Sunday Editorial

I was invited to join a number of non-journalists in the York area who will be submitting columns to the local Sunday paper over the next year. My first contribution is on the Iraq war and borrowed from a post I had written some time ago for Viewpoint. It appeared in yesterday's paper:

Feb 11, 2007 - President Bush has taken much criticism, some of it deserved, for the way the post-war has played out in Iraq. Disillusionment with the Iraqis and the rules under which we operate there has led many to favor bringing our troops home as soon as logistically possible. The day may come when we decide to do that, but before the American public signs on to such a step we should understand clearly what withdrawal will entail.

One need not be a military expert to anticipate that the aftermath of an American pullout would likely include at least these seven consequences:

1. Sunni and Shia would be at each others' throats in a desperate civil war for political dominance. It would be a fight for survival because whoever prevails would surely oppress, if not utterly eliminate, the loser.

2. Iran would move into Iraq on behalf of the Shia and to settle old scores with the Iraqi Sunnis dating back to the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. They would doubtless annex the oil fields in the south. Meanwhile, pressure would mount on Sunni nations like Egypt and Saudi Arabia to come to the aid of their beleaguered brethren. Turkey would take advantage of the chaos to settle their chronic Kurdish problem by invading northern Iraq. Syria would be sorely tempted to grab some oil fields wherever it could. Iraq would get carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey among its neighbors and would be almost completely helpless to prevent it.

3. Al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations would exploit Iraq's weakness to establish training areas and safe havens in the country from which to launch terrorist attacks around the world.

4. Anyone who had collaborated with or cooperated with the coalition would be marked for torture and death by insurgent forces. This could amount to perhaps hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Iraqis.

5. The chaos of war and the rape of the country's resources would result in severe shortages of food, water, medical care, sanitation and electricity. Refugees would flood into neighboring states and subsist in squalid camps. Perhaps millions of Iraqis would starve or perish from disease if these conditions persisted more than a few months.

6. The United States would be thoroughly discredited and blamed for the misery and strife in Iraq because of our retreat. No nation would ever trust us again to honor a commitment. Pressure from their people would cause governments in Kuwait, Oman and Qatar to insist we abandon our bases there. Other Muslim nations, like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Indonesia, seeing that we are undependable partners in the war on terror, would ratchet back their cooperation. As the last American helicopter flees Baghdad, every Arab nation with enough money will begin looking for nuclear weapons to protect themselves from the Iranians. Nations like Libya, which had given up the quest for nuclear weapons, would feel safe to resume it.

7. Our lack of credibility in the region would embolden Israel's neighbors to settle the "Zionist problem" once and for all. Once we start pulling out of the Middle East, it would be psychologically impossible to reverse course and go back in. The enemies of Israel would see our withdrawal as presenting them with a golden opportunity to wipe Israel from the Earth, and the Israelis would probably resort to nuclear weapons to keep that from happening.

It may be, of course, that none of these things would occur. It may be that in the vacuum created by our absence the Shia and Sunni would turn their swords into plowshares and live amicably with each other.

It may be that other nations would not be at all tempted to grab what they can of Iraq's oil wealth.

It may be that al-Qaida feels content in the hills of Pakistan and wouldn't move in force into Iraq.

It may be that the insurgents would forgive and forget the collaboration of their fellow Iraqis with the infidels.

It may be that Israel's Arab neighbors would feel sorry for Israel in its isolated and vulnerable state and offer to make peace instead of war.

And it may be that the Second Coming will be tomorrow, but all of our experience tells us it probably won't be, and it is our experience which should inform our judgments and policies, especially our foreign policy.

The status quo in Iraq is certainly not acceptable, and we may soon decide that we've done enough there, but, if so, let us not delude ourselves by thinking we are doing something noble or moral by withdrawing. A premature exit would consign hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Iraqis to almost certain death and would earn us the contempt of history for our betrayal.

There is an opportunity to comment at the link.

RLC

Honoring a Hero

Those readers of a certain vintage will remember how the left vilified Ronald Reagan as a trigger happy cowboy who was, they insisted, the greatest threat to the world's existence ever to serve as a head of state. His resolve in refusing to bend to the Soviets' attempt to achieve military dominance in Europe, and his refusal to back down from his plan to place medium range Pershing missiles in Europe within striking distance of Moscow, drove the left into apoplexy.

So it is that those of us who thought his determination to gain peace through strength was the correct course and that his plan to drive the Soviet Union to collapse was absolutely necessary read this article at Breitbart.com with particular satisfaction:

Opponents of Poland's former communist regime reportedly want to pay a posthumous homage to US President Ronald Reagan by erecting his statue in the place of a Soviet-era monument.

In an open letter to the mayor of the southwestern city of Katowice, the former anti-regime activists said that the staunchly anti-communist Reagan had been a "symbol of liberty," the Polish news agency PAP reported.

As a result, they said, he deserved to become the centrepiece of the city's Freedom Square, replacing a monument to the Soviet troops who drove out the occupying Nazis in 1945.

They also said that they wanted the site to be rebaptised "Ronald Reagan Freedom Square."

There are already separate plans to erect a statue in memory of Reagan in the centre of the Polish capital, Warsaw, which would be paid-for from private funds.

Reagan, who dubbed the Soviet Union an "evil empire," is widely credited by Poles with having driven communism to the wall.

The conservative Republican made fighting communism the cornerstone of his 1980-1988 presidency, and backed Poland's Solidarity trade union after it went underground when the regime declared martial law in 1981.

I was reminded the other day that while Reagan was working to dismantle the "evil empire," Sen. Ted Kennedy was trying to arrange a meeting with Soviet premier Yuri Andropov to discuss ways that Reagan could be undermined. Some things never change. One of them is the complete unwillingness of the left to stand up to any tyranny that is not allied to the United States.

Anyway, maybe a couple of decades from now Iraqis will be erecting statues of George Bush in Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. Wouldn't that just drive the Bush-haters completely bonkers.

RLC

Unhappy People

One liberal at Daily Kos comes right out and says what a lot of them seem to think:

When pressed, I sometimes reply: "I don't hate America. In fact, think it's one of the best countries anyone ever stole." But, after the laughter dies down, I have a confession to make: If by "America" they mean the elected/appointed officials and the corporations that own them, well, I guess I do hate that America-with justification.

Among many reasons, I hate America for the near-extermination and subsequent oppression of its indigenous population. I hate it for its role in the African slave trade and for dropping atomic bombs on civilians. I hate its control of institutions like the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization. I hate it for propping up brutal dictators like Suharto, Pinochet, Duvalier, Hussein, Marcos, and the Shah of Iran. I hate America for its unconditional support for Israel. I hate its bogus two-party system, its one-size-fits-all culture, and its income gap. I could go on for pages but I'll sum up with this: I hate America for being a hypocritical white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

"I'm committed to fighting U.S. foreign policy, the greatest threat to peace and happiness in the world, and being in the United States is the best place for carrying out the battle. This is the belly of the beast, and I try to be an ulcer inside of it."

[N]o, I do not support the troops and yes, I hate what America does.

For the left it's always about what they hate. Very unhappy people, leftists.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Hoping for Peace, Preparing for War

The Guardian thinks that a strike against Iran, administration denials notwithstanding, will come this spring. The ostensible reason is Iran's nuclear weapons program and their repeated intention to use those weapons once they have them.

Vincent Cannistraro, a Washington-based intelligence analyst, shared the sources' assessment that Pentagon planning was well under way. "Planning is going on, in spite of public disavowals by Gates. Targets have been selected. For a bombing campaign against nuclear sites, it is quite advanced. The military assets to carry this out are being put in place."

He added: "We are planning for war. It is incredibly dangerous."

The bad guys in The Guardian scenario are the neo-cons at The American Enterprise Institute and in the Vice-President's office, including the Great Satan himself:

Neo-conservatives, particularly at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, are urging Mr Bush to open a new front against Iran. So too is the vice-president, Dick Cheney. The state department and the Pentagon are opposed, as are Democratic congressmen and the overwhelming majority of Republicans. The sources said Mr Bush had not yet made a decision. The Bush administration insists the military build-up is not offensive but aimed at containing Iran and forcing it to make diplomatic concessions. The aim is to persuade Tehran to curb its suspect nuclear weapons programme and abandon ambitions for regional expansion.

If another reason were needed surely this would qualify:

The most lethal weapon directed against American troops in Iraq is an explosive-packed cylinder that United States intelligence asserts is being supplied by Iran.

The assertion of an Iranian role in supplying the device to Shiite militias reflects broad agreement among American intelligence agencies, although officials acknowledge that the picture is not entirely complete.

Perhaps the picture is not complete because in recent weeks four American helicopters have been shot down in Iraq with missiles believed to have been supplied by Iran.

Iran is making it clear that they will nor desist from building nuclear bombs and they are doing all they can to kill Americans in Iraq. If diplomacy fails, which it often does, to persuade Iran to give up it's maniacal obsession with triggering Armageddon, what exactly do Bush's critics on the left suggest we do?

The question is important and must be answered now by every person who cares about this country and the world, so that we don't have any ex post facto Kerryesque declamations of having been against the action before one was for it.

The question boils down to this: Should we allow Iran to continue to do what they're doing or should we stop them? Those are the alternatives. Let's not have any flummery about "involving the world community," and other such evasions favored by politicians. Assume we explore every diplomatic strategy and Iran remains obdurate. Should we then resort to force?

Anyone who refuses to go on the record with a forthright answer to this question forfeits, in my mind, his or her right to be taken seriously in the coming debates.

RLC

Speaking Their Minds

This video is a shocker, at least to me. Not because the discussion was particularly compelling - it wasn't, in fact it was disappointing - but because of the makeup of the panel, which consisted of three Christians in the media, and most of all because it was on CNN.

This segment was actually the second part of a feature the first part of which presented two atheist couples who alleged having been persecuted because they were atheists, a charge I find a little hard to believe, actually.

Again, neither segment was very enlightening, both were, in fact, pretty shallow, but the fact that CNN would even air the second segment is noteworthy.

RLC

Hillary's Nightmare

This must keep Hillary Clinton awake at night:

Veterans of Al Gore's past are quietly assembling a campaign to draft the former vice president into the 2008 presidential race - despite his repeated statements that he's not running.

His top policy adviser from his 2000 presidential campaign and other key supporters met Thursday in Boston to mull a potential Gore campaign.

And, in the background, groups have been lobbying for Gore's return to presidential politics.

"He certainly has the right political climate. How many political candidates are being nominated for Nobel prizes and winning Oscars?" said Dylan Malone, co-founder of AlGore.org and organizer of a political action committee trying to draft Gore.

In 2002, Gore asked Malone to stop a draft effort he had begun; Malone did. Malone started up again and, so far, Gore hasn't waved him off.

"The difference is dramatic. His time has come," Malone said. "We're raising tens of thousands of dollars fairly easily. Our mailing lists are growing so quickly we have to buy new computers."

Now, if Republicans would persuade Newt Gingrich to join the fray we'd have a real contest between ideologies and ideas. Neither man is seen by their respective parties as perfect, but Al Gore is not a Kerryesque flip-flopper with his finger to the wind as Senator Clinton is. He has been nothing if not consistent in his left-wing positions. Hillary seems willing to say whatever she thinks she must to get the nomination and get elected.

Newt, on the other hand, has probably the brightest, most fertile, mind of any of the candidates in the race. He also has the virtue of being a fairly consistent conservative, a trait of which neither Rudy Guiliani nor John McCain can boast. Guiliani is a social liberal or libertarian and McCain is completely unpredictable.

A race between Gore and Gingrich would offer the voter a battle of ideas as classic as it is rare in our politics. It wouldn't be a test of who could fool the most people into thinking that they are what they're not. Gore tried that in 2000 and got burned, and it's doubtful that he'd make the same mistake again. It's too bad that neither man has indicated as yet that he will be a candidate.

RLC

Astonishing Power and Brilliance

Two galaxies similar to our own Milky Way collide in space. The collision would be catastrophic for any inhabitants of either of these galaxies:

Fortunately, contrary to popular conceptions about the existence of life in space and even the opinions of many scientists, there is reason to believe that of all the billions of galaxies in the universe and all the trillions of stars in those galaxies, sentient life probably exists near only one - our sun.

Some scoff at this notion. The universe is so incredibly vast and there are so many stars that some of them have to have planets like earth, they reason. But books like Ward and Brownlee's Rare Earth make a good case for the absolute uniqueness of earth as a suitable environment for higher life forms.

It may well be that no other galaxy, no other star, no other planet possesses the characteristics necessary to permit life to emerge and perdure. The entire universe in all of it's vastness may exist just so that we, the inhabitants of this tiny speck orbiting an average star, can. In other words, it's possible that the universe has to be as big as it is and as full of matter as it is in order for life to exist anywhere in it.

Assume that the conventional figure of about 14 billion years for the age of the universe is correct, and assume, too, that scientists pretty much correct about how stars are formed. Suppose further that the universe did, in fact, originate in a Big Bang.

Following this initial creation event the universe would have expanded rapidly. During that expansion stars were formed, lived for millions or billions of years, and then exploded like this star did:

While it lived the star was producing in its core many of the elements necessary for life. When it finally exploded many other elements were formed as well and all of them were spewed into space. Eventually, about 4.5 billion years ago, a small portion of this debris coalesced to form the earth and the rest of the planets in our solar system.

The whole time this process was going on the cosmos was expanding. Thus, life could arise on earth only after the necessary elements had been formed and only after billions of years of cosmic history had elapsed. The universe then, if this scenario is correct, has to be as old as it is, and thus as big as it is, in order for us to be here at all.

God could, of course, have created the universe complete in an instant, but if He chose to do it the way scientists think He did, what an extraordinarily extravagant act of creation He undertook just to eventually produce a world suitable for us to live in.

And what astonishing power and brilliance it must have taken.

RLC

Talking the Talk, Declining the Walk

Much is being made of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's request for access to a military jet to fly her, her staff and family to California on the weekends. The cost of the plane to taxpayers would be $300,000 round trip, and the plane she has requested would dump thousands of pounds more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the plane used by her predecessor, Dennis Hastert. It has also been pointed out that her ostensible reason for wanting the larger jet, the ability to fly non-stop without having to refuel and risk terrorist attacks in airports, makes no sense since any military jet would be refueling at air force bases.

To compound the embarrassment, her colleague in the House, John "offer me the bribe later" Murtha, reportedly threatened the Pentagon with budget cuts if Pelosi doesn't get her plane. Whatever the facts of the matter, this is not the first time Pelosi's claims to be a champion of the working class and the environment are out of phase with what she actually does.

For example, News Max offers some snippets from a book by Peter Schweizer titled Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy. One of the excerpts says this about Ms. Pelosi:

Pelosi claims to be a staunch union supporter, and along with her husband has received the Cesar Chavez award from the United Farm Workers Union, notes Schweizer.

Unions are, in her words, "fighting for America's working families" and battling "the union-busting, family-hurting" Bush administration. But Schweizer uncovered that a $25 million Northern California vineyard the Pelosis own is a non-union shop!

The congresswoman is the top recipient among members of Congress in campaign contributions from labor unions, and has received more money from the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union than any other member of Congress in the last several election cycles.

But in addition to the wine business, the Pelosis own a large stake in the exclusive Auberge du Soleil hotel in Rutherford, Calif. The hotel has more than 250 employees, but once again, Schweizer found, it is strictly a non-union shop.

The Pelosis are also partners in a restaurant chain called Piatti, which has 900 employees.

"But a union card is not required to work there bussing tables, washing dishes, serving guests or preparing food," Schweizer wrote in NewsMax Magazine.

"As with Auberge du Soleil, at Piatti the Pelosis' commitment to organized labor ends at the front door."

Pelosi has also demonstrated hypocrisy on the environment. "With us," she proclaims, "the environment is not an issue - it's an ethic. It's a value."

[But] One of her largest investments is a private partnership called Lions Gate Limited, which operates the CordeValle Golf Club and Resort in San Martin, Calif.

To get a permit to build the facility, the partners promised to build a "public course" providing considerable access to non-members, and to abide by several environmental requirements to ensure that there would be minimal ecological damage.

But after the facility opened, the county's Planning Commission found that the golf course was in fact private - and the club had "ignored" many of its permit requirements concerning the environment!

Perhaps, some of what she's upbraided for in this article is beyond her control, but I recall how the media crucified Newt Gingrich because he had asked to be able to deplane Air Force One at the front of the craft, but the Clinton people forced him to leave at the back. Newt felt he had been deliberately dissed by the Clinton staff and was reportedly a little miffed. Whether he really was or not, I don't know, but the media savaged him for days for what they said was childish pique and arrogant vanity. So what is the media saying about Nancy Pelosi's "arrogance"?

RLC

Tubing Downstream

Hillary Clinton doesn't need a weatherman to tell her which way the wind's blowing, just a couple of pollsters. NewsMax cites Thursday's lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal which chronicles Senator Clinton's shift on the war in Iraq. There's nothing wrong with changing one's mind as events unfold, of course, but Senator Clinton would have us all believe that her current position has been her position all along when, of course, it hasn't:

On October 10, 2002, Clinton spoke to the Senate in favor of a use-of-force resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq, saying: "The facts that have brought us to this fateful vote are not in doubt."

On December 15, 2003, when it was clear there were no large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Clinton's support was unwavering. "I was one who supported giving President Bush the authority, if necessary, to use force," she told the Council on Foreign Relations. "We have no option but to stay involved and committed."

On April 20, 2004, Clinton told CNN's Larry King that she did not "regret giving the president the authority," noting that Saddam Hussein "had been a real problem for the international community for more than a decade."

In October 2005, amid growing anti-war sentiment, Clinton still told the Village Voice: "I don't believe it's smart to set a date for withdrawal . . . I don't think it's the right time to withdraw."

By November 2005, Hillary was softening her stance, saying in a letter to constituents: "If Congress had been asked [to authorize the war], based on what we know now, we never would have agreed."

On December 18, 2006, Clinton went even further, saying on the "Today" show: "I certainly wouldn't have voted that way."

On January 13 of this year, Clinton spoke from Baghdad about President Bush's call for a troop surge: "I don't know that the American people or the Congress at this point believe this mission can work."

On January 17, Clinton called for a cap on the number of U.S. troops in Iraq, and suggested withholding funds for the Iraqi government.

Finally, on January 27, Clinton hit the campaign trail in Iowa and demanded that the president "extricate our country from this before he leaves office."

Ms. Clinton went from the view that we have no option but to stay involved and committed in Iraq to the view that we have to get out as soon as possible. That's an odd way to remain committed. Her position on the war seems to track the opinion of the American people. Like someone floating down the river in an inner tube, she goes where the currents of popular opinion take her. That may be good politics, but it's lousy leadership.

RLC

Cutting Losses By Cashiering Losers

UPDATE: The John Edwards presidential campaign has apparently chosen to deflect the inevitable firestorm of criticism headed their way by firing the foul-mouthed blogger Amanda Marcotte and another equally vile colleague, Melissa McEwan. This is not earning them points with the Democratic base who are evidently outraged (aren't they always) that Edwards would dismiss these exemplars of liberal values, but to have kept these two on would have been to subject the campaign to constant distractions and criticism to which it would have been difficult to effectively respond.

The question we have is why on earth did Edwards' people hire them in the first place? Is the Edwards campaign so tone-deaf to decency that they didn't see Marcotte and McEwan as a problem until people in the blogosphere started quoting them?

For an example of Marcotte's general disposition go here and scroll down. Caution: Not for children.

UPDATE on the UPDATE: It appears that reports that Mr. Edwards was going to relieve himself, so to speak, of the execrable blogger duo were a bit premature:

The [Edwards]campaign distributed written apologies from the two women, who stressed they were writing on personal blogs and not on behalf of the campaign. Edwards said he believes in giving everyone a "fair shake."

"I've talked to Amanda and Melissa; they have both assured me that it was never their intention to malign anyone's faith, and I take them at their word," Edwards said. Mr. Edwards is either incredibly gullible or incredibly stupid.

Here's a sample of what appears on Ms. Marcotte's blog, Pandagon in one of her screeds against pro-life Christians:

Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B [a contraceptive]after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?

A: You'd have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.

That Ms. Marcotte would claim to have not intended to offend anyone's religious faith with this remark tells us something about the sort of cesspools she likes to swim in, I suppose. That Mr. Edwards would take her at her word when she claims to have not intended to malign anyone's faith with remarks like this tells us that he is afraid to alienate the left-wing bloggers who find this sort of sleaze perfectly compatible with their own standards of decency, and who would have his political scalp were he to toss overboard two of their own.

HT: Captain's Quarters.

RLC

Stopping Iran's Nukes

Here's one way, perhaps, to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program. Question for the ethicists among our readers: Are such measures, assuming they successfully avert a war, moral?

RLC

Hitchens Gets Rich

There's no more skillful writer, or effective advocate of the struggle in Iraq, than Christopher Hitchens. Nor is there anyone an opponent of the war would want reviewing his book less than he would want Mr. Hitchens to critique it. So, the New York Times' culture critic, Frank Rich, who churned out an apparently shallow screed against the conduct of the Bush administration since 9/11, must have winced when he saw that Hitchens was reviewing his effort for The Claremont Institute's Review of Books.

After having read the review Rich probably felt that he had been mugged, which indeed he had. Here's some of the drubbing Hitchens metes out to the hapless Mr. Rich:

For another instance of Rich's pseudo-forensic style, you might try the following: "I don't think we ever said-at least I know I didn't say that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein," Bush said in the spring of 2006. That is technically true, but it is really just truthiness: Bush struck 9/11 like a gong in every fear-instilling speech about Iraq he could.

Now, "truthiness" is a laugh-word invented by Steven Colbert who (along with his friend Jon Stewart and the other heroes of Comedy Central) is the beau ideal of what Rich considers to be the ironic. In this book and in his regular column, he gives "truthiness" a workout whenever he can. He clearly wishes he had coined it himself, and he has kept it going for perhaps a touch longer-may I hint?-than even Colbert might wish. Let us examine it in the present case. The administration did not, in point of fact and as Rich concedes, ever make the case that Saddam Hussein had sponsored the assault of 9/11. It did, however, strongly imply that he might have an interest in, or enthusiasm for, this kind of activity. And many Americans when polled were found to suspect him of an even more direct connection.

Well, Saddam Hussein had sheltered the Iraqi-American fugitive who mixed the chemicals for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. He had allowed the internationally-wanted criminal Abu Nidal to use Baghdad as his headquarters. He had boasted of paying a bounty to the suicide-murderers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The man who hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship, a certain Abu Abbas, who was responsible for rolling Leon Klinghoffer in his wheelchair off the vessel's deck and into the Mediterranean, had to be released when apprehended because he was traveling on an Iraqi passport. A diplomatic passport. The Baghdad state-run press had exulted at the revenge taken on America on 9/11.

This does not exhaust the "truthiness" of the suggestion that Saddam Hussein might have to be taken seriously as a sponsor of nihilistic violence. Could one even suggest that those who thought so might be intuitively and even objectively wiser than those who thought it crass to mention Saddam Hussein and "terrorism" in the same breath? Not without being jeered at by Rich, who either does not know any of the above facts or who chooses not to include any of them in his proudly truth-centered narrative.

Here's another important passage, though it's not directed specifically at Rich's book:

Once the [1991] war was over, the U.N. inspectors discovered something that has been erased from many memories. Saddam Hussein had built an enormous secret nuclear reactor at Tuwaitha, and had acquired most of the elements of a nuclear weapon. Had he waited to develop this, and only then moved to take Kuwait, that small yet incredibly wealthy country would be a part of Iraq to this day, and we would all be living-as, unknowingly, we did then-partly at the pleasure of a psychopathic dictator. Accommodations would soon enough have been made to this reality by many powers, perhaps including our own.

It is astonishing how those who scoff at Bush for believing Saddam had WMD and was interested in developing nuclear weapons, never seem to think to mention this. Nor do they ever seem to contemplate that had we not invaded Saddam would certasinly have developed nuclear weapons at the first opportunity in order to offset the Iranian nuclear program. Such details are easily set aside, however, when there are political points to be made by beating up George Bush for "lying" to us about Iraq's WMD.

RLC

Endangered Species

The Daily Mail shows us this picture of polar bears on an ice floe

and runs this story:

They cling precariously to the top of what is left of the ice floe, their fragile grip the perfect symbol of the tragedy of global warming.

Captured on film by Canadian environmentalists, the pair of polar bears look stranded on chunks of broken ice.

Although the magnificent creatures are well adapted to the water, and can swim scores of miles to solid land, the distance is getting ever greater as the Arctic ice diminishes.

The story gives the impression that these bears are stranded far from land, clinging desperately to the ice lest they fall into the sea and drown, all because of global warming. What they don't tell us is where the photographers were perched who took the photo. Were they standing on a pier or were they on a boat hundreds of miles out? They also don't tell us that polar bears often cavort on ice floes, and that these two, being excellent swimmers, are in no danger at all. The story is a good example of how the media has lost all sense of an obligation to be objective and unbiased in reporting the news.

Nevertheless, there is solid evidence that polar bear populations are in decline, but though the story strongly suggests the decline is due to global warming it never really makes the connection clear. The reader is left wondering exactly how the bears' sagging population numbers are related to climate change, but there's not much doubt that the writers of the story want us to think they are.

Anyway, it doesn't appear that there's much that can be done about it since a study on climate change released Friday observes that even if we stopped pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere today the earth will continue to warm for centuries more. The best we can hope for is that we can minimize the damage. Pretty depressing.

It's a nice picture, though.

RLC

Myths About Atheism (Pt. IX)

In this installment in our series on anti-theist Sam Harris' debunking of ten myths about atheism we'll consider "myth" number 9. Harris writes that this myth states that:

Atheists ignore the fact that religion is extremely beneficial to society.

Those who emphasize the good effects of religion never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as "wishful thinking" and "self-deception." There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth.

In any case, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed. In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself, which is more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it?

Among other shortcomings in Harris' reply is the fact that he has a much too pinched view of the this-world benefits of Christianity, thinking them to be limited solely to the moral sphere. Many scholars agree, however, that Christianity provided far more benefit than just a moral basis, as important as that is, to Western civilization and eventually to the world. For example, Christianity provided the only cultural milieu in which modern science could and did develop. It also gave rise to a rich tradition in the arts, especially music, unmatched by any other culture. It fostered a high view of women and of the value of education, and was the motivating force behind the development of the university system in Europe and the United States.

None of these things ever really emerged in any other cultural setting. They only arose among people who believed that God was personal, rational, and that He had laid down certain standards for the treatment of other people. The appearance of these benefits also required that it be widely believed that individuals are created in the image of God and are loved by Him. Only this conviction, as John Locke reminds us, can support and sustain a belief in human dignity and worth.

For more on the contribution to human progress and well-being made by a Christian worldview see Rodney Stark's Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success, or Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization by Alvin Schmidt

Moreover, Christian theism satisfies human yearnings that non-theistic peoples have no hope of satisfying. For example, if Harris is correct and there is no God then there's also no meaning to life, no ground for morality, no basis for human dignity or worth, and no real justice. Nor is there any basis for believing that we are a coherent self, that love is anything more than a chemical reaction in the brain, that there is such a thing as objective truth, or that we have any real basis for trusting our reason to lead us to that truth. In other words, the belief that there is a God gives us an existential hope that our deepest yearnings will not go unsatisfied forever. Atheism can only shrug its shoulders and admonish us to get over it.

Since Harris asks us to consider which is more moral - to help the poor out of concern for their suffering or because God wants us to do it, let's turn to that question.

We can begin by pointing out that the question is mis-framed. It should be stated thusly: What obligates us to be concerned about another person's suffering in the first place? Why would it be wrong to be indifferent to another man's pain? Mr. Harris may wish to help the man who suffers, but if he did not wish to help him, even if indeed he wished to cause the suffering, why would that be immoral? Where does an obligation to help those who suffer come from if there is no God? Surely Mr. Harris doesn't think that nature or evolution can impose obligations upon us, but then, if not, what does?

The desire to help another is, if atheism is true, nothing more than an arbitrary preference some people have and others lack. Those who have it are no more "moral" than those who don't. They're just different in the same way that those who have color vision are different from those who are color-blind.

So, the answer to Mr. Harris' question is that if he's right about God, neither concern for another's suffering nor a mistaken duty to obey a non-existent God is more moral because there simply is no moral right or wrong. There are just things that people, like other animals, do. To pose the question of which is more moral is like asking whether starfish are more emotional than clams. The question is nonsense because, on the assumption of atheism, moral right and wrong is not a property of human behavior any more than emotion is a property of starfish and clam behavior.

For the rest of our replies to Harris' Ten Myths go here for #8. The rest can be found by going here and following the links at the end of the post.

RLC

What Was He Thinking?

The Democratic presidential candidates certainly are fun to watch. First John Kerry put the kibosh on any hopes he had of reprising his 2004 run for the presidency by inadvertantly calling the troops in Iraq academic underachievers.

Then Joe Biden managed to insult the entire African-American community while trying to compliment Barack Obama, and now John Edwards, the man who demonstrates his deep concern for the poor by living in the most ostentatiously palatial digs in North Carolina, paid for by the obscene settlements he obtained chasing ambulances, has hired himself a spokesperson guaranteed to cause him to wonder what he could possibly have been thinking.

By itself, hiring a spokesperson would be of no moment, but this one, a "blogmaster," is Amanda Marcotte, one of the craziest, and vilest, of the left-wing crazies in the blogosphere. Her role as Edwards' internet presence can only eventuate in multiple embarrassments for the candidate. While Biden spends his days trying to explain to every black person he encounters on the street what he really meant, and Edwards spends his trying to explain why he would hire such a sleaze as Ms Marcotte to represent his campaign, Hillary and Obama float serenely above the fray.

To get a taste of Ms Marcotte's style check out Michelle Malkin's site, but be forewarned, it's neither pretty nor pleasant.

RLC

Nothing Left to Say

Victor David Hanson explains why the Democrats will have almost nothing helpful to say or do about the war in Iraq for the next several months. He gives four reasons altogether. Here's his first:

For all the talk of cutting off funds, redeployment, and pulling out, the new Democratic Congress will, at least for now, probably do nothing except speak impassioned words and make implicit threats. Here's why.

First, they have to digest what they have swallowed. Democratic critics had previously framed their opposition to the war in terms of a disastrous tenure of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld; a culpable indifference to the status quo in Baghdad and at Centcom; a failure to listen to the more intellectual generals such as David Petraeus; the "too few troops" mantra; and the lionization of Gens. Shinseki, Zinni, and other shunned military critics.

But now Abizaid, Casey, Khalilzad, and Rumsfeld are all absent - or about to be - from direct involvement in the war. The supposed villain cast of Cobra II and Fiasco has exited, and the purported good guys have entered. David Petraeus will, de facto, be in charge, not just in the strictly military sense, but, given the press and politics of the war, spiritually as well - in the manner that Grant by late summer 1864 had become symbolic of the entire Union military effort that was his to win or lose. Many of those officers involved in the "revolt of the generals" have now largely supported the surge - something Democrats themselves had inadvertently apparently called for when they serially lamented there were too few troops to win in Iraq.

All the old targets of the Democrats are no more, and it will take time for them to re-adjust the crosshairs to aim at men and policies that they have heretofore viewed sympathetically.

Read the rest. It's very good.

RLC

Hope For a Miracle Cure

Many of us know people who have had, or who are presently struggling with, cancer. There appears now to be hope that a simple, inexpensive chemical compound might hold the key to a cure. Here are a couple of excerpts from a story that's appearing in almost every major news outlet:

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their "immortality". The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.

Until now it had been assumed that cancer cells used glycolysis because their mitochondria were irreparably damaged. However, Michelakis's experiments prove this is not the case, because DCA reawakened the mitochondria in cancer cells. The cells then withered and died.

Read the rest of the details here.

RLC

How to Beat Iran

Dick Morris explains how to defeat Iran without firing a shot:

Deterrence won't work. You cannot deter a suicide bomber by threatening to kill him. The nihilistic and apocalyptic worldview echoed in Tehran does not make retaliation a serious deterrent.

Instead, Bush should continue and accelerate his efforts to destroy Iran's economy by cutting off investments to companies that invest there. Frank Gaffney's disinvestterrror.org campaign says that 87 state-administered pension funds in the United States have invested $188 billion in one of 500 publicly traded companies that "partner with terrorist-sponsoring states."

These 500 companies among them "have $73 billion invested in Iran, Syria, Libya, and North Korea." (This 2004 data includes investments in Saddam's Iraq).

Among these companies are: Alcatal SA, BNP Paribas, Hyundai, Linden Petroleum, Oil and Natural Gas Corp, Siemens AG, Statoil ASA, Stolt Nielsen, Technip Coflexip, and Total SA. UBS, which was once on the list, has divested itself of all such investments.

The economic weakness of Iran makes disinvestment its Achilles' heel. With its non-oil and gas economy falling apart and its oil exports dropping while domestic demand is rising, Tehran already totters atop a mountain of popular discontent, as evidenced by the trouncing the establishment took in the local elections a few weeks ago.

So President Bush should mobilize the American people to disinvest in Iran and other terrorist states. He should ratchet up his efforts to persuade states and unions to adopt terror-free investment policies and urge Wall Street mutual funds to do likewise. No public action is required, but massive private action, catalyzed by Bush, can have a huge effect.

Two decades ago the left was demanding that American universities and corporations disinvest from South Africa because they practiced apartheid. Iran is a threat to the entire world. We're waiting for the left to rouse themselves from their slumbering indifference and campaign as vigorously for the economic punishment of this enemy of the United States as they once did against an ally.

RLC

Philosophers in Love

Jennifer Hart Weed has a fine essay on being in love with philosophy at Comment. She stresses that when we love philosophy it loves us in return:

In a lengthy discussion of God's love in the Summa theologiae, Aquinas argues that love is recognizing the good in someone else and desiring that good. More specifically, when you love a person you desire the good for that person. If this is correct, then to love philosophy would be to desire the goodness that is in it. This goodness could include moral goodness, such as ethics, as well as intellectual goodness, such as wisdom and truth. A lover of philosophy is someone who desires goodness and is passionately committed to knowing the good and to doing the good. Understood in this way, then, we can ask whether any human being has ever loved philosophy and what has philosophy offered in return? If we love philosophy, will she love us back?

She loves you back by showing you the truth about yourself and the people around you. She loves you back by helping you to develop your God-given ability to reason and to think. The pursuit of philosophy is intrinsically valuable because of the transformative nature of philosophy as a way of life. As philosophy pointed out to Boethius, human beings alone are rational animals. If human beings do not exercise and develop their rational capacities, they sink below their God-given potentials and purposes to the level of the brute animals (Consolation Book IV, chapter 3). In loving philosophy, we are loved in return because she makes us better human beings, and she points us to the ultimate good, God, whom we should love with all our being.

Read the whole thing, especially the titles of the four works she recommends at the end. Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy is short and filled with wonderful insights. She also lists her four favorite philosophers among whom is Eleanore Stump. Dr. Stump, coincidentally for those of you living in the Lancaster Co. area of Pennsylvania, will be speaking at F&M College on February 9th at 4:30 in Spahr auditorium. Her theme is "Love By All Accounts."

RLC

Waiting On God

In what appears to be an instant society that expects instant solutions, instant answers, and instant gratification, we find a very different message throughout the Old Testament and particularly from the Psalms. It's a message of patience and persistence, of waiting on God. Here's just a few references:

3. Yea, let none that wait on thee be ashamed:
let them be ashamed which transgress without cause.
4. Show me thy ways, O LORD;
teach me thy paths.
5. Lead me in thy truth, and teach me:
for thou art the God of my salvation;
on thee do I wait all the day.
Psalm 25:3-5

21. Let integrity and uprightness preserve me;
for I wait on thee.
Psalm 25:21

14. Wait on the LORD:
be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart:
wait, I say, on the LORD.
Psalm 27:14

34. Wait on the LORD, and keep his way,
and he shall exalt thee to inherit the land:
Psalm 27:34

20. Our soul waiteth for the LORD:
he is our help and our shield.
Psalm 33:20

7. Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for him:
fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way,
because of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass.
8. Cease from anger, and forsake wrath:
fret not thyself in any wise to do evil.
9. For evildoers shall be cut off:
but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth.
Psalm 37:7-9

7. And now, Lord, what wait I for?
My hope is in thee.
Psalm 39:7

1. I waited patiently for the LORD;
and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry.
Psalm 40:1

18. I have waited for thy salvation, O LORD.
Genesis 49:18

1. Truly my soul waiteth upon God: from him cometh my salvation.
2. He only is my rock and my salvation; he is my defense;
I shall not be greatly moved.
Psalm 62:1-2

5. My soul, wait thou only upon God;
Psalm 62:5

27. These wait all upon thee;
that thou mayest give them their meat in due season.
Psalm 104:27

13. They soon forgat his works;
they waited not for his counsel:
Psalm 106:13

5. I wait for the LORD,
my soul doth wait,
and in his word do I hope.
6. My soul waiteth for the Lord
more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.
Psalm 130:5-6

14. The LORD upholdeth all that fall,
and raiseth up all those that be bowed down.
15. The eyes of all wait upon thee;
and thou givest them their meat in due season.
Psalm 145:14-15

9 And it shall be said in that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, and he will save us: this is the LORD; we have waited for him, we will be glad and rejoice in his salvation.
Isaiah 25:9

It might help to read the text that leads up to these next two references to get the context of the events about to unfold. These are interesting because the people are beside themselves and with apparent good reason. They're about to be consumed by the enemy in both cases and they don't appear to be taking comfort in the Psalms. Any chance for survival appears dim and total destruction seems imminent. And then the explicit commands to "stand still"...

13. And Moses said unto the people, Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the LORD, which he will show to you today: for the Egyptians whom ye have seen today, ye shall see them again no more for ever.
Exodus 14: 13

15. and he said, Hearken ye, all Judah, and ye inhabitants of Jerusalem, and thou king Jehosh'aphat, Thus saith the LORD unto you, Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude; for the battle is not yours, but God's.
17. Ye shall not need to fight in this battle: set yourselves, stand ye still, and see the salvation of the LORD with you, O Judah and Jerusalem: fear not, nor be dismayed; tomorrow go out against them: for the LORD will be with you.
2 Chronicles 20: 15, 17

Waiting on God and standing still...very difficult things to do. It may seem that we have the option of waiting on God. We can choose to or not. The circumstances that elicit a "stand still" seem to have more of a sense of urgency about them. I wonder how many times we've been admonished to "stand still" and experience the salvation of God but were too busy in our own devices to hear.

The Dawkins Delusion

Dr. Terry Tommyrot has written a book titled The Dawkins Delusion, and is interviewed about the book here. Apparently Tommyrot doesn't think Dawkins really exists and finds arguments to the contrary woefully inane.

Dr. Tommyrot actually sounds exactly like Dawkins himself, or what Dawkins would sound like if he really existed. Anyone familiar with Dawkins' writings, or at least those writings attributed to him, especially The God Delusion, will find the interview pretty funny.

HT: Uncommon Descent.

RLC

The Slate in '08

According to the latest Fox News Opinion Dynamics Poll at this point in the contest it looks like Hillary vs. Rudy in 2008:

13. If the 2008 Democratic presidential primary were held today, for whom would you vote if the candidates were:

• Hillary Clinton 43%
• Barack Obama 15
• John Edwards 12
• Al Gore 11

14. If the 2008 Republican presidential primary were held today, for whom would you vote if the candidates were:

• Rudy Giuliani 34%
• John McCain 22
• Newt Gingrich 15
• Mitt Romney 3

I really don't think McCain has much of a chance of getting the Republican nomination. Too many conservatives just don't trust him and don't appreciate his shenanigans with the "gang of 14." Gingrich is probably the best of the candidates in terms of ideas and intellect, but he has too much personal baggage. Of course, so does Rudy. Moreover, Rudy is liberal on social issues like abortion, so it's a surprise that he ranks so high among Republicans. Perhaps it's because he's more likeable than McCain and has more charisma than Newt.

Hillary has the Democratic field to herself right now, but that would change if Gore mounted a serious effort. I think the left would dump Hillary in a nanosecond if Gore were to jump in, and I think he'd be harder for the Republicans to beat in November than Hillary would. The base of the Democratic party finds him more genuinely left than Hillary who they view as an unreliable opportunist.

We'll see.

RLC

Teach the Controversy

I was listening to NPR the other morning as they aired a feature on a struggling public school in Baltimore. They had their tape recorders in a biology class as the teacher tried to reconcile the upcoming lesson on Darwinian evolution with the Creationist convictions of some of her students. The lecture included this:

"You've got your area of faith. You've got the things your parents have taught you, your church has taught you. And all those things are good. But because we're in a science class, science is not based on faith. Science is based on fact. But I'm not saying this is right or wrong. All I'm telling you is this is on your [test]."

This is not a good approach. It sets up a false dichotomy between faith and fact, religion and science. In reality, it is a matter of faith, not fact, to believe that life could have arisen by purely material processes. and it is a matter of fact, not faith, that no one has been able to figure out how life could have ever originated as a consequence of the action of chance and physical forces.

What the teacher should have said, if she wanted to avoid controversy, is that "what we are going to be studying in class is the consensus view among scientists about how life arose. There are problems with this view and there are some scientists who think it is wrong. What we will not do is take a formal position on the question of whether or not the origin of life and the diversification of life required the input of an intelligent agent. We leave that question open. Our focus wil instead be on the physical evidence, both in support of the consensus view and against it, and allow you to draw your own conclusions about the philosophical questions. If the philosophical questions interest you, and they should, feel free to share your thoughts with the class."

That would have piqued the interest of at least some of her students, but, unfortunately, too many teachers know too little about this controversy to address it fairly, accurately and interestingly with their students.

RLC

A Friend of God

Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has put together a documentary on American evangelicalism to air on HBO throughout this month. Rebecca Cusey offers a critique of Pelosi's film at National Review Online. According to Cusey, the documentary could have been a lot worse than it is, and also a lot better. Nevertheless, Pelosi's film touches upon an interesting point. Here's Cusey's commentary:

The biggest lesson of the film is that normalcy is in the eye of the beholder. When Pelosi shows thousands of people singing "I am a friend of God," a club of skateboarders "skating for Christ," or even an impassioned sermon, those familiar with evangelicalism see nothing odd. However, your average New Yorker or San Franciscan, or even your suburban neighbor who has never walked through the door of a church, sees something very strange indeed.

Turning a hobby, such as skating or cruising cars, into an outlet for proselytizing may come across as artificial, even manipulative. The fervor of emotional worship, multiplied by thousands of worshippers, can leave those without that experience scratching their head. "There's something very strange about these people," says Pelosi to [Pastor Ted]Haggard [This was filmed before the revelations of Haggard's improprieties became public] about the enthusiastic worshippers, "They're so happy." Happy, perhaps, but disconcerting nonetheless - or all the more - to many liberals.

In an interview with the gay magazine The Advocate, she says, "A lot of New York liberal Democrats who go to the megachurches come back talking about how scary they are." To those who have never been a part of evangelicalism, the lingo, the constant referrals to the Bible, the personal lifestyles defined mainly by their biblically imposed limits, religious passion, even the pure power of thousands of people at a rally, can be terrifying.

Evangelicals would do well to understand this, not to conform to the broader culture, but to speak a language those outside the church can understand.

Cusey notes that Evangelicals don't see themselves as the rest of the country sees them, but the fact is, most Evangelicals don't care how the rest of the country sees them. They should, though, and for the reason that Cusey gives. A group that strikes those it would like to win to the faith as "scary" is not likely to enjoy much success. Like Paul, Christians should be prepared to become all things to all men that some of those might be persuaded that Christianity is true. Making oneself "scary," or presenting an image that seems completely alien to those whom Christians wish to persuade, seems an unpromising way to accomplish this. This is not to say that Evangelicals should not be who they are. It is to say, though, that they should be more alert to how they are perceived by others and the effect that perception has on the attractiveness of the Gospel they offer.

RLC

Screwtape

Variety has a piece telling us that Walden Media and Ralph Winter Productions is going to release a movie based on C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters in 2008. Walden is the same outfit that did The Chronicles of Narnia, a sequel to which (Prince Caspian) is due out next year as well.

HT: Prosthesis

RLC

Pinker on the Brain

Steven Pinker closes his essay titled The Mystery of Consciousness at Time.com with this assertion:

.... the biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul. It's not just that an understanding of the physiology of consciousness will reduce human suffering through new treatments for pain and depression. That understanding can also force us to recognize the interests of other beings--the core of morality.

Let us assume that he is correct that understanding that other people have the same experience I have when I experience pain. How does recognizing that fact impose an obligation upon me not to gratutitously cause another person to suffer this pain? Pinker assumes that just knowing that others suffer is enough to obligate me not to cause that suffering, but this is an unsupportable assumption. If there is no higher moral authority than my own conscience, or even the collective conscience of mankind, there's nothing immoral with hurting someone else.

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people's sentience becomes ludicrous. "Hath not a Jew eyes?" asked Shylock. Today the question is more pointed: Hath not a Jew--or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog--a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer.

Yes, no doubt others suffer the same way we would if exposed to the same stimuli, but what follows from that? Pinker's argument is missing a couple of premises. If these were supplied his argument would look something like this:

1. Other people suffer as we do.

2. We don't like to suffer.

3. So, we can assume others don't like it either.

4. We shouldn't cause what others don't like.

5. Therefore, we shouldn't cause others to suffer.

The argument fails because premise #4 needs to be demonstrated and Pinker simply assumes it, doubtless because, in fact, it can't be demonstrated.

He goes on to write this:

And when you think about it, the doctrine of a life-to-come is not such an uplifting idea after all because it necessarily devalues life on earth. Just remember the most famous people in recent memory who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11.

So far from devaluing life on earth, the doctrine of eternal life is the only thing that could possibly make life on earth meaningful or significant.

Pinker is evidently saying that it's better to believe in nothing so strongly that you're willing to die for it. Anything that a man is willing to die for necessarily is more important to him than is his own life, but if a man is willing to die for his friends, or for a cause, does that devalue his life? Why should being willing to die for God (setting aside the question of whether the 9/11 terrorists were really dying for God) devalue one's life on earth? Pinker doesn't say.

Think, too, about why we sometimes remind ourselves that "life is short." It is an impetus to extend a gesture of affection to a loved one, to bury the hatchet in a pointless dispute, to use time productively rather than squander it. I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

Well, he's right that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift, but a gift is something which is given. Who or what bestows this gift in Pinker's view? If no one bestows it then it's just there and there's no purpose to it. It's just a brute fact of existence which ultimately means nothing.

More to the point he's mistaken when he says that the realization that consciousness is a precious gift endows life with more purpose than anything else could. The realization that consciousness extends beyond the death of the body invests life with far more purpose than the realization that we will enjoy the "gift" for a moment and then it will be gone for eternity. If existence ends at death then everything we do gets erased. It amounts to nothing. Only if what we do lasts forever does it have any real worth or significance.

Pinker's arguments are those of a naturalistic materialist who knows deep down that the logic of his beliefs leads to despair, an end he devoutly wishes to avoid. The arguments he employs to stave off the bitter conclusion are all like the wild rearward shots of an army in full retreat: ineffectual, pointless, and desperate.

See our comments on the first part of his essay here.

RLC

Muslim Valor

The Brits recently arrested nine Muslims who had been plotting to kidnap a pair of their co-religionists who serve in Her Majesty's armed forces and then behead them, probably as a way of intimidating other Muslims who might otherwise cooperate with the infidels. The two servicemen who had been chosen for the kidnapping showed tremendous bravery in allowing themselves to be used as bait in the attempt to apprehend their would-be killers:

Incredibly, the two men carried on with their daily routines but were secretly shadowed around the clock by police and intelligence personnel, using high-technology tracking and bugging techniques. Surveillance teams kept a constant watch, looking for any sign of the plotters.

The two men were fitted with discreet tracking devices, with similar beacons attached to their cars, and armed response teams were on permanent standby to stage a rescue mission in case a kidnap plot was sprung.

It is not clear, however, if the men were even allowed to tell their families.

A senior military source said yesterday: "We have been aware of the operation for a while, and working closely with West Midlands Police."

One insider added: "It was a brave thing to do. Effectively they agreed to act as bait - like tethered goats - without any way of knowing how real the danger was. They had to trust the police."

There has already been speculation that the men's bravery being recognised with a medal or other award, although Army chiefs are anxious to keep their identities under wraps.

This is the sort of courage and resolve on display every day in Iraq in the lives of the people who willingly put their lives on the line to serve their fellow Iraqis even though they know it makes them targets for the jihadis. That some want us to abandon such amazing people to those who would slaughter them in an instant were we to pull out is incomprehensible to me.

RLC

Taking Down the Bad Guys

Task Force 145, the special ops team tasked with hunting down al-Qaeda leaders around the world, appears, in Bill Roggio's opinion, to have taken down another bad guy:

Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, one of Osama bin Laden's brother-in-laws with deep roots in al-Qaeda as a financier and facilitator, has been reported to have been murdered in his bedroom in Madagascar. Khalifa, "who mined and traded precious stones in Madagascar," was reported to have been murdered by "a gang of 20 to 30 gunmen broke into his brother's bedroom, shot him dead 'in cold blood' and stole his belongings."

"I don't think [his death] was politically motivated," said Malek Khalifa, Mohammed Jamal's brother. But Khalifa's deep ties to al-Qaeda, coupled with his history of funding global terrorist operations, his operations in mining precious stones in Africa (a source of untraceable income), and the size of the 'gang' that murdered him, suggests otherwise. We suspect Khalifa was assassinated. "They stole everything - his computer, all of his things," said Khalifa's brother.

Task Force 145 has a mandate to hunt down senior al-Qaeda operatives world wide, and is known to have operated in Pakistan to destroy Osama bin Laden's Black Guard. Also, the U.S. recently deployed naval assets to the region, as well as Task Force 145, in the hunt for al-Qaeda and Islamic Courts leaders fleeing Somalia.

Roggio has more at the link.

RLC

Bigot or Bonehead?

In the course of an otherwise astute analysis of his Democratic rivals for the presidential nomination, Senator Joseph Biden delivered himself of this head-scratcher about Barack Obama:

"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," he said. "I mean, that's a storybook, man."

Either Senator Biden merely mangled the rules of syntax or he has let slip a racial faux pas that should elicits howls of outrage from a media that committed Trent Lott to a political immolation for allowing on the occasion of Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday that he'd have made a fine president back in 1948 and which pilloried George Allen for saying macaca until Allen eventually lost his senate seat. I'm reminded, too, of the brouhaha over Rush Limbaugh's assertion on ESPN that Donovan McNabb is treated more gently by the sports media because they're reluctant to criticize a black quarterback.

Now comes the maladroit Senator Biden seemingly suggesting, if words mean anything, that Barack Obama is the first mainstream black in history who is articulate (why is it that whites are rarely described as articulate?), bright, clean (!?) and "nice-looking." Could the senator from Delaware really have meant to imply that every other black who has appeared on the political stage was inarticulate, dumb, ugly and dirty?

The media have a test for answering such conundrums, of course. Their answer is "no," because, you see, Biden is a Democrat. Had he been a Republican the answer would have certainly been "yes," and the caterwauling over his racial bigotry and the demands for his political head would be even now coming to a boil. As it is we'll hear very little mention on the news of what is either boneheaded inarticulation or outright racism. We'll certainly not be reminded every night for weeks and months, as we were reminded for months that Senator Allen said macaca, that Biden's opinion was far uglier or, shining the best light on it, far more stupid than anything Allen said.

For what it's worth I don't think Senator Biden actually intended to give offense. That would have been incredibly dumb even for a man whose friends rarely mention mental acuity when praising his virtues. But that's the point. Neither did Trent Lott, George Allen, or Rush Limbaugh intend to give offense. Yet that didn't matter to a media which sees itself in a war of annihilation against its political enemies and which will do all it can to protect its friends and destroy its foes.

RLC

He's Not the Only One

Readers who are fans of the Beatles may be interested in this video of a 1995 appearance of John Lennon singing his famous "Imagine." Only the small-minded will quibble that Lennon had in fact died fifteen years earlier.

Actually, the message of his song is much more sophisticated in this later rendition than in the 1970's version.

Click on the video to play the song and scroll down to read the lyrics.

Thanks to Byron for the tip.

RLC

Predator/Prey

A white blood cell chases down an invading bacterium in this fascinating video clip. We might pause to marvel at all the systems and structures which need to be present in this microscopic cell in order for it to carry out its function as a seek and destroy mechanism to guard the body against infection.

It has to have an apparatus that enables it to detect the presence of an invading microbe, it has to be able to distinguish the invader from other cells in the blood stream, and it has to have an apparatus that enables it to home in on its prey and to pursue and ingest it. All of these systems are doubtless very complex, requiring many specialized proteins, all of which require assembly mechanisms and instructions. That assembly, in turn, requires other structures to coordinate the timing and location of the necessary proteins, and all of these things arose blindly and purely by accident, according to the Darwinian narrative.

Well, maybe, but we can hardly help being skeptical. Our credulity can grant to chance and purposeless processes only so much capability before it collapses under the enormous weight the Darwinian view places upon its shoulders. After a while it just seems like we're being asked to believe in a fairy tale.

RLC

Heather Mac

Gene Expression poses ten questions to Heather Mac Donald, a conservative writer who has become something of a curiosity since she came out and declared herself an atheist in The American Conservative last summer.

MacDonald is always interesting, even when I think her to be mistaken, and the Gene Expression piece does not disappoint. Give it a look.

We examined the support Ms MacDonald gives for her atheism in the American Conservative essay here and here.

RLC

Some Friend

Nick Bromell, a childhood friend of Scooter Libby, tells us more about himself than he probably intended and also something about his idea of what it means to be a modern liberal. Little of what he says is flattering to either himself or liberalism. Here are some excerpts from a much longer essay:

So, for six years I've been obsessed with Scooter. Every time I read a newspaper, I see Scooter and me hunched over a game of Stratego (which he usually won), or I see him faking right before hooking left so I can hit him with a pass in the end zone. Walking my dog through the woods around our house, I chant the mantra of questions I literally ache to ask him: How could you work for an administration that denies global warming and supports tax breaks for large SUVs? How could you work for an administration that cuts funding for birth control to the poorest people in our country and the world? How could you so brazenly exaggerate the threat of Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, and how could you so foolishly imagine that American troops would be welcomed in Baghdad with cheers and flowers?

In my hotter moments-I have fewer and fewer cool moments these days-I ask Scooter whether his political identification with homophobia is distinguishable from a political identification with racism or anti-Semitism. And convinced that it is not, I sit down at my desk to do it: to write the letter telling Scooter that I can no longer be his friend, not even in the rather distant way we have been friends for all these years.

You'd think that as friends Bromell would at least extend Libby the benefit of the doubt on these issues rather than portraying them so unfairly. No one, for example, denies global warming. What is questioned is the cause, the importance, and the permanence of the rise in the earth's temperature. No one, not even the censorious Mr. Bromell, knows the answers to these questions.

Nor is it homophobia to oppose gay marriage. To compare opposition to gay marriage to racism and anti-semitism is either ignorant, foolish, or dishonest.

Today, my old friend is under indictment for obstructing justice by lying about his knowledge of the Valerie Plame affair. Unless his lawyers manage to engineer a miracle, he will be tried in court early in 2007. There he will face the distinct possibility of public disgrace and a career-terminating jail sentence. So what should I hope for, I ask myself: my old friend's acquittal or his conviction?

Why wouldn't any decent human being hope that his friend would be innocent of the chages and thus acquitted? Why isn't hoping for his friend's acquittal a no-brainer for Mr. Bromell? Is it that punishing people one disagrees with politically is a higher priority for this self-described liberal than the obligations of friendship?

A liberal, as I use the term, is someone who never gives up trying to see the other person's point of view. A liberal never stops doubting himself, for self-doubt is precisely what allows us to make room in our minds for someone else's views and to keep the possibility of communication between us alive. A fundamentalist, on the other hand, is someone to whom the very idea of point of view is immaterial, or worse-the foundation of relativism. A warrior who pledges fealty to the god of one Truth, a fundamentalist searches for personal conviction, not mutual understanding.

By his own definitions I'd say Mr. Bromell shows himself to be more of a fundamentalist than a liberal. He's not making much of an effort in this article to see Scooter Libby's point of view. His description of a fundamentalist, in fact, sounds very much like a description of his own tone in the first two paragraphs above.

What I want to ask Scooter today is how the United States can shape "the international security order in line with American principles and interests" if those principles include-as the document implies-the right of a nation to seek preeminence. After all, if we aim to shape the world in accordance with that principle, aren't we inviting the other nations of the world to emulate us and thereby to seek preeminence themselves?

For Mr. Bromell it is nefarious for nations to strive for greatness. It's chauvinistic to think that one's principles are superior to those of others. Mr. Bromell would apparently prefer that all nations remain equal in their shared mediocrity. Rather than getting out in front and pulling others along in our slipstream, if people like Mr. Bromell had their way all nations would be stalled at the same level of achievement as the most laggard third world economic basket case.

In my own experience, this pernicious trend resolves itself finally into the matter of whether I should remain Scooter's friend and what verdict I should hope for at his trial. There's a part of me that wants to see him get nailed. There's a part of me that wants to end the endless imagined conversations I've been having with him, that wants to stop peppering him with "How can you?" questions, that wants to arrive at the Zen clarity of the warrior who focuses on one thing only: victory.

But there's another part of me-call it the lingering liberal part-that tries to be fair to Scooter's point of view, that doesn't want to consign him to the camp of "the enemy," that wants to keep lines of communication open.

Would remaining Scooter's friend be the surest way I have of remaining true to the principles of liberalism, as I understand that word? Or would it just be an excuse for my failure to face a difficult situation, and one that makes me a sucker as well? Would recognizing Scooter as my enemy be the honest thing to do, and the only thing he would truly respect?

In other words, rather than loving his friend unconditionally, he agonizes over whether his liberal principles might require him to hope his friend's life is ruined. This makes liberalism sound more like a fringe fundamentalist religion than a set of political principles.

I know that terrorists aren't out to grab American assets. What they hate is a certain image of America, America as a cultural chauvinist trying to impose its principles and interests on the rest of the world.

This is remarkably naive. What terrorists hate about America is the fact that we are not Muslim and that we protect Israel. They hate us, too, because our success, in spite of our being infidels, is an indictment of their own ineptitude and of the religion that has stultified their progress for a thousand years.

If I .... [am] correct, then the best way for the United States to combat the religious fundamentalism that underwrites terrorism is to remain a liberal state guided by liberal principles. The worst thing we can do is precisely what the Bush administration has promoted: become a fundamentalist nation that mirrors bin Laden's fantasies back to him and thus confirms them.

Presumably one of those liberal principles is to treat Islamo-terrorists as criminals rather than as a military foe whose aim is to utterly destroy us and our way of life. How long would our liberal principles last if we refused to fight against this threat?

And Cheney would be right. We liberals do want to hold onto the word true because we know that behind our policy proposals lurks a deep sense of right and wrong, a deep instinct about what makes life valuable and meaningful. But we do not fully articulate these beliefs, and we seldom even admit that we have them. Because they rest at bottom on conviction, not reason, and therefore cannot be justified without circularity, we hesitate to bring them into the open. We are nervous about admitting that in this sense our politics are as faith-based as those of any fundamentalist.

I'm not sure what he's getting at in the preceding paragraph except to admit that liberal principles rest on little more than a subjective preference. If that's what he's saying it's quite an admission. It is an acknowledgement that at bottom liberalism is a non-rational choice that people make simply because it makes them feel good.

While I want the Bush administration to be held accountable for its blunders and its lies, I also want my friend Scooter to be proven innocent and to go home to his family. In short, I want things both ways.

Well, then. Why all the anguish over what he ultimately wants. And how would convicting a minor figure really be punishing the Bush administration anyway? Mr. Bromell sounds like a very mean-spirited and vindictive man who comes close to being willing to sacrifice his friend if it will, even in small measure, somehow hurt Bush.

I wonder if his sense of justice wants Bill Clinton's administration held accountable for its blunders and lies? Does he, for example, insist that Sandy Berger be prosecuted for stealing documents from the National Archives and destroying them? Or is that crime justified because it served the interest of Democrats?

If this attitude involves me in self-contradiction, so be it. The risk of a seeming inconsistency is one that liberals must take if we are to meet the complexities of the world as we know it. But we should undertake this risk agonizingly, not flippantly, taking the full measure of what is at stake as we make up our minds.

Mr. Bromell makes here another confession. Liberalism, at least as he understands it, is inconsistent with the way the world is. The inconsistency, however, is mostly within himself. He wants to see anyone associated with the Bush administration destroyed, but he can't reconcile that with his obligation to love his friend. The problem is more with Mr. Bromell's character, perhaps, than with his ideology.

How is it inconsistent, whether one is a liberal or a conservative, to desire to see justice done while hoping that one's friend is innocent? Mr. Bromell is so blinded by his hatred for Bush that any twinge of human sentiment and common sense that interferes with his desire for punishment seems to him to raise the specter of a contradiction.

Most of the liberals I know are good, kind people who are not at all the obsessed, vindictive Captain Ahabs Mr. Bromell paints himself as being. They would have no trouble loving their friend and praying for his acquittal, even if they disagreed in every neuron in their bodies with the Bush administration's policies. But the liberalism Mr. Bromell displays really is something very ugly.

RLC

The Battle at Najaf

Bill Roggio has more than has been reported in the MSM on the recent battle between Iraqi forces and a large insurgent force near Najaf that cost the insurgents at least 250-300 killed and hundreds wounded and captured.

RLC

The Inner Life of a Cell

We linked to this video a couple of months ago, but it's worth doing again for our newer readers. The next time you hear someone insist that life is solely the product of chance and physical law, that it arose through purely mechanical processes acting blindly through trial and error, think of this computer representation of just a couple of the processes that occur constantly in every cell of every human being. Then ask yourself whether the engineering and complexity of these systems is something that could plausibly result from sheer accident, as the Darwinian true believers would have it.

You can read about the technical aspects of producing the video here.

RLC

Rejoice and Be Glad

A Pew Survey of "Generation Nexters" (18-25 yr. olds) reveals that 81% of them believe that getting rich is either the highest or second highest priority of their generation. Fifty one percent rated getting famous as the highest or second highest goal.

The good news in this otherwise depressing result is that if the Nexters are successful in achieving their goals us aging boomers won't have to worry about social security running out. With Democrats in power taxes on the rich are bound to go up, especially those taxes designed to underwrite entitlements like SS and Medicare.

Some reports of distressing shallowness among the young can indeed be cause for rejoicing.

RLC

Myths About Atheism (Pt. VIII)

We've been offering our thoughts on an article by anti-theist Sam Harris at Edge in which he seeks to persuade us that most of what people believe about atheists and atheism isn't true. He discusses in the piece ten "myths" about atheism that he wants to debunk. In this post we'll respond to what he says about myth number 8:

Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding.

Atheists are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an understanding of nature's laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the Koran will be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists.

From the atheist point of view, the world's religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn't have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation.

When people state that atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding they are not talking about belief in extraterrestrials. This is a rather droll way to construe the claim. They mean, of course, that atheists believe that there is no existence beyond this one and that there is no reality beyond the material world in which we live. This is the only way to interpret the "myth" that makes any sense, and there is surely no atheist who would deny these assertions.

But the irrelevance of what Harris says aside, how does he know that brilliant extraterrestrials would find the contents of the Bible unimpressive? How could Harris know such a thing unless he knows the Bible is completely false in its claims about God, and how could he, or anyone, know that? It takes surpassing arrogance to claim to know that there is no God and, having insisted earlier in his essay that atheists aren't arrogant, he probably should think better of implying that he's in possession of such knowledge.

Finally, we're left to wonder how, or in what way, Christianity trivializes the beauty and immensity of the universe. Harris enjoys making remarkable claims like this which are apropos of nothing in particular and which he leaves hang in mid-air, unsupported by any evidence or argument. He gives the back of his hand to believers for accepting religious claims on insufficient evidence, but he apparently expects his readers to accept his own claims without the benefit of any evidence whatsoever.

RLC

Flatland, the Movie

Suppose that reality actually consists of more dimensions than just the three (four, counting time) that our minds are structured to experience. If so, then the world is, in fact, totally different than it appears to us since we are only perceiving a fraction of a multi-dimensional reality.

In the novel Flatland, written in 1884, Edwin Abbott explored what a two dimensional world would look like to its inhabitants and what three dimensional objects would look like if they invaded a two dimensional world.

The novel helps stretch our imaginations and became a classic. Now it's being made into a movie, the trailer for which can be viewed here.

Woody Allen depicted something similar in Purple Rose of Cairo, in which a character (Jeff Daniels) in the two dimensional world of a film on the movie screen suddenly steps out of the screen and into the three dimensional world of a woman (Mia Farrow) viewing the movie all alone in the theater.

Maybe our existence is like that of the characters on the screen. We think that what we perceive is all there is, while all around us there is a wider world of additional dimensions in which people live, and move, and have their being, and we're totally unaware of it because our minds are unable to apprehend those dimensions.

Perhaps at death we, like Jeff Daniels in the Purple Rose of Cairo, step off the three dimensional screen of this world and into a multidimensional reality that we could no more imagine before we experienced it than a child in the womb could imagine the world that it would be entering when it's born.

Perhaps we are surrounded by, and embedded in, a reality which is so much richer than that which we can experience, but we are totally oblivious to it until we take on a "body" with the senses to perceive it.

As Hamlet says to his companion: "There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Perhaps so.

RLC

The Attack at Karbala

Bill Roggio surmises that the attack on American soldiers at Karbala in Iraq was carried out by Iranian commandos. If he's right then the new directive giving American troops the green light to kill or capture any Iranians found in Iraq makes even more sense:

On January 20th, a team of twelve men disguised as U.S. soldiers entered the Provincial Joint Coordination Center in Karbala, where U.S. soldiers conducted a meeting with local officials, and attacked and killed five soldiers, and wounded another three. The initial reports indicated the five were killed in the Karbala JCC, however the U.S. military has reported that four of those killed were actually removed from the center, handcuffed, and murdered.

The American Forces Information Service provides the details of the attack in Karbala. Based on the sophisticated nature of the raid, as well as the response, or cryptic non-responses, from multiple military and intelligence sources, this raid appears to have been directed and executed by the Qods Force branch of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps.

Read the rest of the details that have been made public about this attack at the link.

RLC

Important Work of Science

Michael Shermer, in reviewing Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion in the journal Science Magazine, closes his review with these surprising words:

"Dawkins' latest book deserves multiple readings, not just as an important work of science, but as a great work of literature."

What a very odd thing to say of a book which is devoted completely to debunking theism. In what sense is this a book of science? And why is a journal devoted to science publishing a review of what is essentially a book on religion?

Mike Gene at wonders:

Isn't it odd how a popular anti-religious book, which reports no new experiments or data, and was not peer-reviewed, has become an Important Work of Science?

Gene sees in Shermer's essay the germ of a trend to expand the definition of science to include anti-religious efforts. The irony of this, of course, is that some of the same people who blanched at allowing Intelligent Design to be taught in public schools because "it's religion, not science" are now calling books on atheism "important works of science."

As Gene says:

Now, science apparently CAN address supernatural causes. Now, science and evolution apparently DO lead to atheism. Now, there is apparently NO difference between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism.

I'm sure that the next time the ACLU goes to court to smack down some school's effort to teach students that not every scholar is convinced that mechanical processes are sufficient to explain the complexity of life, Shermer's essay will be presented as evidence by the defense. When the ACLU witnesses testify that ID is not science they'll have a hard time explaining why a book which seeks to promote atheism is considered science by reputable science magazines.

See here for yet another example of a journal ostensibly devoted to genes and chromosomes publishing an article in which the author indulges in amateurish theologizing. Apparently religious articles are suitable for publication in scientific magazines and journals when they argue against the existence of a cosmic designer. If they argue for the existence of a designer then they are completely out of bounds. The Important Work of Science seems now to consist of trying to prove that there is no God.

RLC