The Kurds

Michael Totten has an excellent article on the Iraqi Kurds in Azure.

There's much to learn from reading it and you won't find this kind of information many other places. Here are just a couple of excerpts:

Ethnic Kurds make up around 20 percent of Iraq's population. They, along with Persians, are indigenous to the upper Middle East, having lived there long before Arabs invaded from the south and Turks from the east....The majority live in the northern mountains, high above the dusty plains of Mesopotamia, in the officially recognized and constitutionally sanctioned Kurdish Autonomous Region. There, the war is already over. In fact, the war was hardly fought there at all.

Erbil, the largest city in Kurdistan, has suffered three terrorist attacks since coalition forces terminated the Baath regime in 2003. The second-largest city, Suleimaniah, was struck only once. The third-largest city, Dohuk, has never been hit at all. More people have been wounded or killed by terrorists in Spain than in Iraqi Kurdistan since 2003. No one has been kidnapped.

Indeed, it is hard to overstate how pro-American the people of Kurdistan are. They are possibly more pro-American than Americans themselves. If Bill Clinton was America's first "black" president, people in at least one part of the world say Bush is the first "Muslim" one: He is sometimes referred to in Kurdistan as "Hajji Bush" (meaning that he made the Muslim pilgrimage, or Hajj, to Mecca), an undeniably high honor for a Republican Christian from Texas. No, Kurdistan is not a "red state," and Kurds are not Republicans. Nor does it occur to most of them to prefer America's conservatives over its liberals. Rather, their warm feelings of gratitude and friendship extend to all Americans and both political parties for having liberated them from the totalitarian dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

So Saddam launched the genocidal Anfal Campaign in 1986 to ethnically cleanse the Kurds from his country. "They wanted to remove all the Kurds from everywhere in Iraq," Rostam said. "They just destroyed whole villages and provinces and moved people into collective towns and concentration camps. Some of the Turkmen villages around here were demolished for the same reason. The point was to make it an Arab area, and no other."

Iraq's Kurdish cities were devastated by air strikes, artillery, and chemical weapons. Forests were clear-cut. Concrete was poured into wells. Between 100,000 and 200,000 people were murdered in massacres, and 85 percent of Kurdish villages were destroyed. Tens of thousands, including children, were tortured to death in prison blocks.

"We believe if the Americans withdraw from this country there will be many more problems," Colonel Mudhafer said. "The Sunni and Shia want total control of Iraq. We are going to get involved in that. Iran is going to be involved in that. Turkey is going to be involved in that. Syria is going to be involved in that. The Sunni and Shia fighting in Baghdad will pull us in. We are going to be involved. Turkey and Iran will make problems for us. It is not going to be safe. All the American martyrs will have died for nothing, and there will be more problems in the future. Americans should build big bases here." For obvious reasons, the idea of the American military garrisoning its forces in Kurdistan is wildly popular among the Kurds.

Those who work with the United States in the Iraqi government, the Iraqi army, and the Iraqi police are already on the hit lists of numerous death squads, terrorist cells, and militias. Doctors, lawyers, writers, journalists, and countless others have already been singled out for extermination for choosing democracy and civil society over politics by bullets and car bombs. The terror that plagued Pol Pot's Cambodia in the 1970s and Algeria in the 1990s now stalks every decent person in the center and south of Iraq.

There's much more information on the Kurdish people and their role in Iraq at the link.

RLC

The Myth of the Naked Public Square

There is a myth that has circulated throughout our culture for over a generation now to the effect that we must be vigilant to keep our public-policy debates free of all religious assumptions. Religion, we've been told over and over, has no place in our public conversation. It's all about the separation of Church and state, don't you know.

This myth does great harm to our civic life because it essentially undercuts the possibility that any position one takes on an issue will be grounded in anything more substantial than personal taste. Consider a controversial social issue like capital punishment and imagine two people, Joe and Carl, debating it. Joe says he's opposed to capital punishment, and Carl asks why. What does Joe say?

He may respond by insisting that it's wrong to kill people, but, if so, Carl can simply ask him why killing people is wrong. Ultimately, Joe is going to have to rest his opposition to capital punishment on something other than his own subjective preferences, but the only solid ground he could rest it on is a conviction that God forbids killing. In the naked public square, however, that option is forbidden. The most that anyone can give as a reason for their position on capital punishment, or any of the issues we debate, is that "I don't (or do) like it," but that's hardly a compelling reason why anyone else should agree.

In other words, in a public forum which has been scrubbed clean of all religious references all debate comes down to a dispute over personal tastes and feelings, and in such a debate no one has any more moral authority or insight than anyone else. There's no possibility of appeal to transcendent objective values which could help inform our decision-making.

Indeed, the only way to prevail in public disputes is by amassing on one's side enough people who share one's feelings that one has the political clout to impose them by law on those who don't. In a world in which God has been banished from political discourse we don't win debates by persuasion, we win them by coercion. The person who can shout the loudest or who can gather the biggest mob is the victor.

Genuine public debates can only be carried out among people who share a common value system. If everyone agrees that God disdains killing then we can debate whether there may be reasonable exceptions to that principle. But if we expel God from our civic and social life we have no basis even for thinking that killing of any sort is wrong and, that being so, there's no place to stand if we wish to argue that capital punishment, or torture, or abortion, or gay marriage, or anything else, is wrong.

The irony of this is that the only people who can engage each other in the public square, the only voices anyone should bother to heed, are those of people who share a common belief in God. The atheist is really irrelevant because all he's doing when he says that X is wrong is telling us that he doesn't like X, and that may be an interesting biographical tidbit but it's nothing to build a policy upon.

RLC

Another Myth Laid to Rest

Darwinians have for a generation or so regaled us with the statistic that we share 99% of our genes in common with chimpanzees and that this is strong evidence that both species have evolved from a common ancestor and are closely related.

Now it's turning out that the 1% difference is incorrect. Not only that, but researchers have discovered that most humans differ genetically from each other by about that same amount. In other words, even were the 1% figure true (It appears that the correct difference is closer to 6.5%) we would have to conclude that humans were as genetically different from each other as they are believed to be from chimps, and that therefore chimps would be as closely related to us as are our fellow humans.

This is nonsense, of course, and most scientists are quietly putting the human/chimp myth to rest in the same graveyard as the myth of the vestigial appendix has been recently interred.

RLC

A Little More Honesty, Please

ProteinWisdom offers some examples of how the left is framing President Bush's SCHIP veto:

"I disagreed with the president's position because he wants to leave out all the children." Dennis Kucinich, Democrat Presidential candidate

"We're holding these members of Congress accountable for standing with President Bush and against our children." Noah Winer, head of MoveOn.org's health care campaign.

"You don't have money to fund the war or children. But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president's amusement." Congressman Pete Stark

"Why does President Bush hate American kids?" Keith Olbermann host of MSNBC's Countdown

As each of these men knows, the President actually wants to increase, not cut, the number of children covered by the program, but he wants to keep the focus of coverage on children in the lowest rungs of the middle class. The Democrats want taxpayers to pick up the coverage of millions of children who are already covered by private insurance. The President wants to expand SCHIP by 5 billion dollars, the Democrats by 35 billion.

Over this disagreement his opponents are willing to say the kinds of things that are quoted above.

It really is sad that the public debate can't be conducted with more integrity than this.

RLC

IFA Week

This week has been declared Islamo-Fascism Awareness week on many college campuses across the country. Despite the efforts of Muslims and leftists to prevent or curtail it many college students will have their eyes opened by speakers and films to exactly what the Islamists have in mind for us and our children. A glimpse of that glorious future can be had here.

If ever these people have their way it will be the end of civilization. Don't watch the video with children present, but by all means watch it, especially if you're a woman. It's important that we understand the nature of the people who seek to spread their religion across the globe.

RLC

PC Mindlessness

Readers who harbor an abiding disdain for political correctness and the "white guilt," as Shelby Steele dubs it in his excellent book of that title, often spawned by it, will find nothing in the e-mail below that would elicit doubt as to whether their disdain is merited.

The writer is replying to an old Viewpoint post titled Dunderhead Watch, and the story she relates tells us much about at least one of the schools our children attend:

This article [Dunderhead Watch] hit home because I had a "Dunderhead" experience of my own when my oldest son, who is now 26, was in the sixth grade. At that time I worked as a teaching assistant for the school district in the school where this happened. One morning I came to work to find a note from my son's principal to come to the office. When I arrived at the office I was asked to sit down and wait for him to call me in. I have to say that I felt like I myself was back in school again! Once I got over my surprise of being called to the office, I looked around the room and saw another set of parents waiting. They looked a little angry and I wondered what had happened.

It didn't take long to find out ... A few moments later, my son and a black female classmate of his also came into the office. I was to find out that she was the daughter of the other parents who were also sitting in the office. Once inside the principal's office, he began yelling at me saying "do you know what your son called this girl (I honestly forget her name)? I said no, what? I was clueless. He called her a (the N word). He used the full term, but I dislike it so much I refuse to use it. He went on to say "Where do you think he has heard this before?"

Quite honestly I was in shock because neither my husband, my parents, his parents or anyone else that we were close to used that word. I am not trying to be naïve, but we just didn't. It was not in our vocabulary. Due to my shock at what he had just said, I was not able to speak so the principal went on to say "Do you know that these parents can sue you and your husband for what he said" and so on and so on. It was unbelievable!

After I finally got over my shock, I looked at my son and asked "Mike, where did you hear that word". By then he was crying, but very quietly said "we have been reading Tom Sawyer in class and that is where I heard it. I called her that after she called me White Honky Trash".

You could have heard a pin drop in the office. The other parents asked their daughter if she had called my son that and she said yes. They could not have been any nicer once the truth came out. We both apologized for what we felt was a poor way to use an educational tool by both of our children and then left.

The principal could not have apologized enough to me, but at that time I just said thank you and left to go back to work and sent my son to class. After a few days, once I had my thoughts together, I went to visit the principal. I told him that I felt that he had used terrible judgment in how he had handled the entire situation. First of all, I felt like I had been ambushed. Why had he not spoken to me and let me know why I had been called in? I was totally unprepared and apparently the other parents knew what had happened to land them in the principal's office.

I also did not appreciate how it had affected my son. He was scared to death to be called to the principal's office because not only had he been called to the office for the first time in his life, but he then had to face some very angry parents and hear how his Mom and Dad were going to be sued over something he had done!

I felt better after I spoke my mind, but to be honest I lost quite a bit of respect for the principal. That is difficult not only because I was an employee, but he was the principal of my son's school which is supposed to be what I always believed was an esteemed position and one that you hope employs someone who knows how to not only make smart quick decisions, but rational ones.

There was one other aspect of this. I had to handle this is in a very cautious way with my son around. Even though I felt one way about the man, I had to be careful about what I said to my son about it. He had to continue school there and I had another child who would also be attending in the next year. I wanted them both to still hold respect for the person who was the head of their school.

I will tell you that it was a lesson on learning that there are unfortunately "Dunderheads" out there in positions that teach, and you have to be very aware of who they are. Let's just say I was not as naïve after that experience as I once was and that was a good thing.

I don't blame the girls' parents for taking the matter to the school administration, given what they knew at the time, but of all the ways this situation could have been handled it's hard to imagine one which would have been more maladroit than the way it was handled. The principal, rather than seizing the opportunity to teach the boy that some words are hurtful and inappropriate and to teach him the virtues of apology, sought instead, I suspect, to ingratiate himself with the girls' parents by showing them that whatever some white people are like, he himself is completely pure on the matter of race and that he isn't going to tolerate any budding young skinheads and their parents in his school. It's a textbook example of what Steele talks about in White Guilt.

I wonder if the principal, having heard the little girl admit to her racial insult, lectured the girl's parents the same way he lectured the boy's mom, and I wonder if he told them that they could be sued. Probably not. Maybe he was angling at the time for a job at Duke.

RLC

Political Skepticism

In response to a post last week titled Truth Matters my friend Byron e-mails to ask me why I seem skeptical of the intentions of those on the political left. It's a good question since I am indeed skeptical of the short-term aims and long-term goals of some, perhaps most, of those in Congress, the media and the blogosphere who tend to position themselves along the portside rail of the ship of state. Here's By's query. My slightly amended reply to it follows:

The only reason I take the time to keep this little sidebar conversation going is to ask why you are so singularly cynical and skeptical of the motives and ulterior motives of the Dems? Wait, on second thought, I am not sure I want to hear why.

Too late to change your mind. Here's the root of my concern, By. Today's liberal leaders wish to move the country to the left in several ways which I think are truly harmful. They want to secularize the nation, lower or erase standards of sexual morality, define deviancy down, and socialize the economy, including health care. They also wish to emasculate American power and influence around the world and restrict individual freedom here at home. They long to banish distinctions of class and values and level everyone to the lowest common denominator. They see each of these as a desideratum, but they realize that the general public, were they aware of this agenda, would not stand for it, so they seek to implement it gradually, hoping that, like the frog in the pot, the public won't notice the rising temperature.

You might say that this is true, perhaps, of Marxists, but that it's not true of liberals. As someone once said, however, Marxists and liberals are traveling along the same road. The only difference between them is that Marxists are in more of a hurry.

People of the secular left tend to share in common the desire to push the boundaries of culture, society, the economy, foreign policy, etc., ever leftward, and there's no endpoint to the push. If there were then progressives would have to change their name to conservatives when the endpoint was reached. No matter how much change we undergo as a society it will never be enough to slake the progressive's thirst for more.

Along the way traditional institutions like marriage are undermined, and education, especially in the humanities, is diluted and debased. People who have strong family attachments are not good raw material for the progressive project nor are people who have some historical understanding of the founding principles of this nation or the major lineaments of world civilization. As I said, the march leftward is a slow trudge that takes generations to complete, and I don't mean to give the impression that it's a conscious conspiracy or that all liberals are on board for the journey - some no doubt oppose it - but the overall ebb and flow of the American culture war has been relentlessly leftward for the last 100 years.

The best way to stop this march to the cliff, perhaps, is to first recognize its manifestations and to then hold it up to the light of day. The more people see what's happening the better chance there is of heading it off.

None of this is to say that there is nothing good about liberalism. I've talked about this with you on occasion and explained that I think liberals are often much more attuned to human problems than are conservatives. Liberals also provoke conservatives to question assumptions and convictions they hold which may be indefensible. But the problem with liberalism is that their solutions to our problems - more government control, higher taxes, more spending, a weaker military, a libertarian socio-cultural milieu, a radically secular public square - are all, in my mind, dangerously wrong-headed.

So, when I see intelligent government officials and others doing and saying things that prima facie make no sense, and which would appear to people whose opinions and thoughtfulness I respect to have deleterious consequences for our nation or society, I have to wonder whether there is some reason they are saying and doing these things other than the reason they give. What is it, exactly, that they're trying to gain by doing what they do?

Anyway, even though you didn't want to hear it, that's why I'm skeptical of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid et al. They're the pawns and front men for people even more radical than themselves, and what they have in mind for my children and grandchildren is not what I hope for them.

RLC

The Perversity of Modern Culture

James Watson the co-discoverer, along with Francis Crick, of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, is an atheistic Darwinian evolutionist. He has recently created a furor in England with his comments that black Africans are simply not as intelligent as Europeans. The Sunday Times in London writes:

[Watson] says that he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really", and I know that this "hot potato" is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".

He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because "there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don't promote them when they haven't succeeded at the lower level". He writes that "there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."

Watson's remarks raise several interesting questions. Let's focus on just one for now: Which view of human origins is most likely to lead to genuine racism, the view that men have evolved the traits they have because those traits had survival value in the competition for resources, or the view that all men are created by God in His image and are loved equally by Him?

Ideas have consequences. The idea of materialistic Darwinism, what some scientists call "the greatest idea anyone has ever had," leads directly, as Richard Weikert has pointed out in his masterful book From Darwin to Hitler, to eugenics, racism, and final solutions. The Christian idea of equality before God, on the other hand, leads to the notion that all men have equal dignity, worth, and rights in the eyes of God.

The paradox and perversity of modern culture is that it wants desperately to condemn racism while at the same time embracing Darwinian assumptions that logically entail it. Moreover, modern culture, while professing its abhorrence of racism, is nevertheless eager to minimize, mock and reject the only worldview that is philosophically incompatible with racist ideology, Christian theism.

Very curious.

RLC

Not Too Thin

One of the considerations, or perhaps reservations, expressed by people when the topic of a military strike against Iran is brought up is how we can do such a thing when our military is stretched so thin in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The fact is, according to a Newsmax report, a strike against Iran would be carried out primarily by air and naval forces, neither of which are heavily involved in the ongoing conflicts elsewhere:

The new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said that despite the commitment of U.S. forces elsewhere, the military is capable of conducting operations against Iran if called on to bomb nuclear facilities and other targets.

Adm. Michael Mullen told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday: "From a military standpoint, there is more than enough reserve to respond if that, in fact, is what the national leadership wanted to do, and so I don't think we're too stretched in that regard."

Defense and military officials have been preparing American forces within striking distance of Iran, according to the Washington Times. Attacks on the Islamic Republic would be carried out largely by the Navy and Air Force.

Officials say one target of any U.S. military action would be Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps facilities because of their role in providing insurgents in Iraq with armor-piercing roadside bombs. One official said the factory where Iranian bomb materials are being produced has been located.

A second target would be Iran's nuclear facilities, which are chiefly underground and spread across the country.

Appearing with Mullen at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it would probably spur other nations in the region to obtain those weapons themselves. That in turn would raise the risk of nuclear materials falling into the hands of terrorists.

But Adm. Mullen said the use of military force against Iran would be an option "of the last resort."

Let us hope that it remains a last resort but let us also hope that it remains a resort.

RLC

The Attack on Bhutto

Bill Roggio has details of the attack against former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. The Islamists promised they would try to kill her if she returned to Pakistan and they did. She's a very brave woman.

As the toll from yesterday's ambush on former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto convoy rises to 132 killed and upwards of 500 wounded, the details of the strike emerge. The attack was a sophisticated, coordinated strike carried out by professional terrorists. Conflicting reports exist, but it is clear at least one suicide bomber, and possibly two, conducted the attack, possibly in conjunction with snipers, a car bomb and a person throwing a hand grenade. The target of the attacks was the large truck carrying Bhutto and her senior advisors. Bhutto's convoy was surrounded by a massive cordon of police and party volunteers. The security arrangement had two rings: an outer cordon of 20,000 police and inner cordon of 5,000 volunteer's from Bhutto's political party as well as police.

At least one suicide bomber penetrated the outer cordon and hit the inner ring of security. The suicide bomb came close to hitting Bhutto's truck. "The blasts hit two police vehicles which were escorting the truck carrying Ms Bhutto. The target was the truck," senior Karachi police official Azhar Farooqui told Reuters. Witnesses said two dozen police vehicles "were completely shattered." About 15 to 20 kilograms of explosives were used in the attack.

There's more at the link.

RLC

Twilight of a Theory

Jerry Fodor is a philosopher and a cognitive scientist. He's also an atheist who has no time for creationism or intelligent design, so this article in which he concludes that it's time to discard one of the two main pillars of Darwinian theory, natural selection (adaptationism), is a bit of a shocker. Fodor says this:

The high tide of adaptationism floated a motley navy, but it may now be on the ebb. If it does turn out that natural selection isn't what drives evolution, a lot of loose speculations will be stranded high, dry and looking a little foolish. Induction over the history of science suggests that the best theories we have today will prove more or less untrue at the latest by tomorrow afternoon. In science, as elsewhere, 'hedge your bets' is generally good advice.

Traditionally the two engines that drive evolution have been thought to be random genetic mutation and natural selection. Michael Behe has delivered a blow to the hamstrings of the first of these in his book The Edge of Evolution, and now a prominent atheistic materialist is forecasting the demise of the second. Soon all that will be left of Darwin's theory will be the concept of descent by modification, but how that descent occurs will be anyone's guess.

One guess that might appear more and more frequently will be that life was front-loaded into the evolutionary process. There will be speculation, I speculate, that laws are somehow woven into the cosmos that direct the evolutionary process toward the production of man. Human beings, it will be suggested, were the inevitable outcome of the first primitive chemical reactions that lead to the genesis of biomolecules. This teleological explanation, of course, sounds very much like the view that mankind, or at least, higher life forms, were consciously intended, and once that sort of speculation breaks out people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens will be suffering apoplectic seizures.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

X-Cons

Joe Carter identifies a new taxon in the ideological zoo. It's comprised of individuals from Generation X who gravitate toward conservative ideas. He labels them X-Cons, a startling nomenclature, perhaps, given its similarities to the designation for former felons.

In any event, Carter talks about the characteristics of X-Cons here. Check it out and see if you qualify for membership.

RLC

Another Headache in Iraq

If Turkey invades Iraq to punish the Kurds and we don't stop them will that give a green light to Iran to launch raids on the Kurds? And if we do try to stop the Turks what would be the ramifications of that?

This is a real mess and how well it's handled will be a measure of the Bush administration's diplomatic adroitness. Every American should hope that Turkey relents because if they do not the whole region could go up in flames.

Fortunately, good sense seems to have prevailed in the Democratic caucus and enough Democrats are backing away from the resolution to condemn Turkey for the massacre of Armenians in 1915 to place its future in doubt. The last thing we need right now is to offend the Turks with a formal condemnation of a crime committed by the long-gone Ottoman Empire ninety years ago.

RLC

Taking a Bite Outa' Crime

Apparently the criminals in this town don't read the papers. Either that or they're suicidal. Whichever it is one thing is fairly sure, there are fewer of them today than there were a month ago.

RLC

On Time and the Age of the World

Scientists tell us the universe is some 13 billion years old while young earth creationists maintain that according to the biblical book of Genesis it's only about 10,000 years old. So which is it? It may be that both sides are correct - it all depends on how we look at time.

Time is generally considered to be an objective dimension of reality. It's believed to exist independently of our human experience of it. If there were no humans, according to this view, time would still roll on. Perhaps this is correct, but there is another possibility. Suppose that time is not an objective phenomenon at all but rather a subjective phenomenon. Suppose that time, not just our sense of time, is actually something that our minds impose upon the world just like they create color, fragrance, sound, and so on. If there were no minds there'd be no color, only electromagnetic radiations. Color is the mind's interpretation of these radiations and perhaps time, too, is a creation of the mind.

If so, then time, like color or sound, did not exist until there were human perceivers (for the sake of brevity let's ignore animal perceivers) on earth.

If this is the case, then there may have been a vast sequence of events that led up to man's appearance on earth - a Big Bang, stellar life cycles, stellar nucleosynthesis, the origin of our sun and earth, the origin of living things, etc., but these events did not occur in our time frame. They were tenseless events.

To understand this, imagine videotaping a friend going about his everyday life for, say, two hours. Your friend would experience two hours of time elapsing, and, were you to view the tape, it would take two hours to watch it. The tape, however, could be sped up so that every event is still witnessed and still stands in the same relative spatio-temporal relation to every other event on the tape, but it only takes two minutes to watch it, or two seconds. Theoretically the information on the tape could be compressed so that it takes virtually no time at all.

To your friend "in" the film time would be unchanged, but from the perspective of you the viewer "outside" the film the lapse of time would be whatever you chose it to be. You, as an observer, are not in the same time as is your friend in the video and your perspective on the amount of time it takes for the events on the tape to unfold is completely different.

Perhaps, were we an observer embedded somehow in the universe during the events leading up to the appearance of human beings, it would seem to us to have taken billions of years, but since there were no observers to these events, at least not observers in our temporal frame of reference, it's really meaningless to talk about how long it actually took to go from the moment of creation to the first appearance of human beings. All the events that precede man's arrival might be compressed like a zip file, occurring almost instantaneously, though in the same relationship with each other, and then, once human minds appear, the occurrence of those events gets "stretched out."

Our minds place the events that scientists believe happened into a temporal context so that as we extrapolate back we say that an event that would today take one year would also have taken one year before there were minds, but in fact what we mean is that the event would have taken one year if there had been human witnesses to observe it. If there were no such observers, however, it is meaningless to talk about how long events took to occur. It's like asking what is north of the north pole. The events literally took no time at all.

Perhaps, the writer of Genesis is trying to put something like this into words we can understand when he talks about the days of creation. God creates the universe in a relatively brief period of time, perhaps instantaneously, perhaps more slowly. If this is so, then the Genesis account gives us a good idea of the age of human civilization, but how much time preceded the appearance of humans is inscrutable. It may have been very long or it may have been relatively brief or there may have been no time at all. We can only say that were those same events to occur in such a way that we could observe them they would take billions of years. Whatever time it actually took, however, was determined by God's temporal context, not ours, since He was the only observer.

RLC

Willful Suspension of Belief

Bill Roggio observes that even The Washington Post has taken note that things are looking much better in Iraq than they were just last spring:

Ten months after the announcement of the new counterterrorism strategy in Iraq -- often misleadingly referred to as "The Surge" -- and four months after the last combat brigade was positioned and major operations against al Qaeda and the Shia extremist groups began in mid-June, the US military can point to real results in the security field. Violence has dropped in Iraq, and dropped significantly.

The Washington Post laid out the evidence of the drop in violence in Iraq. Iraqi deaths are plummeting. US combat deaths -- which can be a poor indicator of success or failure -- are at a near all-time low. Al Qaeda's declared Ramadan campaign did not materialize. "The evidence of a drop in violence in Iraq is becoming hard to dispute," The Washington Post reported.

Maybe the Post will send the column to Senator Clinton. Having told General Petraeus that his testimony before the Senate required "a willful suspension of belief" and effectively branding him a liar, she would no doubt appreciate learning that Petraeus was telling the truth.

RLC

Paranoia Will Destroy Ya

You may have heard reports that an Air America (a liberal broadcasting network) radio host named Randi Rhodes was mugged in New York the other day. Without bothering to check with Ms Rhodes the left wing blogosphere and her co-host at Air America immediately deduced that the villains were conservatives who were trying to shut Ms Rhodes up.

You can read the details along with samples of the bizarre and hate-filled allegations here. They're pretty funny given that what actually happened was that Ms Rhodes fell while walking her dog and bumped her head. No mugging, no right-wing fascists, just a common accident and a lot of egg dripping down the faces of the left-wing paranoids at Daily Kos and Air America.

RLC

Do it Yourselfers

So you think you'd like to try nationalized health care. That's the system being touted by Senator Clinton who promises to get it for us if she's elected. It's also the system they have in Canada where those who are able come south for American medical treatment and those who can't often wait for months for the simplest procedures. It's also the system they have in England where dental patients, in pain and unable to find a dentist, are so desperate they're pulling their own teeth with pliers.

When was the last time you couldn't get an emergency appointment for dental care, or any other kind of medical attention? Looks like if Senator Clinton is elected President a year from now a lot more of us might be able to give an answer to that question. On the other hand, it may be good for us to learn the virtues of rugged individualism, self-reliance, and the use of hand tools.

RLC

Getting it Wrong

I was watching a talk show on Fox Saturday night, and a couple of the members of the panel roundly condemned conservative bloggers for "attacking" (I think scrutinizing is a much more accurate word) Graeme Frost and his family and for thrusting them into the media spotlight. The fact is that it was the Democrats who used this 12 year-old boy in an ad criticizing Republicans and the President for not supporting SCHIP. If Democrats are going to publicize his story then it seems inappropriate for them to complain if their opponents question the boy's family's circumstances and whether they really should be receiving taxpayer paid insurance.

Conservatives have indeed made a number of claims about the family's financial status (the value of their house, their income, the businesses the father owns, etc.). I have read that the data that has been cited is either mistaken (value of the house) or outdated (the business didn't do well) so the question of how wealthy the Frost family is seems to be up in the air, but it's a legitimate issue nonetheless.

What would not be legitimate would be to attack the twelve year old boy, which, to my knowledge, no one has, or to accuse conservatives of attacking him - as some certainly have - if, in fact, they did not.

One has to wonder why people would make such a terrible accusation if it were not true. For example, the progressive blog Think Progress has a post on this brouhaha that is either very dishonest or very dumb. They take information put out by conservatives about the family's financial abilities and present it as an attack on the boy. That sort of thing is inexcusably shoddy or malicious.

As I said, the financial circumstances of this family that some have cited may be out of date or otherwise incorrect, but for pro-SCHIP people, having introduced the Frosts into the debate, to say that their ability to buy their own insurance should not be part of that debate is absurd. To furthermore misconstrue references to that ability as an attack on the boy, as Think Progress does, is pretty low.

Here's another fact that makes this smear all the worse: The boy was not denied medical coverage. He actually received the help he needed under the old SCHIP program, the same program the President wants to expand. The President and others, though, are being maligned by their opponents because they don't want to expand it as much as the Democrats do. Bush wants to increase the program by five billion dollars. His opponents want to increase it by 35 billion.

Michelle's been following the whole thing here.

Parenthetically, one pro-SCHIP blogger has claimed that the left would never do anything like attack a child for political reasons, only the right would resort to such reprehensible tactics. Aside from the fact that no one has "attacked" this child at all, this claim is absurd for another reason. It turns out that two years ago the left actually did launch a vicious attack on young Noah McCollough.

Allahpundit reminds us that in 2005 the Republicans used nine year old Noah to tout their Social Security reform proposals, and the bloggers on the left savaged him. They made sexual references to him, called him a "budding young fascist" and made up a derogatory nickname for him.

Pretty disgusting stuff, but when all that matters is winning this is the sort of thing you get.

RLC

New Abortion Documentary

British filmmaker Tony Kaye tackles the subject of abortion in what is called a powerful and graphic new documentary.

"Lake of Fire," currently on limited release in the United States, unwinds over more than two and a half hours of interviews with some of the leading figures from the pro-life and pro-choice camps. But it is the graphic and disturbing depiction of termination procedures, filmed like the rest of the movie in black and white, that marks the film out.

"From the moment I started making the film I thought I have to show an abortion, which at the time had never been done before," Kaye, best known for his 1998 neo-Nazi feature "American History X," told AFP in an interview. "There was no question about whether or not that was the right thing to do because if I'm documenting two sides of the argument, that is one side of the argument and you have to show it," he said.

One scene depicts a doctor sifting through a surgical tray after performing a late-term abortion, where the grisly residue of an arm, a foot and part of a face can be clearly made out. "It's about as shocking as any motion picture can ever get. It's illegal to film someone being killed," said Kaye.

They may be the kind of images used by anti-abortion activists, but Kaye also doesn't shy from showing pictures of a kneeling and bent-over naked woman who died after performing a botched abortion on herself with a wire coat hanger.

Kaye worked for more than 15 years on "Lake of Fire" -- anti-abortion activist John Burt's description of the hell awaiting abortionists -- and said his goal when he set out was simply to show both sides of the argument.

"The concept was to make a film about the debate over the issue of abortion but to make it in a non-propagandist way and to create a kind of war of words." He said he wanted "to create this kind of a weave where we really explore the issue without taking any sides."

Even after spending years working on the project, Kaye, however, admits to not knowing where he stands in the debate. "My position on the subject is that I don't really know what's right. I didn't know much in the beginning... and at the end I was just as confused."

Well, he doesn't seem to be confused about the fact that he has been filming "someone being killed." If that is the case then surely Mr. Kaye can acknowledge that many abortions involve killing someone and at the very least we shouldn't be able to just do that for any reason whatsoever, which, in the U.S., we pretty much can.

By the way, Mr. Kaye states that no one has ever filmed an abortion before but I think the sequel to the 1980s anti-abortion film "Silent Scream," a film called "Escape From Reason," did that. Maybe not.

RLC

Dangerous Resolution

The Democrats are intent on getting us out of Iraq no matter the cost, and their latest tactic could wind up having calamitous consequences. It consists of a non-binding resolution, approved by the House Foreign Affairs committee, to censure Turkey for its massacre of Armenians over 90 years ago. Turkey is extremely offended by this resolution, which Speaker Pelosi promises to bring to a vote by the full House in November, and threatens to retaliate by shutting down access to our air base in Incirlik from which we supply troops in Iraq.

Turkey is also threatening to invade the north of Iraq to deal with the Kurds who are fighting a low grade insurrection against Turkey to carve out a Kurdish state in the eastern part of the country adjacent to Iraq. Our State department has been trying hard to talk Turkey out of such a move, but the Democrats' insult may have hardened Turkish hearts to our entreaties.

It may be that this resolution is not an attempt to make it harder for us to succeed in Iraq, but if it's not, what other purpose could it possibly serve? President Reagan already condemned the Armenian massacre back in 1981 and there are plenty of other massacres going on today (Burma, Darfur) that Congress could devote its energies to condemning. Why pick one that's almost a century old, and what purpose is served by it other than deliberately antagonizing an ally?

Jed Babbin's column on this at the link is an excellent overview of the situation and the Democrats' rationale for their resolution.

RLC

Good News on Cancer

Here's more good news on the battle against cancer: Death rates are dropping faster than ever, thanks to new progress against colorectal cancer.

A turning point came in 2002, scientists conclude Monday in the annual "Report to the Nation" on cancer. Between 2002 and 2004, death rates dropped by an average of 2.1 percent a year. That might not sound like much, but between 1993 and 2001, deaths rates dropped on average 1.1 percent a year. The big change was a two-pronged gain against colorectal cancer.

While it remains the nation's No. 2 cancer killer, deaths are dropping faster for colorectal cancer than for any other malignancy - by almost 5 percent a year among men and 4.5 percent among women.

One reason is that colorectal cancer is striking fewer people, the report found. New diagnoses are down roughly 2.5 percent a year for both men and women, thanks to screening tests that can spot precancerous polyps in time to remove them and thus prevent cancer from forming.

Still, only about half the people who need screening - everyone over age 50 - gets checked.

If you're over 50 and have never had a colonoscopy done call your doctor to get an appointment for one. The procedure is painless (although preparation for it is a bit tedious) and very effective. If you've never had one it's probably one of the most important things you can do this week.

RLC

Assassination Target

News agencies are reporting a terrorist plot to kill Russian president Vladimir Putin during his visit this week to Tehran. DEBKAfile has some details about the plot that I haven't seen elsewhere:

Vladimir Putin has decided not to accept his security services' advice to call off his trip Tuesday, Oct. 16 to attend the Caspian Sea summit and meet President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Its cancellation would damage Russian-Iranian relations.

Iran's foreign ministry dismissed the reports as "completely baseless and part of a psychological war to disrupt Russian-Iranian ties."

DEBKAfile's intelligence sources report that the assassination plot, hatched by three gangs which joined hands ad hoc, was betrayed to the Russians by a Chechen who was detained before he managed to slip into Iran and join the conspirators.

The three groups are: Chechen separatists, whose revolt is almost completely crushed in Russia; an al Qaeda-Taliban group bidding to settle scores with Putin for his denial of Muslim rights in Kosovo; and an ultra-extremist wing of the clerical regime, which accuses Russia of selling out Iranian interests as an American vassal.

Putin aroused their ire by his "treacherous" offer to transfer Iran's uranium enrichment program to Russia, his calculated foot-dragging on the delivery of fuel for the Bushehr reactor and delays in completing its construction. Moscow moreover is held accountable for voting twice with the United States on UN Security Council sanctions against Iran.

The cancellation of his trip would "damage Russian/Iranian relations," according to the above report. Does this imply that his murder would be less damaging to relations than cancelling the trip?

RLC

The Education Gap

The local Sunday paper yesterday ran another in the series of op-ed pieces I've been invited to write for them. The column (below)was based on a couple of posts I'd done for Viewpoint:

Recent test scores in the California reveal a glaring disparity in student performance between blacks and Latinos and their white and Asian counterparts - regardless of family income. According to state Superintendent of Instruction Jack O'Connell, "These are not economic achievement gaps. They are racial achievement gaps and we cannot afford to excuse them."

Statewide, only 30 percent of black students and 29 percent of Latino students scored proficient or better in English/language arts. In contrast, 62 percent of white students and 66 percent of Asian students scored proficient or better. In math, only 26 percent of black students and 31 percent of Latino students scored proficient or better, compared to 54 percent of white students and 68 percent of Asians.

O'Connell said the new state test scores clearly show that lower achievement by black and Latino students cannot be "explained away" as the result of poverty. "The results show this explanation simply is not true."

So what is the explanation?

Randolph Ward, San Diego County superintendent of schools claims that the achievement gap persists for several reasons. One is that the most experienced and talented teachers often work at more affluent schools, while younger and less experienced teachers fill slots at poorer schools, which typically enroll minority students. Less experienced teachers, Ward believes, have lower expectations of their students and that students unfortunately live down to what is expected of them.

I doubt, however, that this is the real reason for poor minority performance. Whether these students had highly experienced teachers or not their difficulties would likely persist. In fact, it's younger educators who often have the highest expectations from their students and are most enthusiastic about making a real difference in their students' lives. It's only through years of bitter experience that teachers come to realize that disproportionate numbers of minority students simply don't achieve at the level other students do.

Teachers usually love their students. They want them to do well. They long for them to succeed, but teachers also know their students' capabilities better than anyone, and they know that too many of them simply don't have the tools to compete.

The problem is not confined to California, of course. It afflicts almost every community and school across the nation.

So, why do relatively fewer minority students possess the tools necessary for academic success? If the reason isn't their teachers, nor racism, nor economics, we're left with two obvious possibilities. One is that Charles Murray was correct when he wrote in The Bell Curve in 1994 that some groups are, on average, inherently less capable than others. The second possibility is that the problem is cultural. Before we resign ourselves to Murray's very controversial thesis we really should make a concerted effort to take the second seriously.

Many minority students come from communities where, for whatever reason, neither traditional family nor educational excellence is valued. Many youngsters are allowed to dress, speak, and act as if they are mentally handicapped and proud to be so, and the culture in which they are immersed not only permits this perversity but often encourages it.

Moreover, students who grow up with only a single parent invariably find school more of a struggle than do those who grow up with both biological parents. The job of keeping after children to do their homework, or taking them to libraries, historical sites, and cultural events, is daunting to many moms who exhaust themselves just putting food on the table. When children, especially sons, grow to be about twelve or thirteen they're often very difficult for a single mother to control, and mom's pleas that the boy focus on academic work frequently go unheeded. Instead, young men, flush in their incipient manhood, often prefer to gravitate to the streets to affirm their masculinity by identifying with thugs, siring another generation of fatherless children, and dressing and talking as if their IQ were somewhere around the freezing point of water.

The problem certainly exists in every racial group in the country, but it's most severe in minority communities where almost 70 percent of children are born to unwed mothers (It's close to 90 percent in some urban neighborhoods). Until we begin to take the plight of fatherless children seriously all our talk about improving minority academic performance is just going to be so much wasted time and breath, and all our efforts to help minorities close the achievement gap will be like bailing floodwater out of New Orleans with a spoon.

The fundamental solution to the problems of our inner cities, whether the problem is educational achievement, poverty, or crime, requires reinvigorating and restoring the biological family and discouraging behaviors which send the message that it's cool to be stupid. Nothing else will make any real difference unless we do.

RLC

Truth Matters

Many of us grew up thinking that truthfulness was the highest of human virtues. Dishonesty was seen as a contemptible character trait and the liar was among the worst sort of people. To tell a lie as a child, especially to one's parents, was the source of considerable guilt. Without honesty and integrity, we believed, none of the other virtues could flourish, trust would diminish, character would become obsolete and society would unravel.

Unfortunately, this is pretty much what has happened. It's no longer the case that truth holds an exalted place in the catalogue of virtues. For many, especially among secular progressives, truth has been stripped of its status as an objective good in itself, and reduced to a pragmatic function, a tool to be employed in the service of promoting higher goods. Truth, in our post-modern world, is now seen as whatever works to advance whatever goal or project to which one aspires.

The change has had seriously deleterious, even tragic, consequences in our personal and corporate life. It has also had a terribly corrosive effect on our political life. Politicians, for some of whom power is the highest good because without it none of the lesser goods are possible, can lie about themselves and other people, and the lie, like base metal transmuted to gold, is transformed into something "true" and virtuous by the fact that it helps the liar succeed in acquiring the power, influence, and success he needs to promote his agenda.

Politicians all along the ideological spectrum lie, of course, but conservatives still generally believe that lying is a moral wrong. Liberals, particularly secular liberals, are less likely to feel bound by traditional moral assumptions, and thus more likely to distort and misrepresent the truth than are conservatives. Thus our recent politics is befouled by unseemly allegations which are at best irresponsible and at worst exceedingly harmful:

1. George Bush is labelled a liar for telling us there were WMD in Iraq when there apparently weren't. This charge was itself false because it was clear to anyone who looked at the matter that the intelligence services of the whole world thought Saddam had WMD. So did most Democratic senators. Bush may have been mistaken, but a mistake is not a lie.

2. Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh have had their reputations smeared by allegations of racism (O'Reilly) and insulting the troops (Limbaugh). Their accusers, including senators on the floor of the Senate, allege them to have said things the transcripts and witnesses affirm they clearly did not say. Nevertheless, the accusers have not relented or withdrawn their charges.

3. Senator Clinton insinuates that General Petraeus is dishonorable because his testimony doesn't conform to what she and others in the Senate expected to hear. MoveOn.org, without offering a shred of evidence, accuses the General of betraying his country in a full page New York Times ad which the Times originally gave them at a fraction of the going rate for ad space. Neither MoveOn or the Times has apologized.

4. Opponents of SCHIP are accused of not caring about the poor or the elderly because they do not wish to see health care be taken over by the government. Bush is accused of heartlessly cutting the program when in fact he wants to expand it but not as much as its proponents want.

5. False or misleading statistics are used to color the debate on everything from racial discrimination to the number of homeless, the severity of the threat of HIV, the prevalence of rape on college campus, the number of uninsured people in the U.S., and much else.

Lies and deception are an acid eating away at the fabric of our society. When our politicians lie to us and we lie to each other it dissolves trust and spawns suspicion. A society which has lost the ability to trust its leaders and to trust each other is a society doomed to disintegrate. John Adams wrote that our form of government was designed for a moral people and cannot survive under any other.

Progressives don't disagree with Adams, necessarily, but many of them simply don't think that lying about people or promoting falsehoods is really immoral as long as the cause is in their eyes just. Since the most just cause for them is the promotion of the liberal agenda, whatever works to advance that agenda is by definition good, even if they know, or should know, that it's not true.

RLC

Peace Prize

A blog called The Daily Gut speaks for many (including us) in presenting the case for who should have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday:

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this morning, and I'd like to congratulate Irena Sendler. Sendler was a former history teacher who rescued 2,500 children during the Holocaust and was a top contender for the wondrous prize. Back during the early 1940's, Sendler was a Catholic social worker who had gone into the Warsaw ghetto to rescue Jewish kids who were destined either to starve there, or die in death camps. She would sneak the kids past Nazi guards, sometimes hiding them in body bags, or would provide them with false documents - inevitably getting them to Polish families for adoption, or hiding them in convents or orphanages. She also made a list of the children's real names, put them in a jar and buried them, so that some day she could dig them up and find the kids to tell them their true names. The Nazis captured her and beat the crap out of her, but she later escaped, and she went into hiding. She's now in her late 90's , living in a nursing home in Poland.

I want to congratulate her, because she didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize. Instead it went to Al Gore, the guy who invented the Internet. Go figure.

Actually, it's not all that hard to figure. The Nobel committee swoons over liberal nominees who hold all the "correct" views and who also hold celebrity status. The Goracle is all of those and more. There's no way he wasn't going to receive the prize despite the fact that Ms Sendler displayed personal courage that Mr. Gore has never had to exhibit and has saved more lives and done more good for humanity than has Mr. Gore. Ms Sendler is now a feeble old woman and Mr. Gore is a famous member of the glitterati. Ms Sendler is yesterday and Mr. Gore is the future. Ms Sendler risked her life to save lives but Mr. Gore risks nothing to make millions lecturing a fawning world about global warming.

The Nobel Peace Prize is a joke.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Dim Prospects for Social Conservatives

First Things has a series of fine essays by Nat Hentoff, John DiIulio, and Joseph Bottom on the current crop of presidential candidates.

Hentoff is the rarest of political commentators, a staunch pro-life atheist leftist. Every paragraph of his portion of the article is a gem. For example:

I wish - although I know it is not going to happen - that at least one contender for the presidency would repeat what Cardinal O'Connor asked at the Harvard Law School (not a friendly audience for him but a challenge he enjoyed) in April 1986: "How safe will the retarded be, the handicapped, the aged, the wheel-chaired, the incurably ill when the so-called quality of life becomes the determination of who is to live and who is to die? Who is to determine which life is 'meaningful,' which life is not? Who is to have a right to the world's resources, to food, housing, to medical care? The prospects are frightening."

Hentoff thinks Hillary would be a disaster for the pro-life cause, but DiIulio argues that, from the standpoint of meeting our obligation to help the poor, Hillary Clinton and Mike Huckabee are the best candidates in their respective parties.

Bottum dejectedly observes that we should "be honest and admit what we all know: The weakest set of candidates in living memory has taken the field, and we still have more than a year left of watching these people, lumbering and blumbering toward the goal line." He goes on to make a strangely contradictory claim. He argues that Hillary has a lock on the nomination but will almost certainly lose to any candidate the Republicans put against her except Ron Paul. But oddly Bottum then goes on to express doubt that Guiliani would beat her.

He makes an excellent point, though, about what Americans have to look forward to should a Republican win the presidency and the Democrats pick up more seats in the Senate:

Nonstop congressional investigations of everything the president does, rejections of Cabinet members and Supreme Court justices, the Democrats freed of responsibility for actually prosecuting foreign policy - all pushed by a netroots base of leftist activists convinced that, once again, the presidential election had been stolen from them. No wonder some conservatives seem to think it would be better to go ahead and elect Hillary Clinton.

Bottum concludes that 2008 looks grim for social conservatives:

A Fred Thompson nomination, a slim election victory over Hillary �Clinton, a stealth pro-lifer slipped on the Supreme Court through a Democratic Senate - that weak �scenario is about the best a social conservative can hope for today. Everything else is bad. Very bad.

In my opinion this is much too pessimistic. The right man in office can still prosecute the war on terror, enforce existing immigration laws, keep spending and taxes down, and appoint at least two good justices to the Supreme Court. This last may be difficult, but depending on who the President is, it may not be impossible.

The country may be Slouching Toward Gomorrah, to employ the title of Robert Bork's famous book, but the right man in the White House, though he may not be able to turn things around without a sympathetic Congress, can at least keep us from falling completely over until the American people, perchance, come to their senses.

RLC

Hubris and Stupidity

For sheer hubris and stupidity it may be hard to beat the letter from some prominent Muslim scholars in which they warn that the "survival of the world" is at stake if Muslims and Christians do not make peace with each other. This claim is true enough, of course, but then they go on to say that:

"As Muslims, we say to Christians that we are not against them and that Islam is not against them - so long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them and drive them out of their homes."

I see. And this, one is expected to suppose, is what those evil Christians are doing everywhere one looks - waging war against Islam, driving poor Muslims out of their homes, teaching anti-Muslim hatred in their Christian schools, etc. Meanwhile, we find no mention in the report on the scholars' letter of the Muslim endorsement of executing Muslims who convert to Christianity or of the murders by Muslims of Christian missionaries in Afghanistan, Africa and Indonesia. Nor do we find mention of the fact that where Christians live as minorities among Muslims, as in Iran and Syria, they're being systematically driven from their homes and churches. There's no mention of the fact that in virtually every conflict being fought around the world Muslims are involved, often on both sides of the bloodshed, and that the hostilities are invariably initiated by Muslims. There's no mention of the fact that virtually every act of terrorism in the last twenty years has been perpetrated by Muslims, and virtually every case of murder and persecution involving actual Christians and Muslims has been perpetrated by Muslims against Christians.

For these scholars to suggest that Christians, qua Christians, are oppressing Muslims, qua Muslims, is ludicrous. Christianity does pose a threat to Islam, however, and it is this threat that probably provides the impetus for the scholars' letter. Wherever Muslims are actually free to choose between genuine Christianity and Islam, Islam is at risk, and it is this that the mullahs and imams interpret as an attack on their faith.

What Muslim scholars should be doing, if they feel compelled to compose such letters, is urging each other and their flock, if they really want peace, to emulate Christians instead of killing them.

RLC

Vestigial Structures

Darwinians ever since Darwin have pointed to structures like the human appendix to demonstrate that our bodies were once different from what they are today. The tailbone is a vestige of the tail that humans once possessed, we're told. Hip bones in whales are vestiges of legs possessed by the whale's ancestors which walked on land. And the appendix too, was believed to be a functionless appendage left over from some previous stage in our evolution.

Over time functions were found for many of these "vestigial structures" and they were quietly dropped from the textbooks. Now it looks like it has been shown that the appendix, too, has a function in the body, and must be added to the ranks of former vestiges which are no longer vestigial.

Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems that every new scientific discovery that bears somehow upon the controversy between intelligent design and Darwinian materialism either supports the ID position or counts against the materialist position. It's hard to think of any discovery of the last twenty years or so that actually supports the materialists.

But I might be uninformed. If anyone can think of a counter-example please pass it along.

RLC

The Israeli Raid

The plot line concerning the Israeli raid in Syria continues to gradually unfold. DEBKAfile has the latest.

RLC

The Aftermath of Withdrawal

Attempts by Democrats in Congress and the Left in general to force a withdrawal from Iraq seem to have subsided since General Petraeus gave his report to Congress last month. Unfortunately, some Democrats' reasons for not pursuing withdrawal are based more on political considerations than on a prudent regard for the potentially horrendous consequences of our leaving before Iraq is sufficiently stable to fend for itself. Nevertheless, it's good, in my opinion, that demands for an American retreat have faded. Here's why:

Let's think about what we can reasonably expect to happen if we withdraw our combat forces from Iraq. I'm not claiming that any of these consequences are certain to occur, but they are all plausible and they are all much more likely to happen if we pull out than if we stay:

1. Al Qaeda will move into Iraq in force and slaughter everyone they can find who cooperated with the U.S. They were slaughtering them before the surge, there's no reason to think that if we leave they'd suddenly have a change of heart. The victims would include government officials, police, military, trible leaders, professionals, etc. and the families of these people. Even if these amount to only 1% of the Iraqi population that would still be 250,000 people.

2. Shia militias and extremists like Muqtada al-Sadr will seek to settle old scores with the Sunni, especially the Baathists. In this they may be joined by the Kurds. The Sunnis will either flee the country or be murdered and have their property confiscated. This is a huge fear among the Sunni today and for many of them their only hope is that we stay to prevent this from happening.

3. It's very likely that there will be civil war over the oil fields.

4. It's very likely that Iran will see our withdrawal as an opportunity to seize the southern part of Iraq under the pretext of helping their fellow Shia.

5. It's likely that either Iran or Turkey, or both, would go to war with the Kurds in the north.

6. It's also likely that other Sunni Arab states would be pressured to come to the aid of their fellow Sunnis, thus intensifying the conflict and making Iraq an abattoir of war and death.

7. Because Iraq would become a battleground for both indigenous fighters and foreign forces the land would be thrown into chaos. The average Iraqi would find himself without food, medical care, and probably water, oil, and electricity. Education would shut down and Iraq's bustling economy would become a shambles. Starvation and disease would claim thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of lives, mostly children. War and retribution would claim thousands more. The total number of dead could easily top a million people.

8. It's also likely that, once we withdraw, the U.S. would be psychologically, logistically, and economically unable to go back into the Middle East to stop any of this. We would no more be able to go back into Iraq than we could have gone back into Vietnam or Cambodia.

9. Moreover, the Arab nations would sense that our withdrawal would be impossible to reverse, and see it as an opportunity to step up attacks on Israel without having to fear that we would wade back into the region to help. They would still have to fear our air force and navy, perhaps, but if they sense that our leaders in Washington have lost the will to use force they would be more likely to risk war with Israel if they think they could succeed in crippling or destroying them. Even if they are wrong about American willingness to come to the aid of Israel their misjudgment would still be catastrophic if it leads them to war with the Israelis.

10. Iran would see our withdrawal as a green light to continue developing nuclear weapons and the rest of the Middle East would be forced to do likewise to protect themselves from Iranian nuclear hegemony. Any war against Israel would be much more likely to involve nuclear weapons.

11. North Korea and China would both see us as unwilling to keep our commitments to our allies. The North Koreans might be emboldened by our lack of resolve to restart their nuclear program and threaten South Korea, and China would probably feel safe in initiating their long promised war to retake Taiwan. And who knows what effect our withdrawal would have in Moscow and Europe.

There are no certainties, of course, but the chances are good that our withdrawal would be a total disaster for the Middle East and the world.

It's hard to deny that at least some of what is forecast here would follow upon an American withdrawal from Iraq. More importantly, we can be assured that the chances of any or all of these horrors happening are far greater if we leave Iraq than if we stay. That alone, in my view, obligates us to continue our efforts to eliminate the terrorists, put down the insurgency, and help build the country. Contrary to what war critics allege, the stablity of the world depends upon the U.S. finishing the job in Iraq.

Opponents of our presence in Iraq don't usually try to deny that the awful events listed above are more likely to occur if we retreat. They simply argue that we've done enough, whether good or bad, and that we should pull out regardless of the consequences, and let the chips fall where they may. If we followed this policy, though, and a catastrophic bloodbath did ensue, our retreat would be seen by history as one of the most disgraceful moral blunders in the history of our nation.

RLC

For the Children (Partly)

Proponents of expanding SCHIP (States Children's Health Insurance Program) would have us believe that children are being hurt by the President's decision to veto the bill, but apparently taxpayers pay for more under SCHIP than just coverage for children.

According to a press release from Republicans serving on the House Energy and Commerce Committee 13 states will spend more than 44 percent of their SCHIP funds in 2008 on people who are neither children nor pregnant women.

Michigan tops the list with 71.6 percent of its SCHIP money earmarked for adults who have no kids. In New Mexico, 52.3 percent of the state's SCHIP dollars will be spent on childless adults.

It'd be helpful if the proponents of the program were up-front with us about who, exactly, the taxpayers are buying insurance coverage for under this program.

HT: Michelle

Who Huck Is

The New Republic has a good piece on Mike Huckabee. The reader gets helpful insight into who Huckabee is and what sort of principles he holds. There are some things about him which some people will find difficult to accept, of course. He has a history, for example, of wanting to raise taxes, a fact most fiscal conservatives will find hard to overlook. He also supported, as governor of Arkansas, giving college scholarships to children of illegal aliens, an unfortunate blemish which will also raise some red flags about how serious he'd be on stopping illegal immigration.

Nevertheless, there is also much about him to like. He is generally conservative on social issues and perhaps most importantly, seems like a genuinely good man. Read the article and see what you think.

RLC

Strange Column

Tony Judt starts out sensibly in a New York Times editorial explaining why a number of liberals supported the war in Iraq, but as he gathers steam he proceeds to run himself right off the rails.

Consider the following puzzling paragraph:

Those of us who pressed for American-led military action in Bosnia and Kosovo did so for several reasons: because of the refusal of others (the European Union and United Nations) to engage effectively; because there was a demonstrable and immediate threat to rights and lives; and because it was clear we could be effective in this way and in no other. None of these considerations applied in Iraq, which is why I and many others opposed the war.

This is very strange. Mr. Judt believes that there was adequate justification for getting militarily involved in Kosova and Bosnia in the '90s but that those same justifications did not obtain in Iraq. How does he come to such an odd conclusion?

Surely he remembers that it was the failure of much of the rest of the world to do anything serious about Saddam that caused Mr. Bush to feel compelled to take action himself. Surely, he is aware of the murders and tortures which the Saddam regime was engaged in right up to the invasion. He cannot be unaware of the mass graves of tens of thousands of corpses that our troops uncovered in Iraq. Surely, too, he is aware of the twelve year diplomatic process the U.S. pushed in the U.N. that resulted in resolution after resolution, each one of which was used by Saddam merely to light his cigars.

It seems that Mr. Judt is either living in a state of self-delusion or he believes that by simply asserting something as though it were fact, his readers will accept it as the truth. In any case it's hard to imagine anyone giving credence to his reasoning.

RLC

No Middle Ground

Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters has some pithy thoughts on the recent Israeli raid on the Syrian nuclear station, or whatever it was:

Between July and September, weeks of high-level talks took place [between the U.S. and Israel]. The Israelis wanted to destroy the facility immediately, and had some support from the American intelligence community that had managed to miss this development. However, Condoleezza Rice and others did not. They wanted to "confront" the Syrians first -- as the Jerusalem Post puts it, to scold Assad publicly for operating a nuclear facility.

Yes, I'm sure that would have been effective. Publicly scolding them over the Hariri assassination only resulted in five more car-bomb assassinations of anti-Syrian politicians in Lebanon since then. Fingerwagging has done so much to curtail their material support for Hezbollah, too.

The Israelis, who actually originated the "Bush doctrine" decades ago, appear to be the only nation still using it. They probably have concluded that they cannot rely on American will to protect them from Syria and Iran any longer, especially after this episode. The US opposed the raid up to the moment it occurred, afraid of destabilizing the region. Israel, more worried about the consequences of a nuclear Syria -- something that should worry us as well -- simply ignored Washington after weeks of argument and acted in its own self-interest.

If Morrissey is correct what he writes demonstrates the futility of trying to talk people out of doing what they're determined to do. In this case our State Department talkers no doubt told Syria that if they don't give up their plans to finish this facility they would lose it and Syria no doubt thought they could stop any attack with their new Russian air defense system (which proved totally useless). But here's the point, nothing deters these people except the credible threat of annihilation. There are things we could do short of war - sanctions, blockades, etc. - but all of these ultimately lead to war. Not Iraq under Saddam, not Syria under Assad, not Iran under the mullahs and A'Jad could be, or will be, deterred from their determination to establish radical Islamic hegemony throughout the entire Middle East and eventually the world apart from war or credible threat of war.

The tragic truth appears to be that we either accept a nuclear armed Syria and Iran or be prepared to go to war with them to prevent them from having nuclear weapons. Both options are fraught with danger and calamity, but in the end the Islamists seem determined to leave us no middle ground.

RLC

Re: Cold Case Smear

My friend Steve offers an eloquent defense of Cold Case and urges that the series not be judged on the basis of one episode that may, or may not, have wandered out of bounds. I've posted his response here and on our feedback page:

My wife and I might be the only parents in America who actually have to beg our 3-year-old son to watch tv from time to time. He really doesn't know how to watch it because it's almost never on in our house. But there is one show my wife and I have watched steadily for more than three years now: Cold Case.

I was traveling recently and missed the controversial show referenced in this blog in which some renegade Christians stone a girl to death. I'll definitely need to see that one before I comment at all on it. But as a Roman Catholic, I've always found Cold Case's portrayal of religious faith, particularly Catholicism, to be sensitive, insightful and quite compelling. My wife and I watch this show largely because of its very powerful storytelling. Its characters are complex, and the show is relentless in exploring the awful capacity for evil that humans have as well as the toughness and goodness that allows us to endure horrible things and try to right them.

Religion is of course a major part of our society, so Cold Case is bound to take on themes of faith in some episodes. When it does, the depiction of religion has frankly been overwhelmingly positive. If you watch the show consistenly as I have, you learn that the police lieutenant who serves as the boss for the show's detectives has a brother who is a Catholic priest - and he's quite proud of that. During one show, when a detective suggests that a young boy might have been murdered years before by a priest, the lieutenant snaps, "Just because he's a priest doesn't mean he's a pedophile." And by the end of the show, it turns out the priest is the good guy. In other episodes, a young girl in mortal danger from her father is left by her mother in a Catholic church that takes care of her. In another show about drug trafficking, a flawed but fearless Latin American priest stands up bravely for Latino women against savage drug dealers. There are other examples along these lines, but you get the idea: Cold Case takes religious faith very seriously.

I don't know much about the background of the show's producers and writers, but my guess is that at least some of them are religious themselves. Cold Case is rich in religious symbolism, and its stories are largely about evil, love and forgiveness. It sometimes shows us things we don't want to see or think about, but it does so artfully and memorably. Even if the show went astray a bit with its recent controversial episode - and I'll need to see it first to decide - it has a long track record of being a friend of faith. And in our modern television culture, the faithful among us need all the friends we can find.

Good points, all. So, has anyone actually seen the episode that the article our post was based upon made reference to? If so, was it as bad as the article claimed? Please share your thoughts with us.

RLC

Man-Made DNA

The Guardian has a story that sends the needle on our hype detector soaring into the red zone. According to the article Dr. Craig Venter, a DNA researcher:

"is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth...The announcement, which is expected within weeks and could come as early as Monday at the annual meeting of his scientific institute in San Diego, California, will herald a giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes."

The technical achievement seems quite impressive, but it seems somewhat of a stretch to claim that Dr. Venter's lab has created a new life form. What Dr. Venter has done, and we don't minimize the achievement, is to construct a chromosome out of the raw chemical materials of DNA and insert it into a bacterium. This is a notable technical accomplishment, but it's a long way from creating a new form of life. The Guardian continues:

The wholly synthetically reconstructed chromosome ... is then transplanted into a living bacterial cell and in the final stage of the process it is expected to take control of the cell and in effect become a new life form.

It will not be a new life form. It will still be a bacterium. It may, if the synthetic chromosome can successfully integrate with the cell's biochemical machinery, have different characteristics than any bacterium that existed before, but that no more makes it a "new life form" than a new variety of roses is a new life form.

The Guardian seems to recognize that it has overstated things a bit and tries to pull back somewhat from its earlier claim:

The team of scientists has already successfully transplanted the genome of one type of bacterium into the cell of another, effectively changing the cell's species. Mr Venter said he was "100% confident" the same technique would work for the artificially created chromosome.

The new life form will depend for its ability to replicate itself and metabolise on the molecular machinery of the cell into which it has been injected, and in that sense it will not be a wholly synthetic life form. However, its DNA will be artificial, and it is the DNA that controls the cell and is credited with being the building block of life.

In other words, what Dr. Venter will be doing is a bit like inserting a new operating system into a computer. This is not the same as inventing a whole new kind of computer. It's not clear from the article that the new chromosome will even function in the cell, but if it does what Dr. Venter has done will be to have designed a program for a computer that will make the computer do things it didn't do before.

The Guardian then adds this disturbing quote from Dr. Venter:

"We are not afraid to take on things that are important just because they stimulate thinking," he said. "We are dealing in big ideas. We are trying to create a new value system for life. When dealing at this scale, you can't expect everybody to be happy."

A new value system for life? What does that mean? Aldous Huxley must be smiling.

RLC

Accutane for Marxism

Marxism, like acne, seems to be a perennial affliction of adolescents whatever might be their chronological age. So we're not surprised that a news report out of South Dakota (Okay. We're a little surprised that it's South Dakota), says that some people are concerned about the formation by high school students of a young socialists club in their high school:

A new group at Roosevelt High School discusses socialism every Thursday morning. Not everyone is comfortable with the Young Socialist Club's views, but federal law says school districts must allow all student organizations.

The Young Socialists Club at Roosevelt High School is looking for new members. Their flyer asks for students to quote "Come explore the vast realm that is socialism." But also on the flyer is a picture of Karl Marx, who is best known as a revolutionary communist. One of his famous quotes, "Workers of the World Unite," is printed boldly on the handout. But Roosevelt Principal Don Ryswyk says those references do not concern him.

He says, "At Roosevelt we have young Democrats club, we have the young Republicans club and they were asking for a young Socialists club and so I saw it as an equity issue and the students talked to me about some of the things they were going to research and I also saw it as an educational club."

I'm not sure why they felt they needed a club for young socialists if they already had a young Democrats club, but never mind. We have a suggestion for any school personnel who might be concerned about student socialists running around school quoting Marx. Hold a school-wide assembly and show the movie The Lives of Others. Certain scenes would have to be edited out for propriety's sake, but that film should serve as an effective antidote for whatever enchantments Marxist-Leninism might still hold over our idealistic young people.

It's a German film about what life was like for artists and writers in East Germany in the years prior to the fall of the Berlin wall, and it's a good vehicle for disabusing students of their fantasies of a Marxist worker's paradise. It's exceptionally well-acted and the cast's portrayal of the oppressive evil of the East German system is at once understated and riveting. Despite the depressing theme the movie has a redemptive ending that hits just the right note.

We give The Lives of Others two thumbs up. Somebody send the DVD to Principal Ryswyk.

RLC

Save Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has left the United States because she feels her life is in danger and she can not afford to hire a security detail. She tried to return to her native Netherlands, but according to this report the Netherlands' Prime Minister has told her to stay out because they don't want to pay for her protection as they did before she originally left there to come here.

It's hard to believe that this woman, a heroine in the fight against radical Islam, is going to be abandoned to the murderous psychopaths who have been threatening to kill her as soon as they have the chance. Where is President Bush on this?

If the reports are true she's in real danger, and no one who is in a position to help seems interested in doing so. Perhaps she should go to Israel where she'd be as safe from the Islamic orcs as any other citizen. Or maybe Blackwater Security ought to be made to take her on pro bono in partial retribution for their crimes in Iraq.

RLC

Guns and the Supreme Court

One of the cases the Supreme Court is likely to consider this term revolves around a Washington D.C. law that bars residents from keeping handguns in their homes. A lower court struck down the ban in March and Washington has appealed to the Supreme Court. If the justices hear the appeal, they could issue the first ruling on whether the Second Amendment right to bear arms protects individuals or only state militias.

Liberal law professor Jonathan Turley comes reluctantly to the conclusion that contrary to the arguments of his fellow liberals the Second Amendment of the Constitution does indeed protect an individual's right to own a firearm. Turley is to be commended for placing principle above personal preference. He writes:

Like many academics, I was happy to blissfully ignore the Second Amendment. It did not fit neatly into my socially liberal agenda. Yet, two related cases could now force liberals into a crisis of conscience. The Supreme Court is expected to accept review of District of Columbia v. Heller and Parker v. District of Columbia, involving constitutional challenges to the gun-control laws in Washington...

Principle is a terrible thing, because it demands not what is convenient but what is right. It is hard to read the Second Amendment and not honestly conclude that the Framers intended gun ownership to be an individual right. It is true that the amendment begins with a reference to militias: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Accordingly, it is argued, this amendment protects the right of the militia to bear arms, not the individual.

Yet, if true, the Second Amendment would be effectively declared a defunct provision. The National Guard is not a true militia in the sense of the Second Amendment and, since the District and others believe governments can ban guns entirely, the Second Amendment would be read out of existence.

There's much more to his argument at the link. One thing about the objection he mentions above concerning the intent of the Framers is that even if their words seemed to limit the right to bear arms to militias, how can liberals justify placing a narrow interpretion on this amendment when they insist on placing the most expansive interpretation on the First Amendment?

Clearly, the Framers had politics and religion in mind when they conferred upon us the right to free speech, but the Supreme Court has subsequently expanded that right to cover things like pornography which there's no reason to believe the Framers wished to include. How can we justify expanding First Amendment rights to pornographers while restricting Second Amendment rights to militiamen who no longer exist?

RLC

Tough Questions for Mrs. Clinton

Dick Morris suggests a number of tough questions that journalists might ask Senator Clinton if she deigns to make herself available to them again. Here are six of them:

1) Bill Clinton refused to accept political action committee (PAC) contributions in his campaigns of 1992 and 1996. Obama and Edwards are following his example. Why aren't you?

2) After all the bad experiences you had with Johnnie Chung and Charlie Trie and their campaign donations in the 1996 election cycle, why were you not more careful in vetting the donations generated by Norman Hsu? Didn't you learn your lesson in 1996?

(As a follow-up to No. 2) After you found that you had to return almost a million dollars to the donors bundled by Hsu, you said you would be more vigilant in examining the backgrounds of donors. Why didn't you come to that conclusion before the Hsu scandal, based on your 1996 experiences?

3) Norman Hsu was no ordinary donor. He was the biggest bundler in your campaign; he gave funds to the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton School of Government in Arkansas and took Patti Solis Doyle, your campaign manager, and other aides on an all-expense-paid trip to Las Vegas. He also donated to Democratic Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa, whose campaign debt you agreed to help repay.

In view of his high profile in your campaign, why didn't you check him out more thoroughly, and what does this say about your ability to make quality appointments?

4) You base your healthcare proposal on the need to cover 47 million "uninsured Americans." Since about a third of them are illegal immigrants and another third are eligible for Medicaid right now and just don't apply for it, aren't you overstating the problem?

(As a follow-up to No. 4) In 2005 you co-sponsored legislation to provide health insurance to the children of illegal immigrants who have lived in this country for five years. In other words, their children would get subsidized healthcare under the State Children's Health Insurance Program as a reward for dodging the cops for five years. Do you still support that proposal?

5) You say that your healthcare proposal will leave alone those who are happy with their current insurance. But if you provide health benefits for close to 50 million new people, thereby generating huge new demand for medical care without any increase in the supply of doctors, nurses or hospitals, it will drive up prices radically. Won't that force you to institute cost controls by limiting the care those now on health insurance can receive?

6) In Arkansas, you achieved fame by urging mandatory testing for teachers and demanded that those who failed the competency tests be dismissed. You and your husband did this and implemented this policy. As a result, he was denied the endorsement by the Arkansas Teachers Union during his time as governor. Do you still support your proposal of 1983 and 1984 for mandatory teacher competency tests for current teachers - not just for new ones?

I'm a little dubious that anyone will actually have the temerity to ask these questions of Mrs. Clinton and even more dubious that she'd give a straightforward answer to them, but we'll see.

RLC