Religious Heritage Resolution

Atheists have themselves in a fidget over a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives that recognizes America's "rich spiritual and religious history":

The resolution, H.R. 888, resolves to "affirm" the religious traditions that most historians say played a crucial role in America's founding. It calls religious principles and foundations "critical underpinnings" of America's institutions, condemns attempts to remove religion from U.S. history, and designates the first week in May as "American Religious History Week."

The atheists, always with a sharp eye out for signs of the return of the Inquisition, see this as an attack upon them:

"They're throwing 25 million Americans under the bus who don't believe in the Christian faith," Rick Wingrove, the Capitol Hill representative for American Atheists, told Cybercast News Service. "If you have a piece of legislation that favors Christians, what does that say to non-Christians?"

Well, in what sense is recognizing a fact about our heritage a piece of legislation that "favors" Christians? If Congress passed a resolution that affirmed the contribution of women and minorities in American history in what sense would that be "favoring" minorities or throwing white men under the bus? Perhaps we shouldn't expect the arguments of our atheist friends to make too much sense, but still.

There's more on the atheists' objections to the resolution at the link.

Margaret Downey, president of Atheist Alliance International, suggested that her fellow non-believers counter the proposed "American Religious History Week" with "Free Thought Week," which could be legislated in an opposing "Secular History in America" resolution.

Now there's an interesting idea. Let's have a resolution that affirms the contributions made to this country by atheistic ideas and practices. We could start by noting the deaths of the millions who had to fight against atheistic governments of Japan and Germany in WWII and the millions of other Americans who have suffered in one way or another because of atheistic communism. In our own culture we could point in the resolution to the social putridity wrought by the abandonment of traditional Christian morality - the crime, wrecked marriages, wasted lives, toxic entertainment culture, corruption of government at all levels, corporate greed, all of which are consequences of the belief that in the modern world traditional moral sanctions based upon a Christian worldview are no longer viable.

This is a wonderful idea Ms Downey has. I hope she follows through with it so that it can be brought before the public what a glorious heritage atheism has bequeathed us.

RLC

John McCain and Super Tuesday

John McCain is emotionally volatile, sometimes even ugly. He opposed the Bush tax cuts, he opposes increased oil production in the United States, he opposes free political speech, and he favors amnesty for illegal aliens and opening our borders to anyone who wants to come into the country. If he scores big in Tuesday's primary it will be a dark day for the Republican party and an even darker day for conservatives.

McCain would probably be an underdog in the race were Mike Huckabee not attacking Mitt Romney and siphoning votes away from him. Huckabee, by his tactic of running interference for McCain, has lost a lot of respect from people who formerly admired him. Readers who are undecided about McCain ought to read this piece by former Senator Rick Santorum.

I am not prepared to join with those who have said they will not vote for McCain in the general election. Despite his shortcomings, he's still preferable to either Clinton or Obama, but he's not the best option on offer in the Republican primary. Mitt Romney has a much more stable temperament and is more consistently conservative than is McCain. It reflects poorly on the American electorate that so many who call themselves conservative seem to be unaware of this.

RLC

The Ribosome

Casey Luskin finds a bunch of Darwinians, oddly enough, marveling over the irreducible complexity of the ribosome. The ribosome is the structure in the cell which superintends protein synthesis along strands of messenger RNA, and it requires 53 proteins in order to function.

The clip below shows a computer animation of the ribosome mediating the construction of a protein by holding the mRNA in place while the transfer RNA brings amino acids to the assembly point where they are joined into a polypeptide chain.

It really is astonishing, especially to think that this machinery just came about by random chance, but for Darwinians to give even a hint that they think it is irreducibly complex and therefore, by implication, intelligently designed is almost equally astonishing:

RLC

Blue Eyes

Science Daily reports that new research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.

This is an odd report inasmuch as on any view of human origins, whether you prefer Darwin or Genesis, we're all descended from a common ancestor at some point in our lineage. It's still an interesting article, though.

RLC

Sub-Prime Greed

What's fueling the sub-prime mortgage crisis? Apparently, it isn't just that home owners' interest rates were adjusted up, but it's also the fact that some people who took out very low interest mortgages to buy their house then proceeded to take out home equity loans on the house in order to buy things that they wanted. Their cumulative debt is now far more than the house is worth, and they're apparently hoping that the rest of us bail them out.

Instapundit has this note from a mortgage broker:

Speaking as a mortgage broker, I can assure you this is the case in the vast majority of instances. I spoke with a woman today who has a credit report that looks like a train wreck, including a bankruptcy fours years ago and numerous chargeoffs and collections since. Her gross income is less than $850 a week -- but she drives a car with a $700 payment.

She called me up because her adjustable rate mortgage payment is going up. When I told her that the only way she could qualify for a loan is to pay off the car with her mortgage, she threw a fit. Apparently me saving her $500 a month isn't good enough, she wanted to tap her home equity one last time for $30,000 to spend on "home improvements" rather than paying off the car. She then asked if anyone would really check to see if the money went into home upgrades.

This is the behavior that some in our government and media want the rest of us to subsidize. Geez.

RLC

Where's the Line?

My Philosophy of Religion class has been reading an excerpt from Soren Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and we had a lively discussion the other day about Kierkegaard's claim that what a person believes about God is not as important as how one believes. In other words, the content of our belief is less significant to God than is the passion with which we embrace Him. God cares much more about having a love relationship with us, Kierkegaard asserts, than He cares about whether we are right about every theological proposition to which we cling.

Many students agreed with this to a point, but they raised the very critical question as to where the line should be drawn. At what point does the importance of what we believe begin to outweigh the fervor of our belief? Surely Kierkegaard does not wish to say that it doesn't matter at all what we believe as long as we believe it passionately. He cannot be suggesting that the intensity of one's devotion to God compensates in His mind for a belief that He is, for instance, pure evil.

It must be borne in mind that Kierkegaard used hyperbole in order to rouse his readers. He was not concerned with writing a theological treatise in which every detail of an argument is followed to its conclusion. He was concerned, though, with the spiritual health of the Danish church which, despite being theologically sophisticated and accomplished, seemed to regard religion with the same sort of emotional detachment as an engineer might have when beholding a bridge. To get a good idea of the sort of cold, clammy Christianity of which Kierkegaard was so disdainful rent and watch Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light. It's a powerful portrayal of exactly the sort of church and clergy which attracted Kierkegaard's scorn.

But my students' question remains. If we agree that within certain bounds the what of belief is less important than the how then where are those limits? At what point does the what become more important than the how? This is not a trivial matter. In a recent article in First Things Avery Cardinal Dulles explores the evolution of the Catholic doctrine of salvation. For centuries Catholic theologians have wrestled with questions regarding eternal life that have puzzled laymen and theologians alike: What is the fate of those who never heard the Gospel? Are all who fail to respond to the Gospel lost? What about those who die without being baptized? Etc.

Many of the solutions advanced by Catholic thinkers seem to me to be tortured in their logic and implausible in their conclusions, but they reflect the profound reluctance among Christians to believe that people who have never heard the Gospel, or who heard but for whatever reason never accepted, are lost forever. Christians have always struggled with the implications of the traditional interpretation of Scripture which is that man is born lost and must accept Christ in order to receive God's gift of salvation. This interpretation, if rigorously followed, seems to foreclose salvation to those who die young, the mentally retarded, those who've never heard the Gospel, and those who may have heard but for psychological, religious or cultural reasons found it too difficult to accept. In other words the traditional interpretation is that eternal life is pretty much God's exclusive gift to explicit Christians.

I thought of this article while my class was debating Kierkegaard. Is salvation just a matter of what we believe? Could it be a matter of how one believes even if one believes wrongly? How wrong can one be before the passionate how no longer matters? Or is salvation a matter of both the what and the how?

Dulles closes his historical excursis with a paragraph bound to displease many who hold to the exclusivist view that only Christians can be saved:

Who, then, can be saved? Catholics can be saved if they believe the Word of God as taught by the Church and if they obey the commandments. Other Christians can be saved if they submit their lives to Christ and join the community where they think he wills to be found. Jews can be saved if they look forward in hope to the Messiah and try to ascertain whether God's promise has been fulfilled. Adherents of other religions can be saved if, with the help of grace, they sincerely seek God and strive to do his will. Even atheists can be saved if they worship God under some other name and place their lives at the service of truth and justice. God's saving grace, channeled through Christ the one Mediator, leaves no one unassisted. But that same grace brings obligations to all who receive it. They must not receive the grace of God in vain. Much will be demanded of those to whom much is given.

I don't know how orthodox is the view in the Catholic Church that even atheists will be saved, but it's an idea that would have very little purchase in most precincts of evangelical protestantism. So the question recurs: Where do we draw the line? If we say that only those who consciously accept Christ and who commit their lives to Him with Kierkegaardian submission and passion are saved then we not only exclude some of those who sit next to us in the pews, but we have a problem with the fact that most people lie along a spectrum of commitment. How much commitment is enough?

We also have another problem in that this criterion would exclude those who die young as well as the mentally disabled and those who lived either prior to the Christian era or beyond it's evangelistic reach. Some might be comfortable with this entailment, but I doubt that most would. C.S. Lewis wasn't comfortable with it which is why, I suspect, he wrote The Great Divorce. He wanted readers to think about salvation more as a yearning of the heart that determines the will rather than simply an intellectual assent to certain theological propositions.

It might be a worthwhile exercise to read Lewis with a group of friends interested in this matter and then return to the question raised by a reading of Kierkegaard: Where do we, if we are faithful to Scripture, draw the line?

One final thought: Surely we should hope that the line encircles more than just those who have explicitly accepted Christ, even if we don't think that it does. Most Christians have friends, family and others whom we care deeply about and who have passed on without, so far as we know, having come to the place where they gave their lives to Christ. It seems to me that if we loved these people we should profoundly hope and pray that despite their failure to embrace the truth God has nevertheless embraced them.

RLC

Hillary's More Conservative Than McCain?

She's excited and upset and she's not particularly "nice," but Ann does make some sense. She just needs to switch to decaf:

I disagree with her when she says that Hillary and McCain would have the same policies as president or that Hillary is slightly more conservative than McCain. Unlike McCain, Hillary would probably emasculate our military, appoint pro-choice jurists, and, I fear, return corruption and venality to the White House. She would also run her administration like Cruella DeVille, but then so might McCain. On the other hand, Coulter is right in exclaiming that it's astonishing that Republicans are voting for McCain over Romney. That is, to me, a mystery.

RLC

Rope

My students hear me tell them, some would perhaps say ad nauseum, that ideas have consequences. My friend Byron forwarded me a brief piece by Greg Veltman which makes this point very well by referring to an old Alfred Hitchcock film titled Rope. Here's what Veltman says:

In 1948, Alfred Hitchcock made a film called Rope. Based on a stage play the entire film is set in a small apartment, and the whole film is one continuous shot. But holding the well done technical aspects of the film together is an amazing story of an outrageous idea.

In this story, two recent Ivy League graduates, Brandon and Phillip, decide to kill an acquaintance of theirs, David, who they see as an inferior person. They are attempting to test out the theories of their education. Believing that they are superior men, they have advanced "beyond good and evil," and so they can kill and cannot be held responsible for the consequences, in fact they are doing society a favor.

Brandon and Phillip then invite over a few friends, the victim's family, and their esteemed philosophy professor, Rupert Cadell for a dinner party. All the while David's dead body is in a chest in the living room. The climax of the film comes when the professor returns because of the suspicion that something is wrong. He has noticed one of the killers acting strangely throughout the party. On his return he confronts his students. They defend themselves by repeating back the professor's own Nietzschean philosophy. They say that they killed because they learned that if they really were superior to the victim than it is not morally wrong to kill him. The professor then has a critical moment of clarity and realizes that his theory has consequences- that his classroom extends beyond its four walls into real lives.

In the end, Professor Cadell tells his students that they have taught him a great lesson, that his ideas must be in line with his ethics, that ideas inform our everyday actions and decisions. He abandons his belief in superior and inferior people; he concludes that all human beings must be treated with dignity and equality and that everyone has worth.

We are not all that different from Professor Cadell. It is simpler to just separate out the ideas and theories that we discuss and argue about in the classroom, from our everyday routines of eating, sleeping, and hanging out with friends. And as Brandon and Phillip illustrate connecting ideas and actions can be dangerous - even criminal. The trouble is: How do we navigate the bridges and intersections of the ideas that we learn about and the way we live our lives?

After reading this I watched Rope and the cinematography is indeed interesting. Hitchcock used only one camera for the entire piece and there are no breaks in the narrative. It's shot in real time while the artificial city skyline seen through the apartment window constantly proceeds toward dusk.

But more important than the technical aspects of the film are its philosophical implications. It's interesting to me that Prof. Cadell's students, especially Brandon (played brilliantly, by the way, by John Dall)are more consistent in living out his ideas than he is. When Cadell (Jimmy Stewart) sees that his Darwinian view that the inferior have no right to survive actually leads to murder he's outraged, but why should he be? Why should he blame his students for being more logical than he himself is?

Anyway, Dostoyevsky also explores this same Nietzschean theme in his novel Crime and Punishment, and more recently Woody Allen's movie Match Point, which is a take off on Crime and Punishment (If you watch carefully you can even catch the main character reading it in one quick scene) does the same thing in chilling fashion. Match Point actually conflates Dostoyevsky's story with the theme of Allen's earlier film Crimes and Misdemeanors. Everyone should read Crime and Punishment, but if you don't have time for the novel watch either Match Point or Rope. They both highlight the moral confusion and nihilism which are the logical consequence of the abandonment of belief in the moral authority of God.

RLC

No Child Left Behind

My eldest daughter, who is a public school teacher, sent me this parody of the thinking behind No Child Left Behind. It compares the concept of NCLB with scholastic football and points out that if high school football were run like education then the following would ensue:

1. All teams must make the state playoffs and all MUST win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable. If after two years they have not won the championship their footballs and equipment will be taken away until they do win the championship.

2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time, even if they do not have the same conditions or opportunities to practice on their own. NO exceptions will be made for lack of interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities of themselves or their parents. All kids will play football at a proficient level!

3. Talented players will be asked to workout on their own, without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren't interested in football, have limited athletic ability or whose parents don't like football.

4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th game. This will create a new age of sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimum goals. If no child gets ahead, then no child gets left behind. If parents do not like this new law, they are encouraged to vote for vouchers and support private schools that can screen out the non-athletes and prevent their children from having to go to school with bad football players.

Pretty ridiculous, no? NCLB is an example of good intentions enacted into law by people who simply don't understand the dynamics of either a school or a classroom.

I once knew an administrator who constantly reminded his teachers that every child can learn. This, of course, was true enough, but what it glossed over was the additional truths that not every child wants to learn and, among those who do, not every child can learn the same content or at the same rate. When it comes to aptitude in education, as in football, we simply are not all born equal.

RLC

Big Brother Will Soon Be Watching

This story raises some alarms about an emerging technology that most people probably know nothing about, but people who have access to it will know pretty much everything about you there is to know:

Here's a vision of the not-so-distant future: Microchips with antennas will be embedded in virtually everything you buy, wear, drive and read, allowing retailers and law enforcement to track consumer items - and, by extension, consumers - wherever they go, from a distance.

A seamless, global network of electronic "sniffers" will scan radio tags in myriad public settings, identifying people and their tastes instantly so that customized ads, "live spam," may be beamed at them.

In "Smart Homes," sensors built into walls, floors and appliances will inventory possessions, record eating habits, monitor medicine cabinets - all the while, silently reporting data to marketers eager for a peek into the occupants' private lives.

Science fiction?

In truth, much of the radio frequency identification technology that enables objects and people to be tagged and tracked wirelessly already exists - and new and potentially intrusive uses of it are being patented, perfected and deployed.

Read the rest of the story at the link. Thanks to Justin for passing it along.

RLC

Giving Away Your Money

This will toast your muffins: Under the current structure of the stimulus package many illegal immigrants will receive a tax rebate. What a country.

RLC

Reagan Nostalgia

William Kristol at The Weekly Standard urges conservatives to get a grip:

Conservative editorialists, radio hosts, and bloggers are unhappy. They don't like the Republican presidential field, and many of them have been heaping opprobrium on the various GOP candidates with astonishing vigor.

For example: John McCain--with a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of 82.3--is allegedly in no way a conservative. And, though the most favorably viewed of all the candidates right now, both among Republicans and the electorate as a whole, he would allegedly destroy the Republican party if nominated.

Or take Mike Huckabee. He was a well-regarded and successful governor of Arkansas, reelected twice, the second time with 40 percent of the black vote. He's come from an asterisk to second in the national GOP polls with no money and no establishment support. Yet he is supposedly a buffoon and political na�f. He's been staunchly pro-life and pro-gun and is consistently supported by the most conservative primary voters--but he is, we're told, no conservative either.

Or Mitt Romney. He's a man of considerable accomplishments, respected by many who have worked with and for him in various endeavors. He took conservative positions on social issues as governor of Massachusetts, and parlayed a one-term governorship of a blue state into a first-tier position in the Republican race. But he, too, we're told, is deserving of no respect. And though he's embraced conservative policies and seems likely to be steadfast in pursuing them--he's no conservative either.

One could go on. And it's true the Republican candidates are not unproblematic. But they are so far performing more credibly than much of the conservative commentariat. Beyond the normal human frailties that affect all of us, including undoubtedly the commentators at this journal, there is one error that is distorting much conservative discussion of the presidential race. It's Reagan nostalgia.

Read the rest at the link to see what Kristol is talking about. I don't know how many of our readers listen to Sean Hannity, but if there's anyone who suffers from the syndrome Kristol writes about it's Hannity. Hannity worships Reagan and seems to have forgotten that the Gipper's tenure was not as glorious and unblemished as he imagines. Indeed, two hundred of our Marines were murdered in Lebanon and Reagan responded by having us slink ignominiously out of the country. He also put Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, a move that set the pro-life movement back by a generation.

Make no mistake. I think Reagan was a historic president, but conservatives like Hannity do make a mistake, in my opinion, when they idealize his presidency and make that ideal the standard by which any candidate is to be measured.

Thanks to Jason for the link.

RLC

Edwards Withdraws

Democrat John Edwards announces his withdrawal from the presidential race in the Hurricane Katrina stricken Ninth Ward of New Orleans, La., Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2008. Edwards' wife Elizabeth and son Jack applaud. So do we.

Maybe Democratic voters who voted for Hillary or Obama better start looking for a lawyer.

RLC

Brave New World

Denyse O'Leary ruined my evening the other night with three predictions she offers at Uncommon Descent. O'Leary looks for the following to happen sometime in the not-to-distant future:

1. Academic institutions will force students to sign statements saying that they renounce the idea that the universe could be intelligently designed. So students from most normal human traditions will be forced to sign a statement saying that their tradition is actually lies, garbage, and drivel. Even though the evidence of the fine tuning of the universe actually supports their traditions' most basic elements. And if they appeal to the judiciary, the judgebots will demand that they sign, if they want an education.

2. Many religion profs, divinity profs, chaplains, alleged Christians in science, etc., will urge the students to sign the statement, because - whether they know it or not - they are totally in the materialist camp. They hope that they can get a salary while they sell out their tradition. It is unclear why these profbots and revbots should not be booted, given that the evidence from science actually supports, rather than undermines, traditional beliefs about the basic nature of the universe. But lots of people get a salary to pretend otherwise, and they will go on doing so.

3. Social workers will come out from under the floorboards from every direction to urge the young people to be "nice" and sign.

I don't know what she bases these depressing prognostications upon other than the historically demonstrable tendency of left-wing materialists to impose a tyrannical and mindless conformity on as many people as possible whenever it is within their power to do so. I hope she's wrong, yet her predictions have about them a certain troubling plausibility. God help us.

RLC

The Evolution of the Surge

Fred Barnes has written a fine piece in The Weekly Standard that takes us behind the scenes of the decision to implement the surge in Iraq. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the war and the history behind the major change in strategy responsible for the current status of that conflict.

President Bush comes out of this narrative looking for all the world like one of the most wise and courageous men ever to hold the office of the Presidency. Almost everyone in the military, the state department, the media and the congress opposed him yet he and a few of his advisors believed we had to win and that the surge was the best, maybe the only, way to accomplish that.

We haven't won yet. There still remain serious systemic problems in Iraq, but Bush's resolute implementation of the strategy called "The Surge" has convinced all but the most dour doubters that a historic victory is at least within our grasp.

Read Barnes' account. It's worth the time.

RLC

Kicking the Addiction

C. MacLeod Fuller comes to the rescue of those ensnared by the lotus eaters (See The Odyssey) on the Isle of Liberalism and offers those mired in the Slough of liberal Despond (See Pilgrim's Progress) a 13 step program of escape.

If you feel helpless to break your own self-destructive addiction to liberal ideas then Fuller's essay is just what you need. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

RLC

State of the Union

For those who missed it, Ben Johnson at Front Page Mag offers an overview of last night's State of the Union Address. As I listened on radio it seemed that it wasn't the most soaring speech the President ever gave, but it was very substantive and politically adroit. Johnson agrees.

RLC

Guide for the Perplexed

Are you puzzled by some gnawing philosophical conundrum? If so, you may wish to seek relief for your curiosity at Ask A Philosopher. Asking a philosopher a question about a difficult issue may, of course, be a frustrating exercise for the inquirer since philosophers frequently don't give you the answer to your question but prefer instead to help you sort through the various options. Even so, give it a try.

HT: Evangelical Outpost.

RLC

A Time For Grace

Madison Trammel at Christianity Today wonders what should be done about ESPN's Dana Jacobson. If you aren't familiar with Jacobson's recent transgressions go here for the full story. The short of it is that in a drunken rant in which she was vulgarly denigrating the University of Notre Dame, the "Touchdown Jesus," and Jesus Himself she delivered herself of the unladylike sentiment, "F---k Jesus."

This has caused predictable outrage among Christians everywhere, though certainly not of the sort that would have ensued had she substituted Mohammed for Jesus. Many are calling for ESPN to fire her and indeed they fired Rush Limbaugh for much less, and other sports journalists have been given their pink slips by other networks for much more innocuous statements. But I agree with Trammel. The potty-tongued Ms Jacobson obviously needs to have her mouth washed out with soap, but I don't think demanding that she be fired is the best way for Christians to handle this. Trammel says:

Personally, I can't see that firing Jacobson accomplishes much, besides showing that Christians can flex their muscles and get people fired just as well as any other group. "Bless those who persecute you," Paul writes in Romans 12:14, "bless and do not curse." As followers of Christ, we'd be better served by an ESPN-arranged meeting between Jacobson and a group of local pastors. She could apologize in person-something she's already done in a prepared statement-and they could explain, with grace and understanding, why they accept her apology in the name of the one she denigrated.

I think that the circumstances do indeed call for a display of grace, should she ask for it, which would show the world that Christians are compassionate and forgiving people. Let's leave the fatwas to the Muslims. Who knows but that such an act of love and reconciliation would touch Ms Jacobson and perhaps nudge her into the Kingdom. It'd sure illustrate better than any argument ever could the stark difference between Christianity and Islam.

Dana Jacobson

RLC

Rooting For Obama

Barack Obama won big in South Carolina on Saturday, and this will be seen as good news by Republicans who should be cheering for an Obama win in the Democratic nominating process. The reason is that if Hillary wins the nomination she may decide, or have it decided for her, to ask Obama to run as VP. A Hillary/Obama ticket would be almost irresistible to an electorate eager to parade their willingness to vote for a woman and/or a black man regardless of what they stand for. To put both on the same ticket would make the Democrats very difficult to beat in November.

If Obama wins the nomination, however, it's unlikely that Hillary would be willing to serve as his Vice President. The nature of the office would be deemed beneath her station, and she would likely choose to remain in the Senate. If so, the Democratic offering would be weaker with Obama at the head than with him as the running mate.

RLC

Perspective

Ramirez puts the media fixation on actor Heath Ledger's death into perspective:

Sometimes it seems that in order to work for a cable news network one has to pass a superficiality test. The more shallow the applicant the higher he or she scores on the test, and the higher one scores the brighter one's media future.

RLC

McCain's Open Borders Guy

Senator McCain has yet again thumbed his nose at Republican voters. It is remarkable that he manages to get any votes at all in GOP primaries, at least from people concerned about illegal immigration.

This time he has appointed as his "Hispanic Outreach Director" a man by the name of Dr. Juan Hernandez who is an staunch open borders activist. Hernandez has gone on record as claiming that "We must not only have a free flow of goods and services, but also start working for a free flow of people."

It seems to me that conservative Republicans who are voting for McCain in the primaries know only about his steadfast support for the war in Iraq and perhaps his pro-life credentials but little about the rest of his record. His stand on the war and for unborn children make him, of course, a far better choice than any of the Democratic candidates, all of whom favor retreat from Iraq and partial-birth abortion. But all of the viable Republican candidates have the same views on the war and on life, so why are Republicans voting for the most liberal of the pack?

RLC

A Brief History of ID

James Kushiner offers a brief and useful history of the Intelligent Design movement. His essay is the forward to a series of articles appearing in Salvo magazine and serves as an excellent primer for anyone interested in understanding where ID came from and who some of the key players are.

RLC

Panic on the Right

Peggy Noonan, in a Wall Street Journal Online essay, seems to lament the fratricide taking place among pundits in the Republican Party:

As for the Republicans, their slow civil war continues. The primary race itself is winnowing down and clarifying: It is John McCain versus Mitt Romney, period. At the same time the conservative journalistic world is convulsed by recrimination and attack. They're throwing each other out of the party. Republicans have become very good at that. David Brooks damns Rush Limbaugh who knocks Bill Kristol who anathematizes whoever is to be anathematized this week. This Web site opposes that magazine.

Into the midst of this circular firing squad Noonan lobs a hand grenade:

On the pundit civil wars, Rush Limbaugh declared on the radio this week, "I'm here to tell you, if either of these two guys [Mr. McCain or Mike Huckabee] get the nomination, it's going to destroy the Republican Party. It's going to change it forever, be the end of it!"

This is absurd. George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.

It is certainly the case that the party has found itself being whip-sawed by a White House that appoints excellent judges to the Supreme Court and then buckles almost completely on illegal immigration. Even so, for Noonan to say that Bush has destroyed the GOP because of the Iraq war is quite a stretch unless she expects us to believe that because Bush doesn't have the support of The New York Times and Congressional Democrats that he has therefore destroyed the party.

What in fact has hurt the Republican party more than anything was their failure to do anything to reform Congress when they had the majority and the disgraceful moral conduct of some GOP Congressmen. If Republicans are going to act like Democrats then, voters figure, why vote for the substitute when you can have the real thing?

As for for what Limbaugh said it is indeed hard to credit. Neither McCain nor Huckabee is any more liberal than any other Republican presidential candidate since Goldwater, save Ronald Reagan. It may be that neither of them would win in November, but why either of them should be more of a disaster for the party than Richard Nixon, Bob Dole, or Bush '41 is not clear to me.

Both Noonan and Rush need to step back and get a little deeper perspective. They also need to remember that even if none of the remaining GOP candidates is ideologically pure they are still orders of magnitude better than the Clintons.

Thanks to Jason for the Noonan article.

RLC

Autumn's Onset

I commented to several friends last Fall that I thought autumn came late this year. It seemed that in my part of the country (south-central Pennsylvania) the peak Fall foliage display was about three weeks later than it was a decade ago. I wasn't sure why this should be since I had always thought that the onset of the pigment change was related to conditions like temperature and day length which surely weren't significantly different than they were ten years ago. Nor did I see anything written about autumn's tardiness anywhere, but I was pretty certain I wasn't imagining it. So, when I came upon this story at Science Daily it naturally piqued my interest:

Do those fall colors seem to show up later and later-if at all? Scientists say we can blame increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for prolonging the growing season of the trees. And that may actually be good news for forestry industries.

Writing in the current issue of the journal Global Change Biology, Michigan Technological University Professor David F. Karnosky and colleagues from two continents present evidence that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere act directly to delay the usual autumn spectacle of changing colors and falling leaves in northern hardwood forests.

"Basically, this is a good-news story for our region's forests," said Karnosky. "It suggests that they will become a bit more productive due to the extra carbon being taken up in the autumn, along with the increased photosynthesis throughout the growing season."

They found that the forests on both continents stayed greener longer as CO2 levels rose, independent of temperature changes....There has been plenty of evidence gathered previously to show that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing tree growth to begin earlier in the spring, but until now, most scientists believed that other factors, such as temperature and length of day, were the primary elements influencing autumnal senescence.

This raises some fascinating questions. How sensitive are these plants to CO2 changes? How much of a change in CO2 concentration is necessary to trigger such a profound difference in the timing of senescence? If CO2 increases just a little bit more will deciduous trees hold their leaves all year round? What are the ecological and economic implications of all this?

If anyone knows the answers to any of these questions, let me know.

RLC

Should You Buy a Hybrid?

If you're thinking of making your next car a hybrid there are some things you need to ask yourself. One is whether your primary motive is to do your part to reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse emissions or whether it is to save money. This article explains why a hybrid is probably not going to save you much money.

Update: The link in this post has been corrected.

RLC

Why McCain Won't Be President

The Democrats in their debate the other night were all talking about which of them could beat John McCain in November. Evidently, they believe McCain is going to be the GOP nominee. If they're right, it's looking more and more like any of the Democrats would beat him. The reason is that no candidate in the Republican party is likely to generate less enthusiasm among the activist members of the party than is McCain. The grassroots Republicans are largely conservative and, with the exception of two or three of his positions, McCain is not. He's a RINO (Republican in Name Only) and he's going to have a hard time inspiring the foot soldiers to get out and encourage their friends and neighbors to vote for him.

Indeed, a lot of conservatives are talking about not even showing up at the polls if McCain is the candidate. Whether they will or they won't sit it out, a successful campaign requires a high level of excitement and enthusiasm. Bush '41 didn't have it in 1992, nor did Bob Dole have it in 1996, and John McCain won't have it in 2008. It looks a lot like, if McCain is the GOP standard bearer, all a Democrat will have to do to become president is win the nomination of his or her party.

RLC

Shameless Critics

It is depressing to have to go through this again at this late date, especially since we've been over this ground so often in the past, but the President's critics leave us no alternative. The AP has reported that an allegedly independent study has found that the administration made a total of 935 separate statements in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq which were subsequently found to be either untrue or unconfirmable. The left has taken this as proof that George Bush lied us into war and have worked themselves into a swivet over what they see as the Bush administration's impeachable mendacity.

Here's Keith Olbermann and Air America's Rachel Maddow, for instance, talking tonight about the story. Their presentation of this report is breathtakingly fatuous.

First of all, the report is not done by non-partisan, independent actors. One of the organizations involved is funded by George Soros who is a rabidly anti-Bush partisan and a major left-wing moneybags. The AP's failure to mention this in their story is itself a breach of professional responsibility. That neither Olbermann nor Maddow mention it is either an indication that they didn't do their homework or that they were deliberately trying to hide this from their viewers.

Secondly, and most important, Olbermann and Maddow keep referring to the claims made by the administration, including the President, as lies, yet the AP report doesn't use this word and nothing in the story warrants such a judgment.

It is astonishing that this distinction still has to be made, but apparently it needs to be explained for those who, like Mr. Olbermann, have a limited ability to understand simple definitions: An error is not a lie. A lie involves a deliberate attempt to deceive. The liar knows that what he is saying is not true. Nothing in the AP story establishes that anyone knew that what they were asserting about Iraq's threat to the rest of the world, their possession of WMD, their support for al Qaeda, and so on, was in any way false.

On the contrary, the intelligence services of the whole world thought they were true, everyone in the Clinton administration and the Democratic leadership thought they were true, Saddam was behaving as if they were true, Iraqi defectors were telling us they were true. Yet when it turns out that some of the claims appear to have been wrong, Mr. Olbermann, whose own relationship with the truth is somewhat checkered, eagerly concludes that George Bush and his minions are liars and calls for impeachment.

Anyone who believes that George Bush was the only one who was telling us at the time that Saddam was a real threat and that he lied us into war in Iraq needs to watch this video. It'll be an eye-opener (HT: A Blog For All):

Some people truly are shameless. If one is going to call someone else a liar he has the responsibility of demonstrating that the person in question knew that what he was saying was false. To accuse someone of lying without making that demonstration is a reprehensible slander and the person who does it has disgraced himself.

RLC

More on the Objectification of Women

A lot of people have weighed in on last Saturday's post titled The Objectification of Women. Check the Feedback Page for an example from a student that is probably representative of the majority of replies.

RLC

Nine Predictions

Critics of Intelligent Design often allege that ID isn't science because it doesn't lend itself to testable predictions. Denyse O'Leary thinks otherwise and offers nine predictions for consideration at her blog The Post-Darwinist.

For example, she predicts that:

No good theory will be found for a random origin of life, though there will be plenty of huffing and puffing in favour of bad ideas. All theories that exclude purpose and design fail because they leave out the key driver - the purpose that life should come into existence.

Positive prediction: We will learn more about the real nature of our universe and our place in it, and how best we can explore it when we accept the fact that it didn't "just happen."

You can read the rest at the link.

RLC

America For Sale

The United States appears on track to soon become a nation owned largely by foreign investors. Peter Goodman and Louise Story explain why in the New York Times.

RLC

Cell Phones and Sleep

Do you have trouble getting to sleep and staying there? Do you use your cell phone before going to sleep? If so, then you'll be interested in a study that shows a direct correlation between the two and which provides strong evidence that cell phone radiation affects deep sleep. According to an article in The Independent (The link to The Independent article no longer works but the article can be found here).

The findings are especially alarming for children and teenagers, most of whom - surveys suggest - use their phones late at night and who especially need sleep. Their failure to get enough can lead to mood and personality changes, ADHD-like symptoms, depression, lack of concentration and poor academic performance.

Read the entire article at the link.

RLC

March For Life

Thousands of people marched in Washington today on behalf of the right of unborn children to live their lives. I know this because I get my news from the internet. I saw almost nothing about it in the MSM, including FOX, but maybe I just missed it. Even so, look at this picture:

If those were people marching for abortion rights, or if they were marching for civil rights, or gay marriage, or for open borders, or against the war in Iraq their march would have been wall to wall headline news. Today, however, all the news shows evidently decided to give their attention to the really important development - the death of an actor from Brokeback Mountain.

Of course, they did this because not only is that the sort of thing which is of great moment to the people who write and report the news, but also because the last thing they want to do is show the nation and the world that there are thousands of people willing to come to Washington to protest Roe v. Wade. The media and their liberal allies in Congress want people to think that if they're pro-life, they're about the only people in the country who are.

So, I'm going to give the March For Life folks a little unsolicited advice for next year: Get Paris Hilton or Brittany Spears to march with you. It'll guarantee media coverage.

RLC

Good News Is No News

Chuck Asay takes note of the sudden and almost complete lack of interest among Democrats and the media in talking about the war in Iraq:

Just last summer it was all we were hearing about. Today, despite all the news there is to report on the progress that's being made there (see here, for example), there's virtually nothing being reported. Like one of the guys in the cartoon says, it makes you wonder who the media were rooting for.

RLC

The Case Against Hillary

When Christopher Hitchens is wrong (as he frequently is in his book God is Not Great) he's very wrong, but when he's right he's often a must-read. So it is with his essay at Slate titled The Case Against Hillary Clinton. Even so, as strong as is the case that Hitchens makes against voting for another Clinton presidency, it should be borne in mind that it is only a fraction of the total brief against her. Hitchens, constrained by space perhaps, makes no mention of the FBI files scandal, the Rose Law Firm files scandal, the shameful travel office firings, the cattle futures scandal, her volcanic temper and a host of other peccadillos, prevarications, and possible felonies for which anyone else but a Clinton would have long ago been cast by the media into political outer darkness.

Instead Mrs. Clinton has been elevated to the office of Senator by the most important state in the union and now finds herself with as good a shot as anybody to become the most powerful individual in the world.

Read Hitchens' essay and weep that such a person may be, by this time next year, the President of the United States.

RLC

I Have a Dream

Former President Clinton was all ears at Harlem's Covenant Avenue Baptist Church's Martin Luther King day observance:

RLC

Re: The Objectification of Women

Last Saturday we did a piece titled The Objectification of Women. A young student shared her thoughts on this post with us, and I thought I'd share her letter with our readers:

I deeply appreciated this article. I have often wished that I grew up in the 1950's or earlier because the respect and dignity of romance back then was so beautiful. It is absolutely true that the intimacy and excitement of sexual arousal is dwindling as we surround ourselves with images of photo-shopped models and barely-there bikinis.

For both men and women, there are very saddening results. Men are deceived by the images they see and build up inaccurate ideas of a female body. Hence, when all they want is to be aroused by the wife that they cherish, they find themselves disappointed. On the other hand, women feel ugly in comparison to the images their spouses see. They compare their healthy bodies to the anorexic ones displayed in movies and become depressed, anxious, and miserable.

Even worse, many women have come to accept their role as a sexual object and settle for that kind of attention instead of the respect they deserve from men. Men, try as they may to remain faithful to their beloved, cannot escape the sexually stimulating media all around them. The cycle of sexual deterioration is vicious. One can only hope that modesty and chastity will find their way back "into style."

RLC

Liberal Fascism

Jonah Goldberg has a new book out which is creating quite a stir. It's titled Liberal Fascism and it apparently makes the case that what we today call progressivism has more in common with 20th century fascism than it does with classical liberalism.

Jonah appeared recently on Hannity and Colmes, and if you watch the interview (below) you can't help but note the irony of the progressive Alan Colmes denying Goldberg's thesis about the fascist tendencies of progressives while, like a good fascist, refusing to allow Goldberg to be heard. Pretty funny.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about Jonah's book after I've read it.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Another Deranged Hater

Speaking of liberal fascism, an anti-war lawyer by the name of Jay Grodner was sentenced the other day for having keyed the car (!) of a Marine on the eve of the young man's deployment. You'd think it would be some malicious kid that would do something like this, and, in a way, you'd be right. Here's the guy's picture, though:

He's 55 years old, he owns a law firm and he's so twisted that he damages cars that have military license plates. He's an adult, to be sure, but only in terms of his age.

The account of the man's vandalism, which amounted to $2400 in damages, is here.

The judge in the sentencing hearing apparently blasted Grodner. He should be disbarred. See Michelle's site for details of the sentencing.

RLC

Who Do You Like?

This website allows you to match your opinions on a series of issues with the candidate who most closely agrees with your views. The questions don't allow for nuance, but it's nevertheless an interesting guide.

One caveat: When you click on the button to see which candidate matches your responses it may show you the candidate who is least compatible with you. If so, just scroll to the top of the page. I was shocked when I clicked on the button and Chris Dodd's picture came up, but then I scrolled to the top and there was ..... Fred Thompson. Unfortunately, Mr. Thompson will probably no longer be a candidate after his disappointing showing on Saturday in South Carolina.

Thanks to Scott S. for the link.

RLC

Thought For A Sunday

Taken from A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life by William Law.

Every exhortation in Scripture to be wise and reasonable, satisfying only such wants as God would have satisfied; every exhortation to be spiritual and heavenly, pressing after a glorious change of our nature; every exhortation to love our neighbour as ourselves, to love all mankind as God has loved them, is a command to be strictly religious in the use of our money. For none of these tempers can be complied with, unless we be wise and reasonable, spiritual and heavenly, exercising a brotherly love, a god-like charity, in the use of all our fortune. These tempers, and this use of our worldly goods, is so much the doctrine of all the New Testament, that you cannot read a chapter without being taught something of it. I shall only produce one remarkable passage of Scripture, which is sufficient to justify all that I have said concerning this religious use of all our fortune.

"When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him,then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as as hepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked,and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me . . . Then shall he say unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was an hungered, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: Iwas a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. These shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal." [Matt. xxv. 31-64]

I have quoted this passage at length, because if one looks at the way of the world, one would hardly think that Christians had ever read this part of Scripture. For what is there in the lives of Christians, that looks as if their salvation depended upon these good works? And yet the necessity of them is here asserted in the highest manner, and pressed upon us by a lively description of the glory and terrors of the day of judgment.

Some people, even of those who may be reckoned virtuous Christians, look upon this text only as a general recommendation of occasional works of charity; whereas it shows the necessity not only of occasional charities now and then,but the necessity of such an entire charitable life, as is a continual exercise of all such works of charity, as we are able to perform.

You own, that you have no title to salvation, if you have neglected these good works; because such persons as have neglected them are, at the last day, to be placed on the left hand, and banished with a "Depart, ye cursed." There is,therefore, no salvation but in the performance of these good works. Who is it,therefore, that may be said to have performed these good works? Is it he that has some time assisted a prisoner, or relieved the poor or sick? This would beas absurd as to say, that he had performed the duties of devotion, who had sometime said his prayers. Is it, therefore, he that has several times done these works of charity? This can no more be said, than he can be said to be the truly just man, who had done acts of justice several times. What is the rule,therefore, or measure of performing these good works? How shall a man trust that he performs them as he ought?

Now the rule is very plain and easy, and such as is common to every other virtue, or good temper, as well as to charity. Who is the humble, or meek, or devout, or just, or faithful man? Is it he that has several times done acts of humility, meekness, devotion, justice, or fidelity? No; but it is he that lives in the habitual exercise of these virtues. In like manner, he only can be said to have performed these works of charity, who lives in the habitual exercise of them to the utmost of his power. He only has performed the duty of Divine love,who loves God with all his heart, and with all his mind, and with all his strength. And he only has performed the duty of these good works, who has done them with all his heart, and with all his mind, and with all his strength. For there is no other measure of our doing good, than our power of doing it.

WCS

The Objectification of Women

Byron passes along a good piece by Bob Herbert about what seems to be an epidemic of mistreatment of women in our culture. Herbert is right, of course, that there is terrible violence being perpetrated against women in the United States, but the question I wonder about is why. Why do more men than in previous generations seem to hold women in such low esteem?

In my opinion, the problem goes back to the 1960s and the moral revolution that took place in this country concerning our attitudes toward sex and violence.

During the '60s and '70s pornography was mainstreamed and with the advent of the internet it became easily accessible to adolescents. Two generations of young men have thus been raised on ubiquitous pornographic images. This has had several affects, I believe. First, it has desensitized men to sexual stimuli. A hundred years ago a glimpse of a woman's lower leg was stimulating. It no longer is because now there's much more to be seen anywhere one looks than just a shapely calf.

Consequently, men require stronger and stronger stimuli in order to achieve the same level of arousal as someone who is not exposed to the constant barrage of sexual images as are young men today. Because of this need for ever more erotic stimuli many men want their women to be like the women they view in movies, magazines, and online - they want their women to be sexually voracious playthings, and that desire often has a dehumanizing effect on women. A lot of women simply don't feel comfortable in that role and that incompatibility can create tension in their relationships. The man feels cheated, the woman feels cheapened and trouble results.

At the same time that pornography exploded, sex was disconnected from marriage and commitment. Many women were perfectly willing to live with men and give them all the benefits of marriage without demanding of them any kind of permanent commitment. This suited many men just fine. When men could have sex without having to bond themselves to a woman, women were more likely to be objectified and used by men who reasoned that there was no sense in buying a cow as long as the milk was free. People who give us what we want may be popular as long as the benefits keep coming, but they are not respected. Respect is feigned as long as the benefit is imminent but when the benefit no longer seems all that novel or exciting the lack of respect results in the woman being treated accordingly.

Men are naturally promiscuous, they have to be taught to value hearth and family, and our entire culture has conspired in the last forty years to minimize and deride that lesson. So, when today's man, unfettered by a profound commitment to a particular woman and children, gets too accustomed to that woman she'll eventually begin to bore him and his eye will start searching elsewhere for another potential source of sexual excitement.

Along with the decline of traditional sexual morality was the emergence of a radical feminism that castigated the old Victorian habits of gentlemanly behavior. It became quaint for a man to give a woman his seat on a bus or to open a door for her. Men who had been raised to put women on a pedestal - to care for them, provide for them, and nurture them - were told they were no longer necessary for a woman's happiness. In Gloria Steinem's famous phrase "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."

The more vocal feminists also made it clear that women no longer appreciated being treated differently than men. Thus our entertainment culture began depicting women in movies as just as raunchy, coarse, and proficient at killing and mayhem as men, and the idea of a woman being an object of special respect and courtesy because she needed male protection and care became risible. This, too, dehumanized women by eroding the esteem in which their sex had formerly been held among men.

As with sex so with violence. The inclination to violence in the male population follows a Bell curve distribution. At some point along the tail there is a line on the other side of which lies the part of the curve which represents men who are violent. Most men sublimate and control their natural inclination to violence, but when they are exposed to it over and over as young men, when they amuse themselves with violent movies and video games, when they immerse themselves in violent imagery and themes, they become desensitized to it and tolerant of it. When they're no longer horrified by violence the population of males undergoes a shift toward that line, spilling many more men onto the other side than would have been there otherwise.

This affects women as much as men, if not more, because women are often the victims of that violence. As men become more inclined to violence, as they lose respect for women, as our culture portrays women as sexually insatiable playthings, women become increasingly the victims of male lust, anger and aggression.

It would be well for any young woman who is beginning to get serious about a young man to find out how much of his time he spends on violent movies and computer games and what he thinks about pornography. She'll learn a lot of very valuable information about him by so doing.

RLC

How We See 'Em

A couple more primaries come up this weekend, South Carolina and Nevada, and they turn our thoughts to consideration of who we would vote for were we voting today. If we had to rank the top tier candidates in order of our assessment of their suitability to serve as President of the United States, our ranking would look like this:

1. Fred Thompson
   
2. Mitt Romney
   
3. Mike Huckabee
   
4. Rudy Giuliani
   
5. John McCain
   
6. Barack Obama
   
7. Hillary Clinton
   
8. John Edwards
   

Of course, events may conspire to cause us to reconsider the order tomorrow, but as of now that's how we see 'em.

RLC

Bobby Fischer Is Dead

Bobby Fischer, the first American chess world champion, has died in Iceland at the age of 64. For those who remember the 1960s and 70s, Fischer's battles with the Soviet masters, and his manifold eccentricities, are legendary. Younger readers can find out a little more about Bobby Fischer here.

RLC

The Fred Astaire of Politics

"So far, Obama is the Fred Astaire of politics - graceful and elegant, with a surface so pleasing to the eye that it seems mistaken, even greedy, to demand depth. No one, however, would have given Astaire control of nuclear weapons, so attention must be paid to Obama's political as well as aesthetic qualities."

George Will in Jewish World Review.

Thanks to Byron for the link.

RLC

Buying Other People's Houses

Michelle Malkin argues that the very worst solution to the sub-prime mortgage crisis is for government to take money from responsible people who try hard to live within their means, and who do without a lot of what others indulge themselves with, and then give that money to irresponsible borrowers who had no business buying houses that they couldn't afford.

Michelle is right. At some point people have to be held accountable for their actions. They can't make foolish decisions and then expect everyone else to pay for them. Politicians, including those in the White House, who are trying to find a way to make the rest of us pay for other peoples' homes have to be told that we're just not going to do it.

If individuals, churches or other private charities wish to help people who are overextended hold onto their homes, that's fine, but it should be a voluntary choice. No one should be coerced by government to subsidize the purchase of someone else's house, especially when some of those houses cost two and three times as much as the average taxpayer's own home.

RLC

Mind/Body Problem

Michael Engor points out that there are two types of problems related to human consciousness, these are what David Chalmers calls the easy problems and the hard problem. The easy problems are not called that because they are easily solved but rather because we can see how they may yield to future scientific research:

The easy problems are the sort treated routinely by neuroscientists. These are problems such as 'what is the neuroanatomical correlate of arousal?' or 'which neurotransmitters are associated with depression?' Of course, these questions are not easy in a scientific sense, but they are tractable by the methods of science, which are, for the most part, methodologically materialistic.

The hard problem is much different. There seems to be no way of solving it. It appears to be intractable:

The hard problem is this: why are we subjects, and not just objects? Why do we have subjective experiences? Descriptions of neurophysiology are all third-person - neurons do this, serotonin does that. Yet consciousness is experienced in the first person - 'I,' not 'it.' How is the 'third person' matter in our brains related to our actual first person experiences? The easy problems of consciousness relate to objective phenomena - neurotransmitters and action potentials. The hard problem of consciousness is qualitatively different - it's the problem of subjectivity. As Chalmers explains, the hard problem "persists even when the performance of all the relevant functions [e.g. neurochemistry] is explained."

In other words, we have certain subjective experiences which, if we are simply material beings, seem to be inexplicable. How, for example, does matter produce any of the following: self-awareness, appreciation of beauty, gratitude, disappointment, regret, resentment, a wish, a hope, a desire, a doubt, a belief, an intention? How does matter, a series of chemical reactions in the brain, result in understanding, frustration or boredom?

Engor points out that dualistic views are not without their problems:

Indeed, dualism has plenty of problems of its own, and dualists are honest about the problems. For example, how do the mind and brain actually interact?

This is indeed a puzzling question but it should not stop anyone from believing that they somehow do. After all, materialists believe that matter can warp space but I daresay no one knows how it does it. Nor does anyone know how gravity exerts its pull on objects or how similarly charged particles repel each other. The fact that we don't know how mind and matter can interact is no reason not to think that they do.

RLC

Santorum's Revenge

Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum unloads on John McCain explaining why Senator McCain is not a candidate that conservatives should support. Santorum is a credible voice among conservatives and his criticism of McCain's obstructionism in the Senate could be (should be) harmful to the senator's chances for the GOP nomination.

RLC

Mike Nifong and the Golden Rule

I wonder how the disbarred erstwhile North Carolina prosecutor Mike Nifong is feeling now about abusing his power to try to destroy the lives of others evidently for the purpose of advancing his own political career. His life seems to be lying in tatters, which is exactly what he would have done to the lives of the Duke lacrosse players if he could have:

Former Durham prosecutor Mike Nifong has filed for bankruptcy, listing a debt of $180.3 million, according to documents filed Tuesday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Durham.

The filing comes on the same day the former Duke lacrosse prosecutor and others involved in the case were to submit responses to a federal lawsuit by the three men he sought to prosecute.

Nifong lists David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann, as well as three other members of Duke University's 2006 men's lacrosse team who filed a separate federal lawsuit - as unsecured creditors, each owed $30 million.

More than 30 other lacrosse players from that team are also listed as creditors, each owed $1; the North Carolina State Bar, owed $8,397.71 for costs related to his disbarment; and nearly 70 other people involved in or associated in some way the nearly yearlong investigation of rape, sexual assault and kidnapping claims by an exotic dancer.

Nifong values his assets, including his house, car and personal belongings, at $243,898.

There are rare occasions when, if we don't treat others the way we would want to be treated, we get treated the way we have treated others.

RLC

Sermon on the Mount (Muslim Version)

It's an unfortunate failing of the the American media that they do such a poor job of calling to the attention of the American public exactly what goes on in mosques throughout the Middle East and probably here in our own country. The Middle East Research Institute (MEMRI) is on the job, however, doing what the Western media lack the kidney for, and bringing us without comment events like this Friday sermon by a Palestinian sheik. Watch as the sheik lays out for the mosque full of men and boys the Muslim goal of universal Islam and note how attentively they listen to every word as his hatred washes over them.

Of course, I might be a little hasty here in judging the sheik's sermon. Maybe he's really just preaching the sermon on the mount and talking about the need for love and forgiveness, and the captions are somehow a devious Zionist trick, like the Roberto Benigni character Guido in Life is Beautiful interpreting the concentration camp officer's instructions to the prisoners. Maybe. Or maybe the sheik is really what he seems to be - a hate-filled psychopath.

Watch the video. It'll be profitable for those unaware of, or doubtful of, the future the Islamists have in mind for our children.

RLC

The Real Hillary

Sally Bedell Smith's new book The Clintons at the White House is being excerpted by The Daily Mail. The first installment gives disturbing, though not new, insight into the personality and paranoia of Hillary Clinton. It's amazing that someone with this sort of temperament is being given an almost free pass into the White House by the media.

The excerpt is ugly but it's fascinating. If it were about anyone else it would just be gossip, but it reveals the character of a woman who may well be the next president of the United States. Everyone should read it so they know who and what they're voting for or against in November.

RLC

Bush of Arabia

Keith Olberman the other evening observed approvingly that the Europeans don't much care who is elected to be our next president as long as whoever it is tacitly repudiates George Bush and makes a clean break with the last eight years.

Madeline Albright recently sniffed that George Bush is probably the worst president in our history (She said this before going on, humorously enough, to imply that Bush is not concerned about the interests of other nations and that if everyone in the world were poor and ignorant we wouldn't have the problems we do).

Daniel Schorr of NPR observed the other day that George Bush has little to show for his visit to the Middle East. (Schorr pronounced the trip a failure even before Bush had returned home!).

None of these critics has apparently consulted those who actually live in the Middle East before offering their opinions of Bush's impact upon that region. For a completely different take on the significance of George Bush and his presidency one should read this essay by Fouad Ajami in the Wall Street Journal.

Ajami claims that Bush is the most consequential president the Middle East has ever seen. There is no doubt that he means this in a positive sense nor can there be any doubt that he's correct. No president has ever done more good for more people in the Middle East and gotten less gratitude and credit for it than has George Bush. Among other things there are 50 million people living in freedom today in Afghanistan and Iraq who suffered in terror and misery under horrific tyrannies just a few years ago.

Of course, many Europeans, and apparently Keith Olberman, as well couldn't care less about that achievement, and Madeline Albright can point to no accomplishment during her tenure as Secretary of State that is even remotely comparable. As for Schorr, anyone who thinks that the results of a state visit to the Middle East must be instantly apparent in order to be real is simply not to be taken seriously.

Thanks to Byron for the link to the Ajami article.

RLC

Education Pays

Here's data from 2006 which makes it starkly clear that education pays off both in terms of higher income and lower unemployment. The average unemployment rate in 2006 was around 4.8%. The following is a list of 2006 unemployment rates for people of various levels of education. The dollar figure is their median weekly earnings for that year:

• Professional degree (1.1%) $1,474
• Doctoral degree (1.4%) $1,441
• Master's degree (1.7%) $1,140
• Bachelor's degree (2.3%) $962
• Associate degree (3.0%) $721
• Some college, no degree (3.9%) $674
• High-school graduate (4.3%) $595
• Less than a high school diploma (6.8%) $419

It's pretty clear that, on average, the more schooling you get the better you'll do. People like Bill Gates who amassed fortunes with very little formal education are, of course, the exception. A high school student counting on being a Bill Gates is like a high schooler counting on making it in the NBA. You're a lot better off getting all the education you can get.

RLC

The <i>Edge</i> Question for 2008

Edge is a website that often asks very bright people very interesting questions. Recently they invited 165 intellectuals to write about this question: What Have You Changed Your Mind About. Many of the answers are a bit abstruse, but many are also fascinating. For example, psychologist Martin Seligman, whose reply happens to be the first on their list, says this:

If my math had been better, I would have become an astronomer rather than a psychologist. I was after the very greatest questions and finding life elsewhere in the universe seemed the greatest of them all. Understanding thinking, emotion, and mental health was second best - science for weaker minds like mine. Carl Sagan and I were close colleagues in the late 1960's when we both taught at Cornell. I devoured his thrilling book with I.I. Shklovskii (Intelligent Life in the Universe, 1966) in one twenty-four hour sitting, and I came away convinced that intelligent life was commonplace across our galaxy.

The book, as most readers know, estimates a handful of parameters necessary to intelligent life, such as the probability that an advanced technical civilization will in short order destroy itself and the number of "sol-like" stars in the galaxy. Their conclusion is that there are between 10,000 and two million advanced technical civilizations hereabouts. Some of my happiest memories are of discussing all this with Carl, our colleagues, and our students into the wee hours of many a chill Ithaca night. And this made the universe a less chilly place as well. What consolation! That homo sapiens might really partake of something larger, that there really might be numerous civilizations out there populated by more intelligent beings than we are, wiser because they had outlived the dangers of premature self-destruction. What's more we might contact them and learn from them.

A fledging program of listening for intelligent radio signals from out there was starting up. Homo sapiens was just taking its first balky steps off the planet; we exuberantly watched the moon landing together at the faculty club. We worked on the question of how we would respond if humans actually heard an intelligent signal. What would our first "words" be? We worked on what would be inscribed on the almost immortal Voyager plaque that would leave our solar system just about now - allowing the sentient beings who cadged it epochs hence to surmise who we were, where we were, when we were, and what we were (Should the man and woman be holding hands? No, they might think we were one conjoined organism.)

SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and its forerunners are almost forty years old. They scan the heavens for intelligent radio signals, with three million participants using their home computers to analyze the input. The result has been zilch. There are plenty of excuses for zilch, however, and lots of reason to hope: only a small fraction of the sky has been scanned and larger more efficient arrays are coming on line. Maybe really advanced civilizations don't use communication techniques that produce waves we can pick up.

Maybe intelligent life is so unimaginably different from us that we are looking in all the wrong "places." Maybe really intelligent life forms hide their presence. So I changed my mind. I now take the null hypothesis very seriously: that Sagan and Shklovskii were wrong: that the number of advanced technical civilizations in our galaxy is exactly one, that the number of advanced technical civilizations in the universe is exactly one. What is the implication of the possibility, mounting a bit every day, that we are alone in the universe? It reverses the millennial progression from a geocentric to a heliocentric to a Milky Way centered universe, back to, of all things, a geocentric universe. We are the solitary point of light in a darkness without end. It means that we are precious, infinitely so. It means that nuclear or environmental cataclysm is an infinitely worse fate than we thought.

Thinking about Seligman's new thinking on the matter of ETI I'm reminded of an excellent book written by Peter Ward and David Brownlee titled Rare Earth. Ward and Brownlee make it pretty clear that the earth is as close to unique as we have reason to believe and that the conditions necessary for intelligent life might well exist nowhere else in the universe. Anyone who still harbors the Star Wars notion that the uiniverse is probably full of intelligent aliens ought to read Rare Earth.

It is also interesting that Seligman now thinks we live in a geocentric universe. This is an idea that sophisticated people have scoffed at for a hundred years but which now seems to be more likely to be correct in at least one important way than ever before. I talk about why this is here.

You can read the other 164 responses at the link.

RLC

Pander Bear

After having previously assured voters that on the day she takes office oil prices will drop (as will the stock market, probably) Senator Clinton is now delivering assurances in Nevada that, among other things, she is completely convinced that children are our future:

Stroking the 4-year-old girl's head, Clinton said, "I feel so strongly that if we don't take care of our children, we don't take care of our future."

She also has it on good authority that we're heading into a recession:

"I think we're slipping toward a recession," she said. "A couple of people that I met on the street, they work in construction. They tell me it's slowed down."

Well, that clinches it for me.

Not yet done showering profundities upon the adoring crowd the "smartest woman in the world" pandered to her Latino admirers with a great analogy about the lending crisis:

Clinton said unscrupulous lending leads to bad mortgages, which lead to foreclosures, which lead to people with nowhere to go and vacant neighborhoods that can go rapidly downhill. "We treat these problems as if one is guacamole and one is chips, when ... they both go together," she said.

What foods would she have slipped into her comparison, we wonder, had she been speaking to a black audience? Fried chicken and watermelon?

Finally, in a climactic bit of drama she declared all women "legal":

A man shouted through an opening in the wall that his wife was illegal. "No woman is illegal," Clinton said, to cheers.

Goodness, what does that mean? Does it follow that female immigrants in this country without documentation can now get driver's licenses but males similarly situated cannot?

I guess it doesn't matter what it means; The crowd cheered, and for panderers that's what it's all about.

RLC

Observations From Iraq

Michael Yon, an independent war correspondent in Iraq, makes a couple of interesting and important points:

I've done many missions in 2005 and 2007, in many places in Iraq, along with the Iraqi Army: please believe me when I say that, on the whole, the Iraqi Army is remarkably better in 2007 and far more effective than it was in 2005. By 2007, the Iraqis were doing most of the fighting. And . . . this is very important . . . they see our Army and Marines as serious allies, and in many cases as friends. Please let the potential implications of that sink in.

We now have a large number of American and British officers who can pick up a phone from Washington or London and call an Iraqi officer that he knows well-an Iraqi he has fought along side of-and talk. Same with untold numbers of Sheiks and government officials, most of whom do not deserve the caricatural disdain they get most often from pundits who have never set foot in Iraq. British and American forces have a personal relationship with Iraqi leaders of many stripes. The long-term intangible implications of the betrayal of that trust through the precipitous withdrawal of our troops could be enormous, because they would be the certain first casualties of renewed violence, and selling out the Iraqis who are making an honest-go would make the Bay of Pigs sell-out seem inconsequential. The United States and Great Britain would hang their heads in shame for a century.

Alternately, in an equation in which the outcome is a stable Iraq for which they (Iraqi Police and Army officials) are stewards, the potential benefits are equally enormous. Because if Iraq were to settle down, and then a decade passes and we look back and even our most severe critics cannot deny that Iraq is a better place, a generation of Iraq's most important leaders would have deep personal bonds with their counterparts in America and Great Britain. This could actually happen.

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

Throughout most of 2007, as I've watched General Petraeus' strategy being implemented, I have observed the impact his change in strategy was having on our soldiers, on Iraqi security forces, and most importantly, on Iraqi people including some who were formerly our avowed enemies. I have seen how our own military morphed into something much more agile, and I came to see how American commanders tended to be the most trusted voices in Iraq for many Iraqis.

To be sure, the "Anbar Awakening" and other signs of progress were underway before the massive strategy overhaul occurred, and nobody can track and trace all the factors involved in this fantastically complex war, but one thing was certain: the momentum was shifting in favor of a stable Iraq for the first time. The institutional knowledge reservoir was becoming vast, and success was touted and shared. It may have been true that Americans knew very little about Iraq before the invasion, but it was for certain that American commanders had now developed an intimate understanding of the goings-on. It can be said with confidence that as a group, no non-Iraqis know more about Iraq than the US military.

You can read his entire dispatch at the link.

RLC

The Amazing Monarch

Scientists are beginning to unravel the mystery of how Monarch butterflies manage to navigate thousands of miles across Canada and the U.S. to pine groves in Mexico where they winter. It really is an astonishing feat, made more so by the fact that none of the butterflies which make the trip had ever made it before.

It turns out that these insects have a tiny molecular clock in their brains that works in tandem with molecular light sensors that allows them to use the sun as a kind of compass. The sun's position is constantly changing, of course, which is where the clock comes in. As it cycles through a series of chemical reactions it causes the light sensors to adjust for the changing position of the sun so that the butterflies don't get lost.

This marvelous mechanism is, Darwinians assure us, a product of nothing more than random mutation and natural selection (RM&NS), and no one should doubt the ability of blind, purposeless forces and processes to produce it. If you're skeptical that such prodigies are possible by mere chance you can consult the decision of Judge John Jones in Kitzmiller v. Dover for reassurance.

Now, if they could only explain how RM&NS actually created that clock/compass mechanism in the butterfly's brain in the first place, that would really be something. And while they're at it maybe they can tell us how the Monarch caterpillar completely dissociates into a mush during its pupal stage and then reassembles the pulp into an adult Monarch in the process of metamorphosis. I know I'm supposed to have faith that this is just one of those things that natural selection can accomplish without any intelligent input from a Creator, but even though I squeeze my eyes tight shut and try real hard to believe, I just can't get myself to do it. Maybe I need a therapy session with Judge Jones.

RLC

McCain's Baggage

Despite winning the New Hampshire primary, John McCain is still not popular among Republicans. Ramirez illustrates why:

A lot of conservatives will vote for him if he's the nominee, but very few will be enthusiastic about it.

Who will benefit most among the Republicans if any of the top five decide they can't continue? Which of the remaining candidates will their supporters gravitate toward? It isn't at all clear at this point.

On the Democrat side I would think that Hillary wants Edwards to stay in the race as long as possible because when he gets out, which seems inevitable, his supporters will likely swing to Obama. I don't know that Mrs. Clinton's candidacy, much less her ego, can withstand that.

The next three weeks will tell, probably.

RLC

Huckabee's Tax Plan, etc.

One reason why Mike Huckabee is popular among Republicans is that he's commited to what's called the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax would eliminate both the IRS and the income tax and replace the income tax with a 23% sales tax. Not everyone thinks its a great idea to tax consumption rather than income, but a lot of people do. Steven Landsberg at Slate.com goes so far as to call it brilliant.

For a few minutes last week I thought Huckabee had locked up the GOP nomination. The Washington Times had published a story claiming that Huckabee had said that were he to be president he would push for a constitutional amendment that would eliminate citizenship grants to children born in the U.S. to parents who were here illegally. These "anchor babies" are entitled to all the benefits and services of any other citizen and once they become adults they can sponsor their families to come here legally, a process referred to as chain migration.

There is an injustice in entering the country illegally and then having a child here who, because he/she is an automatic citizen, qualifies for welfare benefits to be paid for by the American taxpayer.

It was thought that Huckabee had promised to try to end this travesty, but the story turned out to be false. Maybe Fred Thompson will pick it up. Whoever does, in the unlikely event that anyone does, will endear himself to conservative voters throughout the country.

RLC

Cage's 4'33''

I don't know which is more ridiculous, dozens of musicians sitting on stage for four and a half minutes doing absolutely nothing or an audience that probably paid $50 a ticket to watch them do nothing applauding them for doing it. Maybe I just don't appreciate good music.

Thanks to Matt for sending along the link.

RLC

Post-Modern Politics

The charismatic Barack Obama, a good archetype of the post-modern candidate whose appeal has everything to do with personal style and charm and almost nothing to do with his ideas about governance, which many who are seduced by him seem to know nothing about, has done the country a service by stripping away the aura of invincibility surrounding the Clintons. In just two weeks Hillary has gone from being thought an inevitable victor to a candidate fighting for her political life.

Republicans should not rejoice, however, even if Hillary's candidacy expires. The fact is she would probably be easier for the Republican nominee to defeat in November and will almost certainly have very short coattails even if she does win. Moreover, she will probably be a better president than Obama who is much further to the left than is Hillary and certainly much more reckless in terms of his foreign policy.

Even so, if Hillary is elected president it will mean that Bill Clinton and his henchmen will be reinstalled in the White House and may even wind up being the de facto president. What this country surely doesn't need is four, or eight, more years of the sort of corruption, scandal, tawdry, amoral behavior from the first couple that we saw in the 90s.

The best outcome would be that neither Clinton nor Obama make it to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in November.

RLC