people is not healthy. I do not suggest you don't care about the poor, but I would ask that such charitable care show up in your analysis of what constitutes a perky economy.

Byron implies that I made the "nutty suggestion" that an emotionally disturbed person out of work should travel across the country to get a job. Not only is there nothing in what I said even remotely close to this, it is completely off the point. What we should remain focussed on is that no matter how good the economy is this unfortunate individual is probably going to be perpetually in and out of work and in need of some kind of assistance. His problem is due to his mental condition, not to the state of the economy.

3. I am glad you will not mock the motivations of those who will testify about the nutritional needs of the poor at the upcoming hearing. I did not, of course, say you did.

Perhaps not, but then why did he close his piece with this gratuitous line: "There are hearings in mid-July about these various things [the plight of the poor] at the Farm Show arena here in Central PA where the government hopes to get better insight about the needs of the poor .... I hope you don't suggest that these saints [advocates on behalf of the poor], who will surely cry out to any who will hear, that their people are hurting, will be happy about it."

Why even say this unless one wishes to imply that I might indeed be so unkind as to make such a terrible suggestion?

But, be clear: most of the social workers and church observers and anti-poverty activists that will testify at such a hearing will be those who have sad, sad stories of increasing poverty and who are deeply burdened by it all. They will denounce the economy and they may hold the policies of the current administration to blame. They will be, I am afraid, much like the people who you started out to criticize in your post; those whose care and rage against injustice you take to be motivated by such partisan agendas as to render their voices insincere.

What does this have to do with the fact that there are some people who, for political reasons, are not happy with a Bush success? People who think that the government should be doing more to help the poor have no quarrel, or should have no quarrel, with the state of the economy. Their fight is over social policy which is a different issue. How the economy is doing is a separate matter from what the government should be doing to relieve the suffering of the poor. To conflate them is a confusion.

If you hold to the position you do in your post---that many who are critical of the economy just delight in the bad news---then it only follows that if you went to that hearing and heard the chorus of those who find the ecomony hurtful, you could say of them what you said in your post. I didn't mean to accuse you of putting down the servants of the poor; I just connected the dots of your generic accusation of the disaffected and applied it in my mind to these same attitudes that are expressed almost uniformly by those who work among the poor.

Again, the concern of these people is over how the government disburses its resources among the poor. It really has little to do with whether the economy is doing well or not. A robust economy at full employment and good job growth is simply not going to help the underclass very much except insofar as it stimulates charitable giving and increases tax revenues which may go to programs for the poor.

4. You didn't reply at all to my very real questions about the link to the story that started it all, a story that in my perception documented very negative facts about the economy, a very negative story, despite the one perky sentence that I guess you took to be the highlight. Your "read" of that story reminded me of the kid at Christmas who was overjoyed by a gift of horse manure. She happily exclaimed, "Wow, this means that there has to be a horse around here somewhere."

I didn't reply to this because my response was to the e-mail that Byron sent to our Feedback page. The questions he mentions in the preceding paragraph were raised by him in a private correspondence and were not part of the argument he sent to Viewpoint.

Perhaps it isn't always the left whose views are not fully aligned with the facts and whose partisanship has clouded their judgement.

Byron

I agree with that, but if it's intended to imply partisanship on my part then I must demur. A political partisan puts party above policy. I don't. I am critical of the left because I believe their policies, and in some cases their behavior, are dreadful. I am less critical of conservatives because generally, though not always, I think their policies are good for the country. It just so happens that currently the secular left is in control of the Democratic party and the extremist left comprises a big part of their political base. Likewise, the principles and ideas I find appealing are being advocated, to the extent that they're advocated at all, mostly by Republicans. I would happily vote for any Democratic candidate that held the views that I do, especially if his/her Republican opponent did not. That's not partisanship.

White Guilt

I've recently finished reading Shelby Steele's White Guilt, and I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in race relations in America. Steele uses his recollections of a long drive along the California coast during the height of the Clinton/Lewinsky contretemps together with his reactions to a speech he heard Dick Gregory give back when he was a senior in college as springboards for some very insightful meditations on the loss of moral authority among whites and the benefits and harm that have accrued to blacks as a consequence.

Steele finds much for which to fault both whites and blacks in the way each tends to handle issues involving race, but one of the sins he doesn't think has been a major factor in racial matters since the 1960s is racism. Racism has been replaced by what he calls white guilt, and its consequence, white blindness.

With the revolution in civil rights of the fifties and sixties, Steele argues, it became very unfashionable for whites, even among themselves, to express racist sentiments. In fact, whites, particularly liberal whites, were overcome with a sense that they had lost the moral authority they formerly enjoyed by virtue of their whiteness. In an attempt to regain that authority whites have been desperate to demonstrate to blacks that they are not racists. This obsessive need to prove their racial bona fides is what Steele means by white guilt and it has been calamitous for blacks, not just because it has led to preference programs, quotas, affirmative action, and many lesser manifestations of the phenomenon which actually harm blacks but also because of the message of black inferiority it proclaims to both whites and blacks.

Nor, as Steele points out, are these measures actually taken on behalf of blacks. On the contrary, they're in fact attempts by whites to expiate their own guilt. As a result, blacks as individual persons become almost invisible. They are reduced to a means by which white administrators and employers can show the world that they support racial diversity and are not ignorant bigots.

To reinforce the point, whites, who still have power but not moral authority, tolerate from blacks what would not be tolerated from other whites. Indeed, white guilt causes whites to acquiesce to the nonsensical view that it's racist to fault blacks for educational failure, criminality, family dysfunction, and sexual libertinism. To blame blacks for these dysgenic flaws, it is said, is to blame the victim. The black man or woman can't help his failure because he/she's not playing on a level field. Thus whites, out of guilt, tacitly acknowledge that blacks can't be expected to live by the same standards as other people. Out of guilt they throw money at black problems and hold no one accountable for where the money goes or how it is spent, and out of blindness whites refuse to see the harmful effects this has had on blacks.

Blacks, of course, have been quick to capitalize on white guilt and the more guilty whites can be made to feel the more their guilt is exploited. Black power, according to Steele is the flip side of white guilt. There never would have been a black power movement had there not been the need for whites to purge themselves of the stain of racism.

Steele is not saying that racism wasn't real. He grew up with it and understands its perniciousness. What he's saying is that racism as an impediment to black well-being in this country is largely spent and irrelevant, but because of white guilt blacks are able to milk its residue in hundreds of ways, often to their own detriment.

As I read Steele's book I thought of the too-numerous-to-count occasions when I found myself shaking my head at some witless white person who, eager to demonstrate his or her racial good-heartedness, remarked about a black that "he's a good-looking black man," or noted that this particular black, usually an athlete, is "articulate" or "intelligent."

People rarely remark about these qualities in quite the same way when they're talking about whites. How often have you heard someone described as "a good looking white man"? How often is a white athlete described as "articulate" or "intelligent." Not often, and the reason is because whites are simply expected to be articulate, etc. By remarking on the black person's looks, articulateness or intelligence the patronizing commentator was inadvertantly implying that it's noteworthy to find a black who is good-looking or articulate or intelligent. In other words, the people who try hardest to show they're not racist are often the very ones who still have a problem, not only with race but with sounding stupid.

Another example of white guilt most of us have witnessed is the willingness of many whites to abjectly concede the high ground to any black when the discussion turns to racial matters. It's as if white guilt precludes a white person from having anything worth saying on the subject unless it is to agree with the black interlocutor. Whites, out of guilt, willingly and gladly yield to blacks a kind of authority and infallibility that blacks then use to beat whites over their collective heads with. In these situations, blacks often wind up lecturing, and hectoring, their supine white listeners who feel that any expression beyond nodding in agreement is to somehow overstep their bounds and any objection to what the black authority is saying just proves that the whites are oblivious to their own racism.

If, for instance, a black man tells a white man that he's a racist many whites will meekly acknowledge the truth of the indictment even though they honestly can't find anything inside them that justifies the claim. Yet they believe they must be racist because the racial authority has declared them to be such.

Anyway, read White Guilt. The book is eloquent and every page contains a nugget of pure gold. It's a powerful argument against the last thirty years of racial attitudes and practices in this country and it shines a bright light on the foolishness and servility of liberal solutions to the problem of race over the last four or five decades.

Designing Life

Harvard's George Church is going to give the anti-ID crowd a case of the vapors with talk like this:

We're acting as engineers, possibly as intelligent designers. The religiously-inclined would not put humans in the same league with the "Intelligent Designer", or God. As creative as we become, and as industrious and as good as we are at designing and manufacturing living things, which we've been doing since the stone age - no matter how good we get at that, it's like calling a candle a supernova. A candle is not a super nova; it's not even in the same league. And we, as intelligent designers, are not in the same league as the "Intelligent Design" forces that started the whole shebang. We're not designing sub-atomic particles from scratch; we're not designing galaxies. We're really not even designing the basic idea of life; we're just manipulating it.

Church is a biologist at Harvard trying to fabricate living systems. As he describes his work (see link) it's clear that all the metaphors and analogies he employs presuppose that the fabricated systems must be engineered using mathematics and computation. In other words, apparently life cannot adequately be explained without the use of figures of speech which suggest that it is the product of intelligent agency and purpose.

The Duke 88

When the allegations of the assault of an exotic dancer by Duke University lacrosse players first surfaced a group of 88 faculty members signed a public statement which pretty much assumed the young men were guilty of the crime for which they were charged.

Now that it looks like the District Attorney prosecuting these students has no case we wonder whether an apology from these august academicians will be forthcoming. Will they publically confess to being intemperately hasty? Will they do public penance for the role they played in making these boys' lives a living hell? Will they confess to the sin of contributing to the destruction of these boys' reputations?

Probably not. Being a tenured academic means never having to accept responsibility for your irresponsibility.

The Ugly Side of John McCain

NewsMax's Ronald Kessler has an amazing story that reveals why Senator McCain is so unpopular with so many who work with him. If this information gets wide circulation McCain can forget about the Republican nomination, and if, through some amazing twist of events, he does get the nomination, this article and ones like it will certainly get wide circulation by the Democrats:

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is considered a front-runner for the 2008 race, but does McCain have the temperament to be president? As portrayed by the mainstream media, McCain is an engaging war hero, a man of political moderation positioned between the left and the right. But to insiders who know him, McCain has an irrational, explosive side that make many of them question whether he is fit to serve as president and be commander in chief.

Nowhere is that sentiment stronger than in the Senate, where McCain has few friends or supporters. In fact, when McCain ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2000, only four Republican senators endorsed him. "I have witnessed incidents where he has used profanity at colleagues and exploded at colleagues," said former Senator Bob Smith, a New Hampshire Republican who served with McCain on the Senate Armed Services Committee and on Republican policy committees. "He would disagree about something and then explode. It was incidents of irrational behavior. We've all had incidents where we have gotten angry, but I've never seen anyone act like that."

McCain's outbursts often erupted when other members rebuffed his requests for support during his bid in 2000 for the Republican nomination for president. A former Senate staffer recalled what happened when McCain asked for support from a fellow Republican senator on the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. "The senator explained that he had already committed to support George Bush," the former Senate staffer said. "McCain said 'f- you' and never spoke to him again."

"He had very few friends in the Senate," said former Senator Smith, who dealt with McCain almost daily. "He has a lot of support around the country, but I don't think he has a lot of support from people who know him well."

Another former senator who requested anonymity recalled an exchange at a Republican policy lunch. McCain turned on another senator who disagreed with him. "McCain used the f-word," the former senator said. "McCain called the guy a 'sh--head.' The senator demanded an apology. McCain stood up and said, 'I apologize, but you're still a sh--head.' That was in front of 40 to 50 Republican senators. That sort of thing happened frequently."

"People who disagree with him get the f--- you," said former Rep. John LeBoutillier, a New York Republican who had an encounter with McCain when he was on a POW task force in the House. After LeBoutillier had openly tape recorded comments at a conference, McCain got the idea that LeBoutillier was secretly tape recording him.

"Are you wired up?" LeBoutillier quoted McCain as asking. "Of course not," LeBoutillier said.

"Prove it," McCain said. LeBoutillier said he lowered his pants, apparently satisfying McCain that he was not taping him.

"He is a vicious person," LeBoutillier said. "Nearly all the Republican senators endorsed Bush because they knew McCain from serving with him in the Senate. They so disliked him that they wouldn't support him. They have been on the hard end of his behavior."

Andrea Jones, McCain's press secretary, did not respond to requests from NewsMax for comment.

Senators are leery of speaking on the record about what McCain is really like. Bob Smith described his behavior reluctantly. A former Republican senator listed Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, and Pete Dominici, fellow Republican senators, as being among those who had encountered McCain's outbursts, but none of them agreed to be interviewed on the subject.

Most major media outlets have been uninterested in pursuing the subject. Virtually every media outlet ran Sen. Trent Lott's comment at a 100th birthday tribute to Strom Thurmond. As a result of the criticism over his remarks, Lott stepped aside as Senate majority leader. But only a few news outlets, like the Phoenix New Times in Arizona and the National Journal, that ran an Associated Press story reporting McCain's 1998 joke suggesting that Chelsea Clinton was ugly and Janet Reno and Hillary Clinton were lesbians.

"Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?" McCain said at a GOP fund-raiser in Washington. "Because Janet Reno is her father." McCain apologized to the Clintons. But more recently, McCain said on Fox News, "You know, the French remind me a little bit of an aging actress of the 1940s who is still trying to dine out on her looks but doesn't have the face for it."

In part because he gives reporters access and charms them with his apparent openness, McCain gets good press. "A presidential candidate is not supposed to talk at length and on the record about the rules he broke or the strippers he dated, or the time he arrived so drunk that he fell through the screen door of the young lady he was wooing," Time wrote in a Dec. 13, 1999 profile of McCain. "The candor tells you more than the comment, and reporters sometimes just decide to take him off the record because they don't want to see him flame out and burn up a great story."

"National reporters may genuflect, but local journalists cringe at the thought of covering McCain, better known in Arizona for his short temper, refusal to take calls, and attempts at media manipulation than for the 'straight talk' he doles out . . ." a Playboy profile said in February 2000.

When people have come forward to relate their bizarre experiences with McCain, only minor publications or the foreign press have run their accounts. The favored treatment is reminiscent of the way the press turned a blind eye to John F. Kennedy's dalliances - except that voters have far more need to know about evidence of instability than presidential infidelities.

"The White House is a character crucible," according to Bertram S. Brown, M.D., a psychiatrist who formerly headed the National Institute of Mental Health and was an aide to President John F. Kennedy. "It either creates or distorts character . . . . Even if an individual is balanced, once someone becomes president, how does one solve the conundrum of staying real and somewhat humble when one is surrounded by the most powerful office in the land and from becoming overwhelmed by an at times pathological environment that treats you every day as an emperor?

"Here is where the true strength of the character of the person, not his past accomplishments, will determine whether his presidency ends in accomplishment or failure."

When asked about his temper, McCain has portrayed himself as angry about issues. "Do I feel passionately about issues? Absolutely," McCain has said. "Do I get angry when I see pork barreling and wasteful spending? Absolutely."

But McCain's outbursts have not been directed at policy issues or waste. Instead, even if they are longtime friends, he explodes at people who disagree with him or who tell him they cannot support him. Pat Murphy, an editor at the Arizona Republic, became friends with McCain in the early 1980s. As Murphy rose to become publisher of the paper, their friendship continued.

In 1989, Murphy and his wife Betty had lunch with McCain in the Senate dining room. They were talking about a hearing on a federal project to build a dam system designed to deliver water from the Colorado River to Arizona. Even though the project was supposed to be non-partisan, McCain told Murphy he had planted highly technical questions with a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee to ask when Rose Mofford, the governor of Arizona, testified.

The idea was, because she was a Democrat, to make her squirm when she did not know the answers. Murphy was horrified and told McCain his feelings. After that, McCain froze him out.

"What has struck me about McCain is that everybody underestimated the ability of his advisers and him to hypnotize the national media, because most of us in the media in Arizona thought of him as a guy who had a terrible temper, occasionally had a foul mouth, a guy who whined and pouted unless he got his way," Murphy said. "McCain has a temper that is bombastic, volatile, and purple-faced. Sometimes he gets out of control. Do you want somebody sitting in the White House with that kind of temper?'

Former Phoenix Mayor Paul Johnson, a Democrat, encountered McCain's temper when he and other local mayors briefed the Arizona congressional delegation on local issues. After Johnson spoke, McCain said, "Hold it a minute. Somebody write down everything this guy has to say. You know what, we need to record him. It's best to get a liar on tape."

Johnson stood up and said, "Senator, if you have a problem with me, why don't we go out in the hallway and talk about it."

"You're goddamn right I have a problem with you," McCain said. "They've been treating you like a princess in Phoenix while they've been burning me over this dam deal, and I'm sick of it."

A longtime member of Senator Dennis DeConcini's staff, Judy Leiby, worked on veteran's issues and had differed with McCain on some of them over the years. After DeConcini announced he was retiring in 1994, McCain showed up in his office. "I was standing around talking to about a half a dozen postal workers I'd worked real closely with," Leiby recalled. "And McCain came in. He walked down the line, shaking hands, and he ignored me. And one postal worker said, 'Do you know Judy Leiby?' He said, 'Oh, yeah, I know her.'"

McCain turned away from Leiby, trembling.

"You could tell he was so angry, he was white," she said. "He turned back to me and said, 'I'm so glad you're out of a job, and I'll see that you never work again.'"

Of this incident, McCain said that because he didn't hold Leiby in "particularly high esteem," he thought it would be hypocritical to shake her hand. "I didn't raise my voice, didn't offer any disparaging remarks or insults," he said.

Jim Abbott, the supervisor of the Coronado National Forest, reported a similar threat by McCain in 1989. Worried about the impact on the endangered Mount Graham red squirrel, Abbott ordered a halt to construction of University of Arizona telescopes at the top of the mountain. McCain then asked to meet with Abbott and said, "If you do not cooperate on this project, you'll be the shortest-tenured forest supervisor in the history of the Forest Service."

A few days later, McCain called Abbott to apologize. Construction ultimately proceeded after McCain backed legislation to create an exemption for the project from the Endangered Species Act and other existing laws.

Democrat Marty Russo had an altercation with McCain when McCain was in the House, according to the Atlantic Monthly. "Seven-letter profanities escalated to 12-letter ones and then to pushes and shoves, before the two were separated," according to the account.

In 1993, the Boston Globe reported that McCain "came across the Senate floor and, while mocking [Ted] Kennedy, told him to 'shut up,' according to observers in the chamber. "A stunned Kennedy returned the comment, telling McCain to 'shut up' and 'act like a senator.'"

The previous year, Robin Silver and Bob Witzeman, both medical doctors, met with McCain at his Phoenix office to discuss the endangered Mount Graham red squirrel. At the mention of the issue, McCain erupted. "He slammed his fists on his desk, scattering papers across the room," Silver said. "He jumped up and down, screaming obscenities at us for at least 10 minutes. He shook his fists as if he was going to slug us." After Silver pointed out that his behavior was inappropriate, "He apologized and was contrite," Silver said.

Indeed, senators joke among themselves about their collection of "McCain Notes" - apologies McCain sends after he has unleashed a tirade. The question on the minds of those who know him is whether a man who seems so out of control should have the authority to unleash nuclear weapons.

"I think he is not fit to be president," said former congressman LeBoutillier.

If any of this is true, then neither do we think he's fit to be president. Kessler's liberal use of names and dates and the willingness of these people to go on the record certainly gives the story the ring of truth.

Sudden Popularity of SDI

Where now are the smug cynics who so derisively castigated Ronald Reagan for his vision of a missile defense system back in the 1980s? Where are the skeptics who sneeringly dismissed Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative by calling it a "Star Wars" fantasy? Where are the liberals who scorned George Bush for pursuing missile defense when he first took office?

Not in Tokyo, evidently:

Japan wants to develop a joint missile defense system with the United States as quickly as possible following North Korea's missile tests, the Japanese defense chief said.

"Along with the establishment of a surveillance radar network, we want to work with the United States to build an interception mechanism as soon as possible," Defense Agency chief Fukushiro Nukaga told parliament, as quoted by Kyodo News.

Doubtless the Japanese are thankful for the vision, realism, and resolution of both Reagan and Bush, and it's probable that when Iran starts launching ICBMs the haughty Europeans will also ask to be favored with the fruits of the "cowboy" Reagan's foresight.

On the other hand, if people like this had been heeded back in the eighties and nineties the anxiety produced by North Korea's recent missile launch would be several orders of magnitude greater, especially in Japan.

The nation can sleep better knowing that a workable missile defense is being deployed to protect against just such threats as North Korea wishes to pose. We can sleep better because of the determination of men like Ronald Reagan and George Bush to not leave us defenseless against a missile attack.

<i>24</i>

The television drama 24 has been nominated for 12 Emmys. I suppose I can understand why. It is gripping. I have never in my life paid attention to the Emmys, but I'll be interested to see how 24 does this year.

Not being able to watch the show for the past four seasons because of schedule conflicts and not being much of a television watcher in any case (I cannot abide commercial interruptions every ten minutes, for one thing), I decided to rent the first season on DVD and watch it this summer. I confess to having been won over. The storyline is a high tension, high adrenaline experience that lifts the viewer into a state of suspense from which he finds himself unable to climb down. It's only with difficulty that I could stop watching at the end of an hour. I felt compelled to stay with it through the entire DVD of four episodes, and, like a chain smoker, as soon as one DVD was finished I went out to rent the next one.

Even so, there were times when I found myself cringing at the implausibilities. 24 requires one to suspend a lot of credulity. Regular viewers of the program might find my complaints both outdated (since they're based on the first season) and perhaps a bit picayune, but I was struck by the fact that so many people could experience so many stressful, life-threatening and otherwise extraodinary events in the space of a single day without suffering complete collapse sometime around breakfast.

The show is also poorly cast, at least in its minor characters. For instance, in the very beginning we meet two young women, one of whom has just blown up an airliner full of people. These two actresses seem highly unlikely in the role of killers, being more suited to play a couple of girls planning a trip to the mall. Then there's Senator Palmer's son who is supposedly in his upper teens yet he's a foot shorter than his father. Nor does the main character, Jack Bauer, played by Keifer Sutherland, look the part of a near superhero.

Even worse, the writers have so many people killed in the space of one day that had something like this ever actually happened the national guard surely would have been called out and martial law would have been imposed to meet what would have been seen as a national crisis. Indeed, I don't know how the CTU (Counter Terrorism Unit) had enough staff left after the carnage to return for a second season.

Moreover, every major female character in the show, except perhaps Bauer's wife, was either incredibly stupid or evil.

Finally, in a show about counterterrorism, it just seemed an inordinately servile bow to political correctness to portray the terrorists as white Europeans and not Middle-Eastern Muslims.

Even so, despite these irritants, the show is addictive, and I'm afraid I'll be unable to resist starting season two this weekend. I might even tune in the Emmys.

NRO Flays <i>Hamdan</i>

The editors at National Review find the Supreme Court's decision in Hamden v. Rumsfeld to be an outrage and they build an excellent case in support of that conclusion. Here are a couple of paragraphs from an essay that would repay being read in its entirety:

To begin with, the Court had no business deciding this case at all. Not only did it target the president's commander-in-chief authority to determine what is militarily necessary in wartime, it also imperiously slapped down the U.S. Congress. In last December's Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), Congress - acting on its constitutional prerogative - rescinded the unprecedented jurisdiction that the Supreme Court, in the 2004 Rasul case, had claimed over alien enemy combatants captured in wartime and held outside the U.S. (that is, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts). This Court, however, acknowledges no limits on its powers - whether imposed by Congress or by the English language, which it had to torture in order to construe the DTA's unambiguous limitation of its jurisdiction as an invitation to meddle.

[T]he Geneva Conventions were irrelevant to Hamdan's case. He is a terrorist combatant who fails to meet the conventions' definition of a prisoner of war; consequently, he is not entitled to the conventions' POW protections. In order to get around this inconvenient fact, the Court had to invoke (and distort) "Common Article 3" of the conventions, which applies only to civil wars taking place within the territory of a single country, as opposed to international conflicts.

The Court argued, absurdly, that because al Qaeda is not a nation, it cannot be in an international conflict: so the global War on Terror is not "international," despite having been fought in the United States, Somalia, Yemen, Kenya, Tanzania, Afghanistan, and Iraq. As for Article 3's requirement that the conflicts to which it applies be confined to a single country, the Court's majority found an easy way to get around it: by ignoring it.

Read the rest at the link.

The Macgyver Hypothesis

Back in the late eighties and early nineties there was a show on television called Macgyver. The premise of the show was that Macgyver would fashion from whatever materials lay at hand some ingenious device that would get him out of whatever jam he was in during that week's episode.

I think of Macgyver everytime I read how the Darwinians seek to explain how Michael Behe's irreducibly complex machines, like the bacterial flagellum, could have arisen purely by natural selection. The theory is called co-option (or exaptation) and advocates maintain that the several dozen protein parts of the flagellum were probably present in the cell serving other functions prior to the emergence of the flagellum. At some point these parts were "co-opted" by the cell, guided by natural selection, and incorporated into the flagellar motor. We might call this the Macgyver hypothesis.

Unfortunately for the Macgyver hypothesis, it's even more implausible, if that can be believed, than the tv show. GilDodgen at Uncommon Descent explains why:

1) In order for co-option to produce a bacterial flagellum (for example) all of the component parts must have been present at the same time and in roughly the same place, and all of them must have had other naturally-selectable, useful functions. There is no evidence whatsoever that this ever was the case, or that it ever even could have been the case.

2) The components would have to have been compatible with each other functionally. A bolt that is too large, too small, or that has threads that are too fine or too coarse to match those of a nut, cannot be combined with the nut to make a fastener. There is absolutely no evidence that this interface compatibility ever existed (between all those imaginary co-opted component parts), or that it even could have existed.

3) Even if all the parts are available at the same time and in the same place, and are functionally compatible, one can't just put them in a bag, shake them up, and have a motor fall out. An assembly mechanism is required, and that mechanism must be complete in every detail, otherwise incomplete or improper assembly will result, and no naturally-selectable function will be produced. The assembly mechanism thus represents yet another irreducibly complex hurdle.

4) Last, and perhaps most importantly, assembly instructions are required. Assembly must be timed and coordinated properly. And the assembly instructions must be complete in every detail, otherwise no function will result. This represents an additional irreducibly complex hurdle.

Co-option is a demonstrably fantastic story made up out of whole cloth, with absolutely no basis in evidence. And it doesn't withstand even the most trivial analytical scrutiny. There is not a shred of evidence that this process ever took place, or that it even could have taken place. Worst of all, it requires blind acceptance of the clearly miraculous.

There is a great irony here. This verifiably ridiculous co-option fantasy is presented as "science," while a straightforward and reasonable inference to design is labeled pseudoscience. The real state of affairs is precisely the reverse.

The problem for Darwinians is that for them, given their metaphysical assumptions about science, they have to maintain that any naturalistic explanation, no matter how far-fetched or improbable, is still preferable to an explanation that invokes intentionality. What they need to be reminded of, of course, is the fact that Macgyver was an intelligent designer.

Independence Day Meditation

In a time of terror and war, when the demands of security seem sometimes in tension with freedoms we've enjoyed for over two centuries, it's good to take a moment to reflect on what is at stake in the conflict in which we find ourselves.

The Islamic world, or at least that part of it that has embraced Wahhabism, is comitted to an eternal war against those whom they believe to be infidels. They see this as a war that Allah commands them to wage, and they believe themselves enjoined by God to fight until either the infidels are no more or until we have all converted to Islam. The Islamists believe that Allah has blessed them in this struggle and that he will ultimately give them victory. They have the resolve of men convinced that they walk in the will of God.

There is then no negotiating with them, no persuading them that they should give up the fight. Our only options are to fight them or surrender to them. Our choice is between constant vigilance and more 9/11s.

There are those who think that the Islamists are driven by oppression, or poverty or grievances against the United States for its policies in the Middle East, and they argue that if we could mitigate these conditions the Muslims would relent. This is a grave mistake.

The Islamic terrorists are driven by an amalgam of religious fanaticism, an inferiority complex, and hatred for Western societies which have historically surpassed them in every way. They see the war they are waging as the continuation of hostilities that failed at Tours in France in 732 and again at Vienna in 1683. After each unsuccessful invasion the Muslim tide receded in order to regather its strength for another assault. In other words, for them this is the resumption of a 1300 year long war that began within a century of the death of Mohammed and will continue as long as there are infidels left on the earth. We can be thankful that President Bush seems to understand this even if many who oppose him do not.

In light of the long struggle in which we are engaged, and the alternatives which are set before us, it is appropriate on this July 4th that we pause to reflect upon what it is we hold precious, what it is we fight for, and who it is that we fight against.

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On a somewhat more serene note, Here's a Fourth of July card for all of our readers. You'll need your speakers on.