Environmental Ethics

The following exchange took place in the course of an interview with Mike Huckabee, formerly Republican Governor of Arkansas and likely Presidential candidate. Huckabee articulates a view one wishes all conservatives shared:

Q: "But do you believe there's a human role in climate change?

A: There may be. But whether there is or there isn't, it doesn't release us from the responsibility to be good stewards of the environment. It's the old boy scout rule: you leave your campsite in as good or better shape than how you found it. It's a spiritual issue. [The earth] belongs to God. I have no right to destroy it. I think we work toward alternative energy sources. [We need to make it] like the Manhattan Project or going to the moon. We need to accelerate our energy independence."

We could vote for a guy like that.

HT: Prosthesis

RLC

Sudden Impact

Those who wish a vivid reminder of how the war against terrorists is being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are invited to watch this video of a recent action against enemy combatants who made the mistake of firing on American aircraft. R.I.P.

RLC

The Good News

I just finished reading Beginning at Moses by Michael P.V. Barrett several weeks ago. It's about finding Christ in the Old Testament. Mr. Barrett is talking about Psalm 22 on page 312.

The Lord expresses His confidence that His prayers have been heard and then in the next section begins to detail the answer to those prayers. It becomes clear in the second division that all the suffering of the first division was not in vain. As you meditate your way through this Psalm, do so with what should become an overwhelming impression that you are reading what the blessed Savior said, thought, and prayed while He was suffering vicariously for His people on the cross. The New Testament reveals that the initial lament was audible: 'My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?' (see Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34). There is no indication that men could hear the rest of the prayer, but God heard. In this Psalm, we are allowed into the mind and soul of the Savior. You can see why I say that this is holy ground.

The first division highlights three spheres of suffering endured by the Savior. He suffered before the holy God (1-5), by cruel men (6-11), and in His whole person, body and soul (12-18) The opening stanza brings us to the heart of the atonement. The simple answer to Christ's agonizing question 'Why has thou forsaken me?' is that God forsook His Son in order that He might forgive us. With our sin and guilt imputed to Him, He who knew no sin, having become sin for us, took the full force of God's just and necessary wrath against our sin. While Christ was suffering on the cross, God dealt with Him in terms of us. I confess a total inability to explain the utter dereliction of Christ that is expressed by this statement. It boggles the mind. It declares how absolutely offensive sin is to the holiness of God and how absolutely gracious God is in giving His dear Son to be the only Savior. How dare any man say that there is any other way to God!

Well, it would be silly of me to try to add anything to that.

What it Would Take

How can the President get the media to pay attention to all the important things going on in the world? Perhaps the best way, maybe the only way, would not be popular with GW. At least Ramirez doesn't think it would:

RLC

Dumb and Dumber

George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinks that the new generation of atheists is angrier and dumber than their intellectual forbears. I don't know about dumber, but they certainly are angrier.

RLC

Idealism

The blog Conscious Entities has an interesting post on Idealism and also one on the moral, intellectual, and phenomenal gaps between animals and humans.

Idealism is the view that everything we encounter in the world is ultimately reducible to ideas in minds. There is no material substratum to reality.

It was given its most notable expression by George Berkeley (1685-1753) in Principles of Human Knowledge where he argues that all we can experience are sensory phenomena like color, fragrance, sound, etc. But these sensory phenomena exist only in minds, thus all we can have experience of are ideas in our minds. It follows that if knowledge is a product of experience then all we can know are these ideas. A material "stuff" that generates the phenomena of experience is not only absurd but unknowable.

Since Berkeley was an empiricist and believed that all of our knowledge comes through sense experience, he concluded that we can know nothing of anything other than these ideas in our minds. We have no experience of, and therefore no knowledge of, matter. The notion that there is a material world behind the phenomena of our senses is superfluous and should therefore fall victim to Occam's Razor.

All that exists, according to Berkeley, are ideas in minds, and for Berkeley the entire world exists as idea in the mind of God. The world is a virtual reality generated by God, which may be one way to read Hebrews 1:3 and Colossians 1:13.

RLC

Why Are Students Bored?

So why do American kids find school boring? Is it because of poor teaching as the No Left Turns guys say? Probably to some extent, but there's more to it than that, as many of our readers have pointed out.

American kids are jaded by affluence. It takes a lot to excite young people surrounded by stimulants that appeal to their hedonism and materialism. Having never wanted for anything, many students find any kind of intellectual work unappealing and unnecessary. They do enough to get by, but any glimmer of concern for the life of the mind is easily extinguished by social and extra-curricular concerns.

Schools minimize academics. In many schools today only lip-service is paid to the importance of academics. Everything else the school does implicitly sends students the message that the least important thing they do in their school day is what they do in the classroom. At the school at which I taught for thirty-five years a student could be taken out of an academic class for almost any activity imaginable, but a teacher of an academic subject dare not insist that the student remain in class nor could he take the student out of another activity to do academic work. For instance, if the band needed to rehearse, or the swim team had a meet, or the student council had an activity students could leave class to participate, but a classroom teacher was not permitted to take the student out of band class, or swim practice, or student council to tutor him/her on what was missed.

In other words, every activity trumped the academic program in my school, and, I suspect, the same situation exists at most schools. When the school administration tacitly communicates to the student the lesson that academics are the school's lowest priority, only the exceptional students can be expected to take a particular interest in them.

Modern culture devalues great literature, art, history, and philosophy. The value of these disciplines is intrinsic, not instrumental. One studies them for the intellectual satisfaction and enrichment one gains from them, not because they'll enable the student to one day buy a new Lexus. Our culture, however, tacitly disdains any curriculum which is not oriented toward a career or the making of money. Subjects which are pursued for their own sake are deemed less important than those which are more utilitarian. Students realize this and take such classes only because they are a state requirement, and they embark upon it with the attitude that they'll put forth the minimum effort necessary to get whatever grade they feel they need.

Finally, many kids in many schools come from homes and neighborhoods which are so dysfunctional that the student starts out way behind and can never catch up. He/she has no idea what's going on in the classroom and tunes it out. This starts in the earliest grades and continues all through school. By the time the student is in tenth grade he/she is often languishing at a second or third grade level. Understanding nothing of what's going on in the classroom it's little wonder they're bored.

So, to Peters Lawler and Schramm at No Left Turns, yes, there are too many teachers in classrooms who are uninspiring and apathetic, but that situation certainly exists in schools in India and Asia. It's in fact probably worse there than it is here. So why do those kids do so well and ours perform sub-optimally? Look at the affluence, look at the importance placed on academics and the life of the mind, and look at the culture.

RLC

Astonishing Human Being

This young man is perhaps the most astonishing human being you will ever see. I started watching the documentary about him (at Telic Thoughts) and couldn't stop. It's 48 minutes long, but it only takes about five minutes to realize that you're watching something that is both incredible and spooky at the same time.

At the end of the film one man observes that he wonders what abilities are latent in the human mind that most of us cannot use. I wondered the same thing as I watched the video, and wondered, too, if perhaps we will ever be able to access those capacities.

RLC

Easy to Defend

Rick Pearcey offers a very clever analysis of the Ann Coulter contretemps in light of contemporary thinking and concludes that there's really nothing wrong with what she said. Pearcey is being satirical, of course, but there is a truth implicit in his essay that should be teased out.

The only people who have any basis for criticizing Coulter for her specific remark are Christian conservatives. There are several reasons for this, but let me focus on just one: If one believes, as liberals do, that there is nothing wrong with being gay then there's no reason to be upset that Coulter calls someone a "faggot"? Sure she meant to be insulting, which is kind of insulting all by itself, but the insult is akin to a secularist calling a conservative Christian a "fundie." The term is meant to be insulting since it connotes a certain lack of sophistication, but a lot of conservative Christians would be only mildly irritated by the epithet and a lot of them would simply laugh at the idea.

People who believe that homosexuality is a deviant lifestyle, however, see a much deeper insult in Coulter's words and are upset that one who speaks for conservatives and for Christians would engage in that sort of discourse. But, and this is the point, it is only those who see homosexuality as deviant who have reason to find her language offensive.

Meanwhile, compared to the vicious rhetorical felonies the left commits everyday (Remember Alec Baldwin saying that people should stone Henry Hyde to death, along with his entire family?) against the people they hate, which is about everybody to the right of George McGovern, Coulter's words, as bad as they were, are a misdemeanor.

As Pearcey observes, there are lots of others who have no reason to take umbrage in her words. Read his piece titled "Faggot" Easy to Defend.

RLC

St. Petersburg Declaration

A number of people whose heritage is Muslim but who may or may not themselves still be Muslim met recently in St. Petersburg to proclaim their intention to contend against the brutes and thugs who dominate the Islamic world on behalf of fundamental human rights. Here is the declaration that resulted from their convocation:

We are secular Muslims, and secular persons of Muslim societies. We are believers, doubters, and unbelievers, brought together by a great struggle, not between the West and Islam, but between the free and the unfree.

We affirm the inviolable freedom of the individual conscience. We believe in the equality of all human persons.

We insist upon the separation of religion from state and the observance of universal human rights.

We find traditions of liberty, rationality, and tolerance in the rich histories of pre-Islamic and Islamic societies. These values do not belong to the West or the East; they are the common moral heritage of humankind.

We see no colonialism, racism, or so-called "Islamaphobia" in submitting Islamic practices to criticism or condemnation when they violate human reason or rights.

We call on the governments of the world to:

- reject Sharia law, fatwa courts, clerical rule, and state-sanctioned religion in all their forms; oppose all penalties for blasphemy and apostacy, in accordance with Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights;

- eliminate practices, such as female circumcision, honor killing, forced veiling, and forced marriage, that further the oppression of women; protect sexual and gender minorities from persecution and violence;

- reform sectarian education that teaches intolerance and bigotry towards non-Muslims;

- and foster an open public sphere in which all matters may be discussed without coercion or intimidation.

We demand the release of Islam from its captivity to the totalitarian ambitions of power-hungry men and the rigid strictures of orthodoxy.

We enjoin academics and thinkers everywhere to embark on a fearless examination of the origins and sources of Islam, and to promulgate the ideals of free scientific and spiritual inquiry through cross-cultural translation, publishing, and the mass media.

We say to Muslim believers: there is a noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine;

To Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Baha'is, and all members of non-Muslim faith communities: we stand with you as free and equal citizens;

And to nonbelievers: we defend your unqualified liberty to question and dissent.

Before any of us is a member of the Umma, the Body of Christ, or the Chosen People, we are all members of the community of conscience, the people who must chose for themselves.

God bless those who signed off on this document, and may God protect them from those who will inevitably seek to kill them for their heresy.

RLC

Justice For Jessica

A terrible story nears its end:

MIAMI (AP) - A sex offender was found guilty Wednesday of kidnapping and raping a 9-year-old girl and burying her alive in a case that led to a crackdown around the country on people convicted of sex crimes.

Jurors deliberated about four hours before returning the verdict against John Evander Couey in the slaying of Jessica Lunsford, who was snatched from her bedroom in 2005 about 150 yards from the trailer where Couey had been living.

Her body was found in a shallow hole, encased in two black plastic trash bags. She had suffocated, and was found clutching a purple stuffed dolphin.

Couey had a record as a sex offender. In 1991, he was arrested on a charge of fondling a child. In 1978, he was accused of grabbing a girl in her bedroom, placing his hand over her mouth and kissing her.

This case raises two questions which might be asked of those who oppose the death penalty. First, does John Couey deserve to be executed or doesn't he? Second, if he does deserve it what good is served by not doing it?

By refusing to execute a man such as this for the horrific crime he commited we send the message to society that Jessica Lunsford's life is not worth executing her murderer over. A society which refuses to execute people like Couey sends the message that it just doesn't value innocent life very highly, at least not highly enough to make taking a life punishable by the most severe penalty.

To allow him to live is a bit like assessing a rapist a $50 fine. The penalty sends the message that the crime isn't very serious and that women really aren't worth protecting.

Justice is served by nothing less than the execution of John Couey. It's better than what he deserves.

RLC

Who Is John Galt?

Mark Skousen commemorates Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged 50 years later in the Christian Science Monitor. Rand's work is not literature, exactly, but it is, according to a 1991 poll of American readers, the second most influential book ever written. Only the Bible was voted more influential.

I'm not sure about this assessment myself, since back in the late fifties and early sixties everyone was reading Rand, and then shortly thereafter we suffered our national, wrenching lurch to the left which represented in many ways everything Rand deplored.

In any event, Atlas Shrugged is a book of philosophical ideas about morality, economics, and collectivism set as a novel. Her ideas are both good and bad. When they're good they're very good and when they're bad they're very bad. Skousen's essay sorts them out.

RLC

If Only Jesus Knew

John Edwards seeks political traction with Christians by invoking Jesus on behalf of the poor, but either he's tone deaf to how evangelicals regard Jesus or he's just not as articulate in talking about Christ as he is when he's appealing to a jury to award a huge settlement to his client and thus to himself:

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards says Jesus would be appalled at how the United States has ignored the plight of the suffering, and that he believes children should have private time to pray at school.

Edwards, in an interview with the Web site Beliefnet.com, said Jesus would be most upset with the selfishness of Americans and the country's willingness to go to war "when it's not necessary."

"I think that Jesus would be disappointed in our ignoring the plight of those around us who are suffering and our focus on our own selfish short-term needs," Edwards told the site. "I think he would be appalled, actually."

What exactly does Edwards mean when he says that "Jesus would be appalled"? Does he mean that if Jesus only knew about the plight of today's oppressed masses He would be appalled by it? Does he think that Jesus doesn't know about it, but would be outraged if He did? If so, then Edwards has a long theological road to travel before he rests in evangelicalism's good graces. Most Christians believe that Jesus was divine, that He is alive today and quite aware of everything that happens in this world. It's Christologically incongruous, in other words, for Edwards to speak in hypotheticals.

Edwards failure to fire his two potty-mouthed anti-Christian bigot bloggers didn't do much to endear him to Christians, and he certainly won't score any points by using clunky rhetoric that suggests that Jesus is purely past tense or otherwise oblivious to what's going on in the world.

But setting all that to one side, what might appall Jesus even more than the plight of today's poor is the hypocrisy of people who live in opulent extravagance and ostentation while invoking His name to criticize others for their alleged lack of concern for those who live in hovels.

RLC

Iranian Defector

Here's an interesting development in the deteriorating state of affairs concerning Iran. An Iranian general with much knowledge of his country's espionage efforts and weapons programs has either defected or been kidnapped:

One respected analyst with sources in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard says Gen. Ali Reza Asgari has defected and is now in a European country with his entire family, where he is cooperating with the U.S.

Other reports have suggested that the general may have been kidnapped by the Israeli secret service, the Mossad. A spokesperson at the CIA declined to comment on the reported defection.

"This is a fatal blow to Iranian intelligence," said the source, explaining that Asgari knows sensitive information about Iran's nuclear and military projects. Iran called tens of its Revolutionary Guard agents working at embassies and cultural centers in Arab and European countries back to Tehran out of fear that Asgari might disclose secret information about their identities, according to the analyst.

In either case, it seems that there will be an intelligence bonanza for the U.S., unless, of course, the guy is a double agent out to plant disinformation.

RLC

More on Boring School

More readers have weighed in on why school is boring on our Feedback page and have between them said much of what I wanted to say, so I've postponed my response to tomorrow.

RLC

Another Difference

Here's another example of the difference between liberals and conservatives, at least in the media and in the blogosphere. Ann Coulter calls John Edwards a "faggot" and conservative commentators, if not everyone in the rank and file, have been quick to condemn the insult and to all but require Coulter to do penance in sackcloth and ashes. Her mean-chick schtick has run its course and worn itself out in the minds of many conservatives. They'd rather leave that kind of rhetoric to the Maureen Dowds of the world.

Meanwhile, Bill Maher suggests that the world would be better off if the Taliban had succeeded in assassinating vice-president Cheney last week, and there has been utter silence from the libs. I have seen nothing in any liberal news media about this dreadfully cruel remark.

Name-calling and hateful speech is considered despicable by most conservatives no matter who does it, but, judging from their silence, liberals have no problem with it, at least if it comes from one of their own. Indeed, they scarcely seem to notice it unless it has a conservative provenience.

The silence on the left causes one to fear that this kind of vicious, ugly thinking and speech has simply become part of how many contemporary secular leftists see the world and part of who they are.

RLC

Sensus Divinitatis

Sunday's New York Times Magazine has an article by Robin Marantz Henig which explores current scientific thinking on the question of why people are religious. What is the best explanation, scientists are asking, for the fact that belief in God or gods is almost universal? Henig writes:

Lost in the hullabaloo over the neo-atheists is a quieter and potentially more illuminating debate. It is taking place not between science and religion but within science itself, specifically among the scientists studying the evolution of religion. These scholars tend to agree on one point: that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain.

Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God - evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident? Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity? And if scientists are able to explain God, what then? Is explaining religion the same thing as explaining it away? Are the nonbelievers right, and is religion at its core an empty undertaking, a misdirection, a vestigial artifact of a primitive mind? Or are the believers right, and does the fact that we have the mental capacities for discerning God suggest that it was God who put them there?

In short, are we hard-wired to believe in God? And if we are, how and why did that happen?

I think Reformed philosophers would reply that of course we're "hard-wired" to believe in God. That's almost precisely the point Paul was making in Romans 1. It's what John Calvin meant when he wrote about the sensus divinitatis, the sense of God that everybody seems to have as long as they don't squelch it.

Of course, this isn't what many scientists have in mind when they talk about belief in God being a product of our evolutionary past. Their agenda is to discredit belief in God by showing that it's nothing but an illusion foisted upon us by our genes to equip us for life in the paleolithic epoch.

This little parlor game can be played as well by theists, however. I wonder, for instance, if next these scientists are going to take up the question why many people don't believe in God. Are atheists actually genetic mutants intellectually maladapted to their environment and doomed to be eliminated by natural selection? Is atheism simply an evolutionary aberration, like Down's syndrome, such that the person who suffers from it really can't help holding the beliefs he does? If so, then the rationality that atheists enjoy claiming for themselves is an illusion. Their belief, or lack of it, is a completely non-rational, genetically determined state of mind.

Isn't this fun?

RLC

Hammering on the Lunatics

University of Minnesota biologist P.Z. Myers has gained some reknown and much criticism from both supporters and adversaries alike for his acidulous attacks on anyone who is skeptical of the Darwinian paradigm. He advocates humiliating and firing school science teachers who want to teach both sides of the intelligent design/materialistic evolution issue and considers ad hominem abusive to be the pinnacle of intellectual discourse:

Please don't try to tell me that you object to the tone of our complaints. Our only problem is that we aren't martial enough, or vigorous enough, or loud enough, or angry enough. The only appropriate responses should involve some form of righteous fury, much butt-kicking, and the public firing and humiliation of some teachers, many schoolboard members, and vast numbers of sleazy far-right politicians (See here).

I say, screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. It's time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots. If you don't care enough for the truth to fight for it, then get out of the way.

don't even suggest that we're being too partisan. I am on the side of reason and human rights, and my only failing is that I'm not partisan enough (See here).

When these words were read by a disputant during a debate with an ACLU lawyer the ACLU supporters in the crowd actually cheered. So much for liberal tolerance of diversity and cherishing the freedom of speech among that crowd.

Anyway, it's ironic that Paul Myers, an avowed atheist (if one didn't know it would be apparent from his total rejection of the idea that one should treat one's opponents with dignity, respect, and kindness), claims himself to be on the side of reason and human rights. Perhaps no one has told him as yet, but atheistic naturalism offers its devotees absolutely no grounds for either stance.

In other words, both his devotion to reason and to human rights are arbitrary, non-rational commitments somewhat akin to one's devotion to oreo cookie ice cream. Now one may be passionate about oreo cookie ice cream, of course, but to establish a blog and to spend one's time excoriating those who have a different view of oreo cookie seems at least a little perverse.

Perhaps professor Myers might spend a few moments reflecting upon why he believes that reason is a reliable guide to truth or why he believes that human rights are rooted in anything more than an arbitrary preference. If he gives these questions just a few moments of serious attention he might realize that he can only argue for the trustworthiness of reason by using reason, which is irrational.

Given his view that matter, or nature, is all there is, neither his trust in reason nor his devotion to human rights is grounded in anything more than his own personal taste, bias, or prejudice.

RLC

Amazing Grace

Christianity Today gives Amazing Grace a pretty good review. The film hasn't arrived at our little backwater yet, but we're looking forward to seeing it when eventually it does. William Wilberforce was an impressive man, motivated, as were so many abolitionists throughout history, by his sense that Christ wanted him to do what he could to fight the injustice and inhumanity of the slave trade.

Rodney Stark, in his excellent historical work titled For the Glory of God, points out that had it not been for Christians and the Church, slavery would not have been eradicated in Europe after the fall of the Roman empire, and when it rose again after the discovery of the New World, it was both the Church and the work of Christians like Wilberforce which eventually got it abolished in the Western Hemisphere.

There is nothing in any other religious tradition, and certainly nothing in the philosophies of naturalism or materialism, that affords grounds for condemning slavery. Indeed, Islam's founder, Mohammed, himself owned slaves.

To the extent that slavery, which has been practiced all through history and all throughout the world (and still is today), has been meliorated or abolished, it has been because of the efforts of people operating out of a Judeo-Christian worldview which teaches that men are made in the image of God and are loved by Him. As such they have individual dignity and are all equally precious in God's eyes. Each man is the property of the Creator, and it is therefore an affront to God to treat as one's own property a man or woman who is one of His children.

If, though, we abandon this worldview we must also abandon the notion that man has any special dignity or worth or rights. If there is no Creator then if one has the power to enslave another there can be nothing morally wrong with doing so. In a world without the Christian God might makes right, and owning people is no different, morally speaking, than owning horses.

RLC

Re: School is Boring

There's an interesting response to our post on students being bored in school on our Feedback page.

I'll share some thoughts on this on tomorrow's Viewpoint.

RLC

The Other Front

An intriguing series of events unfolds in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Vice-president Cheney visits Pakistan, a senior Taliban leader is arrested right after he leaves, and an attack on a "high value target" takes place on a terrorist compound in Afghanistan. Is this all a coincidence or are the Pakistanis throwing us a bone by arresting the Taliban guy and persuading him to give up some of his confreres? Allahpundit has the details and a few caveats.

RLC

Conservative <i>Agonistes</i>

Social conservatives in the Republican party find themselves in a real bind as they prep for 2008. They're pretty sure Senator Clinton will be their opponent, but there is a sense that only candidates whose social conservatism is suspect or absent altogether are in a position to beat her. The genuine social conservatives like Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo, and Duncan Hunter are scarcely a blip on the voters' radar screen, at least at present.

There are Republicans who doubtless could defeat Hillary - John McCain, Rudy Guiliani, Mitt Romney - but none of these excite conservatives who see each of them as personally or ideologically problematic. One person who does get conservative juices flowing and who might be able to at least give Hillary a run is Newt Gingrich, but he's not a candidate at this point, and he's carrying an awful lot of personal baggage.

Peggy Noonan summed up the Republican plight when she quipped, that of the major Republican contenders - McCain, Guiliani, Gingrich, and Romney - it is ironic that the only one who has only one wife is the Mormon.

My friend Jason linked me to this article which delves into this matter in a little more detail.

RLC

News Flash: School is Boring

This story reports that a big study has found that most students are bored in school most of the time. I'm not sure that that they needed a study to find this out or that it's news, but apparently some people think it is.

No Left Turns has some interesting commentary that blames teachers (both in high school and college)for this state of affairs. Pete Schramm writes:

Students in high school are bored. We can argue all day why that may be so, but, in general it is my considered opinion that it has to do with the massive fact that students aren't asked to do enough, and are not exposed to interesting things well enough. They are given much busy work, and not enough poetry or beauty or something good or high or noble to consider and think about.

There was a very big international(UN funded?) study that came out of the Netherlands maybe ten years ago that compared students from dozens of countries. In general we didn't fare too badly in the early years of schooling, but the US fared worse the longer the students stayed in school. So, by the time our students were in high school, they were at the bottom of the pack.

This was also not surprising to me, but what was surprising is that for the first time in any study they gave a reason why: American students were more bored than students in other countries; the more they were in school (through high school), the more bored they became. That is an important fact. I regret that I am unable to find that study. My experience confirms this fact. Almost all students think their education in high school was boring.

And Peter Lawler responds:

Peter [Schramm] is right. High schools are very, very boring. What most students end up doing there could be done in a couple of years, at most. High school students are in class way too much, and high school teachers are too. The teachers have no time to prepare for class, and they're stuck with boring books that come with test banks that they don't have time not to use.

Most high-school teachers simply don't have the time to do much reading, and many of them aren't even allowed to let their students (outside of English class) read anything much but the dumb, boring textbook. (The fantastic lectures of our Tony described on the first boredom thread below our a mighty, mighty rare treat for high school students.) Most of them can't fall back on something like Tony's fine undergraduate or graduate liberal arts majors (thanks to schools of education). And various techno-innovations such as power point only make things worse; they insult the student's intelligence and induce yawn after yawn. There are many exceptions to these broad generalizations (many or most of them in serious science and math classes), but the exceptions prove the rule.

Whenever a new student comes to me full of enthusiasm for learning--or turns in 14 pages for a 500-word assignment, I pretty much assume that the student was homeschooled. I'm not one who thinks most homeschooling is all that good. But one of the most positive things about it is that the homeschooled spent a lot less time on school, a lot less time with textbooks, etc. than the kids in public schools. School doesn't rule their lives, and it's not a contemptible source of boredom for them. They haven't had the love of learning strangled out of them.

And, of course, most college classrooms aren't that different. The "teaching style" fading quickly is the faculty member coming to class with nothing but the serious book the students have been assigned and talking BOTH to and with them about it. College professors don't have the excuse of not having time to read and generally prepare for class. Even those with a "4-4" load are on a leisure cruise compared to 95% of high school teachers. They have to think up pedagogical theory and assessment mechanisms to avoid doing their real jobs. They convince themselves that they can "teach without talking," or by surrendering their privileged positon in the classroom and taking one place among many in an egalitarian community of learners, or by lazily boring themselves and the students to death with classes devoted to group presentations or "peer review" or (worst of all) breaking up into small groups to "dialogue" about some generic issue or another.

But I'm sure there are studies that show that boring schools prepare us for the boring jobs that we'll be stuck with. There really are studies that show that students are prepared for the business world through group projects. They don't learn to cooperate or work together like a well-oiled machine or anything like that. The fact that one student ends up doing all the work and the others get by by taking credit allegedly is a key insight into way the "real world" works.

There is much to say about all this, and I'll have some thoughts to offer on a future post.

RLC

Analyze This

The American Psychological Association has adopted a resolution opposing the teaching of intelligent design as science.

After having adopted the position they released an unfortunate statement which offers rhetoricians everywhere a textbook case of muddled thinking:

"While we are respectful of religion and individuals' right to their own religious beliefs, we also recognize that science and religion are separate and distinct. For a theory to be taught as science it must be testable, supported by empirical evidence and subject to disconfirmation. Thus, intelligent design lacks a basis in science."

This statement suffers from a number of shortcomings. The truth of the second clause of the first sentence, for instance, is by no means obvious. It's easy to say that science and religion occupy different domains of human experience until you try to define the boundaries of those domains. Once you embark upon that project you find that there's much overlap and that the overlap is unavoidable. In other words, the difference between science and "religion" is not as clear-cut as the APA would have us believe. Indeed, for many materialists science is a religion.

Roy Clouser explains in his book The Myth of Religious Neutrality that what all religions share in common, maybe the only thing they share in common, is the belief that there exists something which does not depend upon anything else for its existence but upon which everything else depends. For theists this is God. For atheistic materialists it's matter. The point is that religious belief is inescapable. Everyone has it. The only questions are what specific religious beliefs are to be excluded from science and why those and not others?

There is, then, a sense in which ID is religious, since it holds that there is a designer upon which all else, at least in our cosmos, depends. But so, too, is Darwinism religious in that it holds that matter and energy are the ultimately necessary existants. So where is the line between science and religion to be drawn?

The second sentence of the APA statement has the unintended consequence of ruling neo-Darwinism out of science. The fundamental premise of NDE (Neo-Darwinian evolution)is that natural processes, chiefly natural selection and genetic mutation, are sufficient to account for all biological phenomena. But precisely how does one go about testing or disconfirming that claim? What empirical evidence would bear upon its truth or falsity?

If that claim is indeed scientific then its contrary, i.e. the claim that natural processes by themselves are not sufficient to account for all biological phenomena, is also scientific, and that's the fundamental premise of ID.

Here's another problem: Many scientists are of the view that there are other uiniverses besides our own. Articles on this exotic hypothesis can be found all through the scientific literature. So evidently at least some people in the field believe this to be a legitimate topic for scientific inquiry despite the fact that it is neither testable, supported by empirical evidence nor subject to disconfirmation. But if the idea that there are many worlds is legitimate science why is the possibility that an inhabitant of one of those worlds designed this world considered to lack a basis in science? Why is it considered "religious" to think that the designer of our cosmos may dwell in some other universe when the existence of those universes is not considered to be religious speculation?

Perhaps the APA needs to reanalyze their opinions on this issue and attempt to think a little more deeply about it than they evidently have.

RLC

Inconvenient Truth

Ramirez pokes a little fun at Hollywood's limousine liberals:

Living large while telling the rest of us to carpool. That's Hollywood ... and Al Gore.

RLC

Problems of Consciousness

One of the most fascinating problems philosophers wrestle with is the problem of consciousness. What exactly is consciousness? How is it produced? What is its relationship to the brain? Etc.

Usually we think of consciousness as a state of being aware, but how does awareness arise from inanimate matter? How can atoms and molecules make us aware of ourselves and of the world external to ourselves? How does this all happen? How, for example, does an electro-chemical reaction in the brain generate the sensation of red?

Peter at Conscious Entities has an interesting discussion of what he calls the Three and a Half Problems of Consciousness.

The problems he discusses are the problems of Qualia, Intentionality, Morality, and Relevance. The article is a good primer on what is one of the most cutting edge fields in contemporary philosophy and also one of the most vexing because the problems seem so intractable.

Qualia are the sensations that we experience as part of our conscious awareness of the world. The sensations of color, sound, emotions, etc. are the qualia of our experience.

Intentionality refers to the fact that thoughts are about things. How is it that a particular flow of atoms, chemicals, and electricity can be about something.

The problem of moral responsibility concerns, among other things, the question of how we can be responsible for our actions unless we somehow cause them, but if we are bound by the laws of physics then in what sense is it us who causes our actions rather than the laws of physics which constrain us?

Anyway, read what Peter has to say on these things and you'll be well on your way to a Ph.D. in the philosophy of mind.

RLC

Patriotism

Dennis Miller instructs the ladies on how to be an American. HotAir has the video.

RLC

When Race, Religion and Ideology Matter

John Leo at City Journal explains why one can't be too careful when reading or listening to the news:

Sometimes news stories omit important religious and political identifications, too. In Nashville last week, readers of the Tennessean were probably able to deduce the religious affiliation of a cabbie who tried to run over two Christian students after a heated discussion of religion. His name: Ibrahim Sheikh Ahmed. The paper reported: "Metro police spokeswoman Kris Mumford said one of the students is Catholic and the other is Lutheran. Mumford said that Ahmed's religion was not known." Maybe so, but many readers probably wondered: if the driver had been a conservative Christian trying to run down a Muslim, wouldn't the newsroom have summoned the energy to find out, and to confront Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the evils of Islamophobia?

Evidently, race, religion and ideology are only important to a news story when identifying them can make white male Christians look bad.

Leo's whole piece is worth reading.

RLC

Cheap Shot

I've written several times about the viciousness that resides all too comfortably on the left and how it is almost a uniquely left-wing phenomenon in contemporary politics. I say "almost" because from time to time someone on the starboard side of the ship will let go with something that's just plain gratuitously mean. It doesn't happen often, but it shouldn't happen at all, and it would happen a lot less often if Ann Coulter would just stifle herself when she feels the need to step over the line of "edgy and witty commentary" into the realm of just plain meanness.

Alas, she doesn't stifle herself often enough, and so conservatives are made to wince at episodes like this one reported by Hot Air:

Ann Coulter is speaking at CPAC as I write. As is typical, she gave a brief speech full of her usual witticisms, including a few brilliant attacks on Al Gore's green hypocrisy. All was good. Untill the last few seconds, when she launched into a joke about John Edwards. Here's what she said.

"I'd say something about John Edwards, but if you say 'faggot' you have to go to rehab."

I'm no fan of John Edwards, but that's just a stupid joke. It's over the line. The laughter it generated across the room was more than a little annoying.

Last year it was "raghead." This year it's calling John Edwards a "faggot." Two years in a row, Coulter has finished up an otherwise sharp CPAC routine with an obnoxious slur that liberals will fling at conservatives for years to come.

Thanks, Ann.

Coulter's penchant for the gratuitous insult is why we rarely cite her commentary anymore which is unfortunate because she is bright, usually right, and often funny. This sort of "joke," however, just confirms her reputation as a cheap-shot artist. She owes Edwards an apology.

RLC

Plantinga on Dawkins

Books and Culture features a review by philosopher Alvin Plantinga of Richard Dawkins' much talked about anti-theistic book The God Delusion. Plantinga's essay is a bit longish, but every paragraph rewards the reader with wonderful insights into both the shortcomings of Dawkins' book as well as the shortcomings of the metaphysical naturalism upon which the book relies.

An example of what Plantinga has to say about the latter comes toward the end where he recaps an argument that he's been making for years and which no one seems able to refute:

But from a naturalist point of view the thought that our cognitive faculties are reliable (produce a preponderance of true beliefs) would be at best a naive hope. The naturalist can be reasonably sure that the neurophysiology underlying belief formation is adaptive, but nothing follows about the truth of the beliefs depending on that neurophysiology.

In fact he'd have to hold that it is unlikely, given unguided evolution, that our cognitive faculties are reliable. It's as likely, given unguided evolution, that we live in a sort of dream world as that we actually know something about ourselves and our world.

If this is so, the naturalist has a defeater for the natural assumption that his cognitive faculties are reliable-a reason for rejecting that belief, for no longer holding it. (Example of a defeater: suppose someone once told me that you were born in Michigan and I believed her; but now I ask you, and you tell me you were born in Brazil. That gives me a defeater for my belief that you were born in Michigan.) And if he [the naturalist]has a defeater for that belief, he also has a defeater for any belief that is a product of his cognitive faculties. But of course that would be all of his beliefs-including naturalism itself. So the naturalist has a defeater for naturalism; naturalism, therefore, is self-defeating and cannot be rationally believed.

The real problem here, obviously, is Dawkins' naturalism, his belief that there is no such person as God or anyone like God. That is because naturalism implies that evolution is unguided. So a broader conclusion is that one can't rationally accept both naturalism and evolution; naturalism, therefore, is in conflict with a premier doctrine of contemporary science. People like Dawkins hold that there is a conflict between science and religion because they think there is a conflict between evolution and theism; the truth of the matter, however, is that the conflict is between science and naturalism, not between science and belief in God.

Plantinga spends time throughout the review analyzing Dawkins' argument that God had nothing to do with the appearance of living things. The argument distills to this:

1. We know of no irrefutable objections to the claim that life is solely the product of mechanical processes.

2. Therefore, life is the product of mechanical processes.

In other words, because it is possible that life arose without God, therefore life must have arisen without God. Plantinga writes:

It's worth meditating, if only for a moment, on the striking distance, here, between premise and conclusion. The premise tells us, substantially, that there are no irrefutable objections to its being possible that unguided evolution has produced all of the wonders of the living world; the conclusion is that it is true that unguided evolution has indeed produced all of those wonders. The argument form seems to be something like:

We know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that p; Therefore, p is true.

Philosophers sometimes propound invalid arguments (I've propounded a few myself); few of those arguments display the truly colossal distance between premise and conclusion sported by this one. I come into the departmental office and announce to the chairman that the dean has just authorized a $50,000 raise for me; naturally he wants to know why I think so. I tell him that we know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that the dean has done that. My guess is he'd gently suggest that it is high time for me to retire.

Dawkins' most talked about anti-theistic argument in The God Delusion is one which reasons that since the biological world is very complex, and since the more complex something is the more improbable it is, and since the Creator of life would have to be even more complex than what He created, the Creator must be an extraordinarily improbable being - so improbable as to be not worth believing in.

Plantinga explains why this argument is essentially nonsense, but there's one reason for rejecting it which Plantinga doesn't delve into very far. When we say that the complexity of the living world is improbable we mean that it is improbable that it could arise solely by unguided processes. The processes that produced it must have been purposeful. It is highly improbable that a stick would appear to be whittled to a point if only mechanical forces ever acted upon it, but it's not at all improbable that the stick takes on this appearance given the existence of a boy with a knife.

In other words, complex living things are only improbable on the assumption that they arose by happenstance. They're not at all improbable if there's an intelligent creator.

Moreover, although it's improbable that complex things will be produced by purely mechanical processes, God is not something which is produced. God is a necessary being which does not depend on anything else for His existence. Thus it is a category mistake to talk about the improbability of God coming to be. God is not the sort of thing which "comes to be."

Dawkins either doesn't understand the concept of necessary and contingent being or he simply confuses God with contingent entities, which is perhaps why Plantinga observes that Dawkins is no philosopher.

RLC

The Anti-God Crusade

Denyse O'Leary has an excellent series of posts on the New Atheism and its accompanying neuroses at The ID Report.

Links to each of the posts in her series can be found at the bottom of the post linked to above.

RLC

The Threat We Face

Our highly esteemed staff of professional foreign policy experts here at Viewpoint have been cautioning us for over three years now that the biggest threat we face from our enemies may be a scenario something like this: A terrorist organization manages to smuggle a single suitcase nuke into a major American city. They publicly announce, falsely, that they have numerous such weapons planted in cities around the country and demand that we get out of the Middle East, abandon Israel, and impeach the current president or they will begin to detonate these bombs.

The nation is hurled into crisis. Everything shuts down because people are afraid to go into our cities. The economy begins to plummet and chaos reigns in our urban centers. The administration stands firm, however, and refuses to bend to the blackmail. The terrorists tell us that we asked for it, and set off their one bomb killing tens of thousands of Americans and destroying, say, Manhatten.

They then announce that we have one week to comply with their demands or they will detonate another. No one knows, of course, that there isn't another. So panic ensues. The pressure on the White House to capitulate would be irresistable. The United States would almost have to yield and the door would swing wide open to the Islamofascists who would sweep the world imposing Islam on every nation on earth.

That's the scenario that causes our greatest anxiety. Now Michael Crowley of the New York Times Magazine writes an article on former Senator Sam Nunn that says that his greatest nightmare is a scenario very similar to the one we've outlined above. It's really quite disconcerting.

Even moreso since despite the Islamists' stated determination to destroy us, the Democrats' biggest concern seems to be preventing the president from eavesdropping on terrorists' phone calls and otherwise acting as a president should when our very existence is under assault. For some of the president's opponents, the most frightening threat to our future is not the likelihood of nuclear terrorism on our shores, but rather that the average mean temperature of the planet has gone up almost a degree in the last century.

As if to illustrate the unseriousness that exists in some precincts of the left in the face of the most serious threat to our national survival since the Cuban Missile Crisis, a television person named America Ferrera recently delivered herself of the opinion that America won't be free until George Bush leaves office. This empty-headed nonsense was boffo with her audience, of course, but it's positively moronic given the nature of the real threats that face us.

RLC

Leiberman Calls for a Truce

Here's a must-read plea in the Wall Street Journal from Senator Joe Lieberman, perhaps the only Democrat in the Senate with a sound understanding of what's at stake in Iraq. I've edited out some of the essay for the sake of brevity:

Two months into the 110th Congress, Washington has never been more bitterly divided over our mission in Iraq. The Senate and House of Representatives are bracing for parliamentary trench warfare--trapped in an escalating dynamic of division and confrontation that will neither resolve the tough challenges we face in Iraq nor strengthen our nation against its terrorist enemies around the world.

What is remarkable about this state of affairs in Washington is just how removed it is from what is actually happening in Iraq. There, the battle of Baghdad is now under way. A new commander, Gen. David Petraeus, has taken command, having been confirmed by the Senate, 81-0, just a few weeks ago. And a new strategy is being put into action, with thousands of additional American soldiers streaming into the Iraqi capital.

Congress thus faces a choice in the weeks and months ahead. Will we allow our actions to be driven by the changing conditions on the ground in Iraq--or by the unchanging political and ideological positions long ago staked out in Washington? What ultimately matters more to us: the real fight over there, or the political fight over here?

If we stopped the legislative maneuvering and looked to Baghdad, we would see what the new security strategy actually entails and how dramatically it differs from previous efforts. For the first time in the Iraqi capital, the focus of the U.S. military is not just training indigenous forces or chasing down insurgents, but ensuring basic security--meaning an end, at last, to the large-scale sectarian slaughter and ethnic cleansing that has paralyzed Iraq for the past year.

Tamping down this violence is more than a moral imperative. Al Qaeda's stated strategy in Iraq has been to provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war, precisely because they recognize that it is their best chance to radicalize the country's politics, derail any hope of democracy in the Middle East, and drive the U.S. to despair and retreat. It also takes advantage of what has been the single greatest American weakness in Iraq: the absence of sufficient troops to protect ordinary Iraqis from violence and terrorism.

The new strategy at last begins to tackle these problems. Where previously there weren't enough soldiers to hold key neighborhoods after they had been cleared of extremists and militias, now more U.S. and Iraqi forces are either in place or on the way. Where previously American forces were based on the outskirts of Baghdad, unable to help secure the city, now they are living and working side-by-side with their Iraqi counterparts on small bases being set up throughout the capital.

But the fact is that we are in a different place in Iraq today from even just a month ago--with a new strategy, a new commander, and more troops on the ground. We are now in a stronger position to ensure basic security--and with that, we are in a stronger position to marginalize the extremists and strengthen the moderates; a stronger position to foster the economic activity that will drain the insurgency and militias of public support; and a stronger position to press the Iraqi government to make the tough decisions that everyone acknowledges are necessary for progress.

Unfortunately, for many congressional opponents of the war, none of this seems to matter. As the battle of Baghdad just gets underway, they have already made up their minds about America's cause in Iraq, declaring their intention to put an end to the mission before we have had the time to see whether our new plan will work.

There is of course a direct and straightforward way that Congress could end the war, consistent with its authority under the Constitution: by cutting off funds. Yet this option is not being proposed. Critics of the war instead are planning to constrain and squeeze the current strategy and troops by a thousand cuts and conditions.

Among the specific ideas under consideration are to tangle up the deployment of requested reinforcements by imposing certain "readiness" standards, and to redraft the congressional authorization for the war, apparently in such a way that Congress will assume the role of commander in chief and dictate when, where and against whom U.S. troops can fight.

But we must not make another terrible mistake now. Many of the worst errors in Iraq arose precisely because the Bush administration best-cased what would happen after Saddam was overthrown. Now many opponents of the war are making the very same best-case mistake--assuming we can pull back in the midst of a critical battle with impunity, even arguing that our retreat will reduce the terrorism and sectarian violence in Iraq.

In fact, halting the current security operation at midpoint, as virtually all of the congressional proposals seek to do, would have devastating consequences. It would put thousands of American troops already deployed in the heart of Baghdad in even greater danger--forced to choose between trying to hold their position without the required reinforcements or, more likely, abandoning them outright. A precipitous pullout would leave a gaping security vacuum in its wake, which terrorists, insurgents, militias and Iran would rush to fill--probably resulting in a spiral of ethnic cleansing and slaughter on a scale as yet unseen in Iraq.

I appeal to my colleagues in Congress to step back and think carefully about what to do next. Instead of undermining Gen. Petraeus before he has been in Iraq for even a month, let us give him and his troops the time and support they need to succeed.

Gen. Petraeus says he will be able to see whether progress is occurring by the end of the summer, so let us declare a truce in the Washington political war over Iraq until then. Let us come together around a constructive legislative agenda for our security: authorizing an increase in the size of the Army and Marines, funding the equipment and protection our troops need, monitoring progress on the ground in Iraq ...

We are at a critical moment in Iraq--at the beginning of a key battle, in the midst of a war that is irretrievably bound up in an even bigger, global struggle against the totalitarian ideology of radical Islamism. However tired, however frustrated, however angry we may feel, we must remember that our forces in Iraq carry America's cause--the cause of freedom--which we abandon at our peril.

Senator Leiberman is absolutely right, and his Democratic colleagues know it. Perhaps that's why they've had second thoughts about trying to slow-bleed the troops to force a halt to our involvement.

RLC

Moral Authority

Alyaan Hirsi Ali, a woman who has been placed under a death fatwa by Islamic mullahs for her impertinence in telling the truth about Islam, instructs Bill Maher's audience, guests, and Maher himself on the nature of dhimmitude.

Maher's understanding of Christianity is regrettable, but the chance to hear Ali makes it worth putting up with his arrogance for a while. The movie critic spoof at the end is pretty funny, too.

If you're interested in learning about who Ali is check out at Slate by Anne Applebaum. RLC

Invested in Failure

Cooler heads seem to have prevailed in the Democratic caucus and the leadership is pulling the extremists, who are a substantial portion of the party, back from the brink of a debacle:

Democratic leaders backed away from aggressive plans to limit President Bush's war authority, the latest sign of divisions within their ranks over how to proceed. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Monday he wanted to delay votes on a measure that would repeal the 2002 war authorization and narrow the mission in Iraq.

Senior Democrats who drafted the proposal, including Sens. Joseph Biden of Delaware and Carl Levin of Michigan, had sought swift action on it as early as this week, when the Senate takes up a measure to enact the recommendations of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission.

Reid, who will huddle with Democrats Tuesday to discuss whether to postpone the Iraq debate, cited pressure from victims' families for quick action on the Sept. 11 bill as the reason for doing so.

"Iraq is going to be there - it's just a question of when we get back to it," Reid said, predicting it would be "days, not weeks" before the Senate returned to the issue. The war reauthorization legislation also appears to lack the 60 votes it would need to pass the Senate.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., meanwhile, said she doesn't support tying war funding to strict training and readiness targets for U.S. troops.

The comments distanced her from Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who has said he wants to use Congress' spending power to force a change in policy in Iraq, by setting strict conditions on war funding.

This is all so disingenuous. One minute they're telling us that the 2006 election was a mandate to end the war, which Congress could do by simply cutting off funding, the next minute they're trying to rationalize their refusal to do what's necessary to bring the war to a conclusion.

The leadership has come to realize, of course, that had they pushed the Murtha plan through the House and the Biden/Levin bill in the Senate they would have unintentionally placed themselves in a political no-win situation. If the U.S. were forced by the Murtha plan to withdraw from Iraq then the American people would have rightly blamed the humiliation on the Democrats. On the other hand, if, despite the Democrats' efforts to prevent it, we manage to achieve a noticeable measure of success in that miserable land, the credit will all go to George Bush and the Republicans. This would politically marginalize the Democrats for the next twenty years. It would've been a heads they win, tails we lose proposition for the Dems and luckily for them Pelosi and Reid recognized where they were headed in time to avert the catastrophe.

The Democrats' best strategy - for their party, not for the country - is to play along with Bush, to keep nipping at his heels, and hope that he fails to establish a stable and secure democracy in Iraq. If he does fail without the Democrats interfering with his policy then the Democrats will be well positioned to blame the defeat on the Republicans and reap the political harvest.

Even so, there's something very wrong with having half of our government heavily invested in the defeat of our forces and the failure of an attempt to bring some measure of peace and safety to millions of people.

RLC

Magic Wand

Uncommon Descent links to a couple of interesting videos which illustrate how the cellular machinery which produces proteins does what it does. Protein synthesis really is astonishing, all the more so if one believes that all the machinery and coordination of reactions just evolved by chance. After all, the DNA and RNA which code for proteins can only work when they're manipulated by proteins, but proteins did not become available until DNA and RNA were able to produce them. So which came first, the proteins or the nucleic acids?

Never mind, we're told. Such conundrums are minor puzzles which will be solved eventually. Darwinism is like a magic wand. When we encounter problems like the above we simply wave the wand and solemnly recite the incantation "genetic mutation and natural selection plus time and chance" and, presto! the problem goes away.

RLC

Pass the Vitriol, Please

There was a time when conservatives were reviled everywhere for being "haters" and "mean-spirited." Then came Bill Buckley's magazine The National Review and a series of books by conservative authors the tone and quality of which gave the lie to the allegations of their opponents. It turned out that it was very difficult to find an actual conservative who fit the stereotype of a frothing Joe McCarthy out to lynch everyone to his ideological left.

Nevertheless, by the late 1960s the damage had been done. Conservatives, in the public's mind, had been stuck with a reputation for biliousness and the media was only too pleased to reinforce the image in whatever way they could. Conservative ideas had a hard time gaining a hearing because they'd been stereotyped as insensitive, fat cat businessmen who loathed both minorities and commies in equal measure.

In the 1980s, however, the emergence on the national scene of charismatic, irenic conservative personalities like Ronald Reagan made it even more difficult for liberals to sustain the specter of the fire-breathing conservative, and in the last twenty years that misconception has been greatly diminished.

The irony is that as the public has come to realize that conservatives are not the monsters they had been led to believe they were the left has ratcheted up the propaganda, trying to portray George Bush as a demoniac on the level of Adolf Hitler. In their desperation to show that conservatives really are the incarnation of Lucifer the left has infused our political rhetoric with far more hate, spite, cruelty and viciousness than anything their predecessors of a generation ago imputed to conservatives.

Nothing in our political past, for example, compares to the vituperation and sheer ugliness of the sort of thing that fills the left's blogs in the wake of the attempted assasination of Vice-president Cheney. Michelle documents some of the sick commentary here although I understand that some of the blogs she quotes from have now expunged the more disgusting comments.

There are several words that come to mind to describe people who think like these people do, but rather than indulge in trying to pin an appropriate adjective on them, as satisfying as such an exercise might be, I wish to simply wonder out loud if there isn't a connection between the ideology the secular left embraces and the kind of people that it seems to attract.

RLC

Busted Pervert

Federal agents in Virginia have arrested a man named Charles Rust-Tierney for possessing child pornography. Some of the material this man was viewing consisted of video of young, prepubescent girls screaming and crying as they were tied up and forcibly raped. What sort of man would want to watch this kind of thing?

Well, it turns out that Rust-Tierney is a past president of the Virginia chapter of the ACLU, not that that explains everything. He also coached youth sports in his Arlington neighborhood. In other words, he's a man of some means and accomplishment who could be anyone's neighbor. The fact that he rose to such prominence in the ACLU seems like it should be significant, perhaps because of facts like this:

In the past, Rust-Tierney had argued against restricting Internet access in public libraries in Virginia, writing, "Recognizing that individuals will continue to behave responsibly and appropriately while in the library, the default should be maximum, unrestricted access to the valuable resources of the Internet."

One wonders, in light of Mr. Rust-Tierney's arrest, if the ACLU's commitment to defending the pornography industry isn't at least partly due to self-interest.

Anyway, there's more on this sordid affair at the link and also some discussion on Bill O'Reilley's show, a video clip of which can be accessed at Hot Air.

It turns out that Rust-Tierney's wife is a leader in an organization which has fought to abolish the death penalty. We suspect that after this development she might be having second thoughts.

RLC

Knee-Slapper

More left-wing hilarity comes to our attention courtesy of Yahoo:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New Yorkers got to kick President George W. Bush's butt on Thursday, sort of.

Performance artist Mark McGowan kicked off his bid to crawl for 72 hours across Manhattan dressed as the president, offering the opportunity to kick his backside. The controversial artist from London began his odyssey from New York's Lincoln Centre wearing a rubber George Bush mask, a business suit, knee pads, work gloves and a sign stuck to his cushioned posterior reading simply: "Kick My Ass".

Though few ordinary New Yorkers, other than fellow artists, cameramen and photographers, were present for the launch on a wet workday afternoon, some people gave him a kick.

"It felt real good to kick Bush," said Casmirr Sharp, 52, of New York's Queens borough. "He really deserves more than a kick."

McGowan told Reuters he hopes his performance proves therapeutic to the city's denizens. But he insisted his work was no publicity stunt but art: "It's definitely an art form. A lot of the things I do are a bit silly but they always have a political edge to them."

Ho, ho. Whether it's humor or art those lefties sure are a caution, aren't they? Their sense of the comic is so uproariously sophisticated, so endearing that it makes one want to be a liberal just for the laughs.

RLC

Life of the Cell

Those with a little background in cell biology might find this animation interesting.

Everyone else will find it stunning that so much coordinated, machine-like activity is going on in the tiny cells of our body all the time. How does brute matter produce such complex machinery and exquisite coordination?

RLC

It's All Too Beautiful

GilDodgen at Uncommon Descent has an interesting meditation triggered by a reading of Michael Denton's classic work titled Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe.

GilDodgen considers just one tiny aspect of the laws of physics, the physics of sound, and contemplates the amazing fact that the laws of physics are precisely suited to allowing us to experience music:

Isn't it also interesting that the physics of sound is just right to create scales, harmonies, consonance and dissonance, and that musical instruments can be made from common materials?

Music is based on the physics of sound - in particular, the overtone series which is produced when a string or column of air vibrates in integer multiples. The division of the octave into 12 semitones is not an accident or a matter of personal preference; this produces notes that coincide with the overtone series. This is the basis of melody and harmony, and why some sounds are dissonant and some sounds are consonant.

Imagine a world without music: no music accompanying the movies you watch, no music in your church services, no music on the radio or television, no violinists, no pianists, no guitarists, no singers, no songs - no music at all! Wouldn't your life be indescribably impoverished? Music is a totally abstract art form, but has tremendous power and meaning in our lives.

When I was in college I took a number of courses in music theory. I remember a chapter in a book about melody. All the technical elements of melodic composition were discussed but there was one final comment that struck me (I paraphrase): Most people associate "melody" with something that cannot be described, but they know it when they hear it, and there is no way to teach how to write a good melody. Each note seems to naturally flow from the preceding one.

The more we learn the more it becomes apparent that the universe was rigged for humans, from top to bottom, and in almost every way. Our universe is a very meaningful one.

Everything we learn about the world seems to confirm this assertion, which is why statements like that made by Steven Weinberg at the end of his book The First Three Minutes: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless," appear more and more ludicrous with every new discovery.

RLC

Triple Rings

One of the many beautiful photos taken by the Hubble telescope is this one of a triple-ringed supernova:

How these rings were formed has long puzzled scientists, but it seems now that a pair of astronomers at Oxford may have figured it out. See this article at New Scientist for the details.

RLC

Fitzfonged

The trial of Lewis Libby has been a farce from the beginning. A man's life is being devastated by a fanatical prosecutor who evidently shares some of the same genes as Mike Nifong, the contemporary Torquemada who prosecuted (persecuted?)the Duke lacrosse players who were accused of rape.

For a quick overview of the case and an indictment of the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, we recommend Mona Charen's column on the subject. It's brief and tells you everything you need to know to bring you up to speed in case, like most people, you haven't been paying much attention.

Viewpoint likes the word being bandied about to describe what happens to people who fall afoul of prosecutors like Nifong and Fitzgerald who mistake themselves for Medieval inquisitors. Such hapless souls are said to have been Fitzfonged. We think it'll stick.

RLC

Scott's Oriole

I invite those of you who appreciate beauty in nature to check out this visitor to a backyard near Mechanicsburg, PA this past week. It was captured on film by photographer Bob Moul.

The bird is a Scott's oriole, a species indigenous to the American southwest which usually winters in Mexico and Central America. Indeed, the Mechanicsburg bird, which I had the pleasure of viewing on Thursday, is the first one ever recorded in the northeastern U.S.

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever" (John Keats).

RLC

Victory is Defeat, Success is Failure

Saner elements in the Democratic party seem to have prevailed over the Pelosi/Murtha wing, and the idea of slow-bleeding the troops in Iraq appears to have itself bled itself to death:

House Democrats have pulled back from efforts to link additional funding for the war to strict troop-readiness standards after the proposal came under withering fire from Republicans and from their party's own moderates. That strategy was championed by Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) and endorsed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

"If you strictly limit a commander's ability to rotate troops in and out of Iraq, that kind of inflexibility could put some missions and some troops at risk," said Rep. Chet Edwards (D-Tex.), who personally lodged his concerns with Murtha.

The anti-war Democrats, however, are nothing if not determined to achieve failure in Iraq, and thus a couple of leading Democratic lights in the Senate, Joseph Biden and Carl Levin, are crafting legislation that would:

essentially overturn the 2002 resolution granting Mr. Bush the authority to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and limit the military to combating Al Qaeda in Iraq, keeping Iraq from becoming a haven for terrorists and training Iraqi forces. The proposal's goal, officials said, would be to allow combat forces not engaged in those duties to be removed from Iraq next year.

This is rich. Under the senators' proposal the American military will be limited to combat only against al Qaeda in Iraq. I wonder if the legislation will require the al Qaeda cadres to identify themselves to American troops so that our forces will know whether or not they can proceed to shoot them. I wonder, too, if august worthies like Joe "Obama's the cleanest black ever to run for president" Biden have considered that, in the unlikely event their legislation passes, al Qaeda will just change its name. What are our troops supposed to do then? I guess I'm too much of a worry wort. Surely Messers. Levin and Biden have it all figured out.

For the Democrats victory is defeat and success is failure. George Orwell must be smiling.

RLC

Fear Itself

Al Gore once famously accused President Bush of deceiving the American people by screaming these words: "He betrayed this country. He played on our fears."

Well, we are now well on our way to having a national panic attack over global warming due largely to the efforts of Mr. Gore and his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Even small children are reportedly being frightened into sleeplessness by fears of global warming and world-wide catastrophe.

One wonders whether Mr. Gore would agree that An Inconvenient Truth plays on our fears. Probably not. Only Republicans do that.

RLC

Behind the Contretemps

You've probably heard about the dust-up between the Clinton camp and the Obama people over remarks made by Hollywood producer David Geffen at a fund-raiser for Obama. What hasn't been speculated upon much in the media is why Geffen has turned away from the Clintons, with whom he was once very close, and thrown his Hollywood heft behind Obama.

Here's why:

One of Geffen's causes was the release of Leonard Peltier, a Native-American convicted of murdering two FBI agents back in the 80's. Geffen believes Peltier is innocent and had urged President Clinton to pardon him, but Clinton declined. Geffen, though disappointed, accepted this decision. Then came the last days of the Clinton presidency and a flurry of pardons were issued, among them were these:

Marc Rich was indicted on tax evasion, commodities fraud and other charges in 1983 and fled to Switzerland. After Clinton pardoned him, a House committee probing Clinton's pardons sought testimony from Rich's ex-wife Denise, who had been a major contributor to Democratic causes - including Hillary's Senate campaign and the Clinton Presidential Library. Denise Rich invoked the Fifth Amendment.

Almon Glenn Braswell was pardoned of his mail fraud and perjury convictions after paying about $200,000 to Hillary's brother, Hugh Rodham, to represent his case for clemency. He later returned the payments, but he too invoked the Fifth Amendment during a Congressional hearing.

In 2000, Clinton had pardoned Vonna Jo Gregory, owner of the carnival company United Shows International, and her husband Edgar for a 1982 bank fraud conviction. After the pardon, the company gave Hillary's brother Anthony Rodham $107,000 in "loans" that he has never repaid.

On his last day in office, Clinton pardoned his old friend Susan McDougal, who had already completed her sentence for her role in the Whitewater scandal.

Clinton also pardoned his brother Roger on drug charges, and former Housing secretary Henry Cisneros, who was convicted of lying to the FBI about payments to a mistress.

Clinton slashed the prison sentences of four men convicted of stealing millions in federal grants. The men were from a community of Hasidic Jews in New Square, N.Y., which voted 1,400 to 12 in favor of Hillary Clinton in her first Senate race.

Clinton also commuted the sentences - over the objections of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office - of 11 members of a Puerto Rican nationalist group that set off more than 100 bombs in the U.S. The large Puerto Rican community in New York City supports Democrats.

Geffen was apparently angered by the fact that a man he believed to be innocent of any crime was left unpardoned but this parade of corrupt and criminal cronies and others were released by the president. Especially galling was the pardon of Marc Rich whose beautiful wife apparently bought his release through political contributions of one sort or another. Geffen saw this as something of a betrayal by the Clintons and has consequently joined the swelling ranks of Democrats who've come to despise the Clintons for the cavalier way in which they use and discard people according to how useful they are to them.

It's beginning to look as though Hillary will have to fight hard for her party's nomination and, if she gets it, enthusiasm for her candidacy will be subdued among those Democrats who know her.

RLC

Unlocking the Mystery of Life

One of the finest videos on intelligent design is one titled Unlocking the Mystery of Life. It lays out some of the early history of the ID movement and addresses two major points of conflict with Darwinian naturalism: The origin of life and the origin of specified complexity. The theoretical stuff is interesting and the computer animations are breathtaking.

For a sample of the latter take a look at this clip which illustrates just a few of the processes involved in the cell's manufacture of proteins. It's nothing short of astounding.

RLC

Bribe Me Later

For those too young to remember the Abscam scandal that resulted in six Democrats and one Republican going to jail, Ann Coulter offers a quick summary. Her purpose, of course, is to highlight the venality of a young congressman named John Murtha, who was caught on tape discussing bribes with an undercover FBI agent.

This is the man who is leading the Democrats, and our nation, up Surrender Hill. It's ironic that the Democrats would feature a congressman with one of the most questionable ethical reputations in Washington as a key leader in what they purport to be a kind of moral quest, the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.

Read Coulter's piece to learn a little bit about the kind of man it is who is scheming to deny the president the ability to reinforce the troops in Iraq.

RLC

Evil America

Randall Hoven at The American Thinker offers a salutary, and fairly brief, history lesson for those who wonder about the claim that the United States is a dangerous, perhaps evil, force on the world stage. Hoven shows that such a claim can only be made by those who either have no idea what has transpired around the world in the last seventy years or who are being deliberately dishonest.

Students who sit in classrooms where this meme is regularly trotted out by leftist instructors will especially benefit from reading the piece.

RLC

Why We Must Win

This is yet another illustration of why we must win the war against Islamo-fascism. If we lose heart, as some already have, what happened to Zilla Usman will eventually happen to women throughout the West.

Zilla Huma Usman, the minister for social welfare in Punjab province and an ally of President Pervez Musharraf, was killed as she was about to deliver a speech to dozens of party activists, by a "fanatic", who believed that she was dressed inappropriately and that women should not be involved in politics, officials said.

Usman, 35, was wearing the shalwar kameez worn by many professional women in Pakistan, but did not cover her head.

The attack happened in Gujranwala, 120 miles southeast of Islamabad, where the minister's office is based. As Usman, 35, stepped out of her car - where she was greeted by her co-workers throwing rose petals - the attacker pulled out a pistol and fired a single shot at close range, hitting her in the head. She was airlifted to hospital in the provincial capital Lahore, but died soon afterwards.

The gunman, Mohammad Sarwar, was overpowered by the minister's driver and arrested by police. A stone mason in his mid 40s, he is not thought to belong to any radical group but is known for his fanaticism. He was previously held in 2002 in connection with the killing and mutilation of four prostitutes, but was never convicted due to lack of evidence.

Sarwar appeared relaxed and calm when he told a television channel that he had carried out God's order to kill women who sinned. "I have no regrets. I just obeyed Allah's commandment," he said, adding that Islam did not allow women to hold positions of leadership. "I will kill all those women who do not follow the right path, if I am freed again," he said.

"He is basically a fanatic," Raja Basharat, the Punjab Law Minister, said. "He is against the involvement of women in politics and government affairs." A police statement added: "He considers it contrary to the teachings of Allah for a woman to become a minister or a ruler. That's why he committed this action."

"He killed her because she was not observing the Islamic code of dress. She was also campaigning for emancipation of women," said Nazir Ahmad, a local officer.

Usman, a married mother of two sons, joined the pro-Musharraf Pakistan Muslim League after being elected in 2002. A strong supporter of the President's policy of "enlightened moderation" - designed to tackle extremism - she was appointed to her current post in December last year according to her government biography.

A culture which gives a slap on the wrist to rapists, which turns a blind eye to "honor" killings, which punishes children by driving automobiles over their arms,

which hangs teenagers for being homosexual,

and which produces people who believe they're doing God's will by killing women who don't "know their place", is not just retrograde and dysfunctional. It's diseased.

Yet it is just such a culture as this which the Islamo-fascists wish to impose on the whole world, and they are prepared to use whatever means necessary to do it.

RLC

Deep Impact

As if we didn't have enough to worry about:

An asteroid may come uncomfortably close to Earth in 2036 and the United Nations should assume responsibility for a space mission to deflect it, a group of astronauts, engineers and scientists said on Saturday.

Although the odds of an impact by this particular asteroid are low, a recent congressional mandate for NASA to upgrade its tracking of near-Earth asteroids is expected to uncover hundreds, if not thousands of threatening space rocks in the near future, former astronaut Rusty Schweickart said.

If you like to worry about things you can do nothing about you can read the rest of the article here.

RLC

Pro/Con

This month's edition of First Things has a very interesting pair of essays by Joseph Bottum and Michael Novak, both of whom are conservative Republicans (I'm surmising), on the competency of George W. Bush. Bottum takes the view that W. is in over his head, Novak is much more lenient in his judgment.

FT is offering the article for free here, and it's well worth a read whether one is a supporter or a foe of the president.

RLC

ATP Synthase

In yet another tribute to the skill displayed by blind mechanistic processes in constructing what anyone but a Darwinian true-believer would recognize as an engineered machine, Telic Thoughts offers a simulation of the operation of the enzyme that synthesizes ATP in the body's cells.

RLC

If It Should Come to War

The BBC reports on the American plan of attack should Iran persist in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Here's part of the BBC story:

It is understood that any such attack - if ordered - would target Iranian air bases, naval bases, missile facilities and command-and-control centres. The US insists it is not planning to attack, and is trying to persuade Tehran to stop uranium enrichment.

The UN has urged Iran to stop the programme or face economic sanctions. But diplomatic sources have told the BBC that as a fallback plan, senior officials at Central Command in Florida have already selected their target sets inside Iran.

That list includes Iran's uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. Facilities at Isfahan, Arak and Bushehr are also on the target list, the sources say.

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the trigger for such an attack reportedly includes any confirmation that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon - which it denies.

Alternatively, our correspondent adds, a high-casualty attack on US forces in neighbouring Iraq could also trigger a bombing campaign if it were traced directly back to Tehran.

Long range B2 stealth bombers would drop so-called "bunker-busting" bombs in an effort to penetrate the Natanz site, which is buried some 25m (27 yards) underground.

The BBC's Tehran correspondent Frances Harrison says the news that there are now two possible triggers for an attack is a concern to Iranians.

It should be of concern to everyone. One of the interesting things about these plans is that they have been somehow made available to the BBC at the same time that the Bush administration is adamant in its denials that any attack on Iran is being planned. We appear to be playing mind games with the Iranians. Let's hope it works.

RLC

The Blasphemy Challenge

Something called the "Rational Response Squad" is soliciting people, mostly young people, to make a commitment to condemn themselves to eternal damnation by videotaping themselves denying the existence of the Holy Spirit.

Set aside the callowness of the project and the dubious theology that underlies their interpretation of blaspheming the Holy Spirit and explore for a moment the psychology of what these kids are doing. They are proclaiming that they don't believe that God exists, but for what purpose? Someone may believe that space aliens don't exist but most people would hardly bother to send in videos to You Tube declaring the fact. If one doesn't believe that God exists why go to the trouble of videotaping an affirmation of one's doubt? What is it about denying the existence of something that is a source of such pride in the denier?

For some of these kids, moreover, it seems that they're not so much denying God's existence but rather banishing the God they suspect exists from any role in their lives. In other words, it's not an intellectual or philosophical position they're voicing, but an act of defiance or rebellion against the concept of God that they've come to hold. In the very act of denying God's existence they seem to be admitting that they know He's there, but that they resent that He is.

If this is a correct interpretation of what at least some of these kids are doing, then, for all of their pretense at intellectual sophistication, they're making themselves look silly. It's foolish, after all, to deny the existence of what deep down you know to be real. It's foolish to despise what deep down you believe to be the source of all that's good and right in the world. In their attempt to be "rational" they make themselves irrational. In their attempt to be "cool" they make themselves dumb. It's very sad.

RLC