Evolving Sex

The International Herald Tribune has an interesting article on parthenogenesis in Komodo dragons and other species. Parthenogenesis occurs when an ovum produces offspring without benefit of male fertilization, making the offspring a genetic clone of the mother. In other words, it's a form of virgin birth.

Here's one passage of several from the article which caught my attention:

The big question these virgin births raise is this: If some females can get along without males, why does any species have males? The reason is simple. With virgin birth, hatchlings are simply genetic duplicates of the mother. In a world of clones, there would not be enough variation for populations to adapt. Virgin birth, then, is a great stopgap measure to ensure the survival of a species, but works against it in the long haul.

Ah, so easy. Sexual reproduction is necessary to produce genetic diversity, diversity helps a species survive, therefore sexual reproduction evolved through the blind, purposeless processes of natural selection and genetic mutation. This is what some scientists and philosophers refer to as a wave of the wand explanation. It tells us why sexual reproduction evolved while glossing over the much more intractable question of how such a process evolved.

Think of all the changes that have to occur, most of them simultaneously, in order to produce two different sexes of the same species. The evolution of meiosis and the production of gametes in both males and females (before males and females ever evolved), the means of getting the gametes from the male to the female, the entire complex of reactions which occurs when a male gamete encounters the female ovum allowing the male's DNA to penetrate to the nucleus of the ovum, the synchronization of the two sets of chromosomes, the coordination of embryonic development and the entire panoply of anatomical structures and behaviors which need to evolve in order to facilitate the process, along with the physiological and biochemical adaptations which must also be in place. It's no wonder that evolutionary treatments of sex almost always focus on the advantage that sexual reproduction affords, they almost never address the problem of how sex evolved. The problems are staggeringly difficult.

Consider, too, how rare it is that mutations occur that are beneficial to an organism, much less simultaneous beneficial mutations occurring in the same populations of the proto-sexes. Each of these mutations had to confer a survival advantage even before sexual reproduction was possible. Moreover, since both plants and animals reproduce sexually we can assume that this ability evolved pretty early on in the evolutionary process, so it must have unfolded with comparative rapidity.

Well, maybe it all did happen, but the more one learns about the extremely complex series of events and the sheer number of adaptations that must have occured in order to produce fertilization in all sexual species the more skeptical one becomes that chance and nature could, with no conscious intention, produce such a breathtaking process.

The Darwinian, perhaps, can trace out a long, elaborate hypothetical scheme which results in the emergence of sexual reproduction among protists and conclude that, since it is logically possible that it could have happened that way, that therefore it's plausible that it did happen, and since it's plausible then it's probable that it indeed happened because, after all, here we are, and we're sexual creatures.

But logical possibility is hardly a sufficient condition for plausibility, much less probability. Whether evolution produced sexual reproduction, I don't know, but I am quite certain that if it did, it was not the blind, unguided evolution of the Darwinian materialists. Their story of the evolution of sex is a fairy tale of magic wands and pixie dust.

RLC

Global Swelling

The consensus among scientists today is that the earth's continents have drifted apart over the ages due to the spreading of the sea floor caused by the introduction into the crust of new rock from deep in the earth's mantle. This new rock, the theory goes, is exuded through crevices in the mid-ocean ridges and pushes the continents away from each other. The continents then slide under each other along contact faults in a process called subduction. This returns rock back to the mantle where it's melted.

There is a minority view, however, which holds that continental drift is not a result of sea-floor spreading and subduction but rather is caused by an expanding globe. According to this theory (see video) the earth is inflating like a balloon, and it's this expansion which pushes the tectonic plates(continents)apart. The earth's crust was originally a solid shell, the story goes, and over vast time the planet grew in size forcing the crust to fracture and spread. There are http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanding_earth_theory various hypotheses as to the causes of the expansion, but that it happened the narrator of the video, Neal Adams, is quite convinced:

Wait until the global warming people here about this. They'll be hurling themselves off of bridges.

HT: Jonah @ NRO

RLC

The Russian Bear Is Stirring

Recent statements and provocations by the Russian leadership and military suggest to some that Vladimir Putin wishes to initiate a new cold war with the United States by rebuilding Russia's military to a state of parity with American forces. Strategy Page thinks a rebuild of the Russian military is highly unlikely, however:

The government is making a lot of noise about rebuilding the armed forces, and another Cold War with the U.S., but this is all talk, to make the government appear like it's doing something. The military would need massive amounts of money (over $100 billion a year, for a decade or more) to restore any meaningful amount of military power. Nothing near that amount is forthcoming. The government is trying to get the population stirred up so there is less resistance to the purchase of many expensive warplanes and ships.

A lot of this is necessary because China is buying less and starting to offer their own stuff, often containing stolen Russian military technology, on the world market. China is threatening to offer its copy of the Su-27 (the J-11). Currently, half of Russian weapons export sales are Su-27s. The Chinese ignore Russian complaints about the stolen technology. To keep Russian weapons manufacturers in business, the Russian military has to buy more, to make up for the lost Chinese sales. Western firms are also going after the lucrative Indian arms market, which Russia has dominated for decades. Last year, Russia sold $7 billion worth of weapons overseas, and may have a hard time topping that this year.

In other words, the talk of a new military aggressiveness on the part of the Russians is all bluster. They haven't the resource base or the economic power to sustain the kind of program that would be necessary to catch up. The real problem they pose is that out of resentment toward western superiority they may provide assistance to those, like the Chinese and the Islamists who intend to,and can, hurt us.

RLC

Reforming Education

Sol Stern has an article in City Journal that should be read by everyone pursuing or contemplating a career in education or who cares about the issue of educating our children. Stern breaks education reformers into two camps, the incentivists who want to increase competition and rewards for success and the instructionists who believe that the best way to improve our schools is to impose rigorous curricula K-12.

Stern himself used to be an incentivist and acknowledges that they still dominate the reform movement, but he cites three reasons why he's moving away from it. First, alternatives to failing urban public schools are diminishing. Catholic schools, for example, are closing their doors. In Detroit only one Catholic school is still operating in the city. There's no place else for public school students to go even if they had vouchers and tax incentives to leave the schools they're in.

The second problem is that incentives like vouchers simply haven't won the allegiance of most voters and their proponents cannot compete in referenda into which the NEA can pump money and volunteers that choice advocates simply can't match.

The third reason he's reconsidering his position is Massachusetts:

...where something close to an education miracle has occurred. In the past several years, Massachusetts has improved more than almost every other state on the NAEP tests. In 2007, it scored first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading. The state's average scale scores on all four tests have also improved at far higher rates than most other states have seen over the past 15 years.

The improvement had nothing to do with market incentives. Massachusetts has no vouchers, no tuition tax credits, very few charter schools, and no market incentives for principals and teachers. The state owes its amazing improvement in student performance to a few key former education leaders, including state education board chairman John Silber, assistant commissioner Sandra Stotsky, and board member (and Manhattan Institute fellow) Abigail Thernstrom.

Starting a decade ago, these instructionists pushed the state's board of education to mandate a rigorous curriculum for all grades, created demanding tests linked to the curriculum standards, and insisted that all high school graduates pass a comprehensive exit exam. In its English Language Arts curriculum framework, the board even dared to say that reading instruction in the early grades should include systematic and explicit phonics. Now a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, Stotsky sums up: "The lesson from Massachusetts is that a strong content-based curriculum, together with upgraded certification regulations and teacher licensure tests that require teacher preparation programs to address that content, can be the best recipe for improving students' academic achievement."

In other words, those who have been advocating that schools teach what and how they did two generations ago are being vindicated in, of all places, Massachusetts. It remains now for courts and legislatures to wake up and facilitate the removal from middle and high schools those students whose behavior acts as a drag on the rest of the student population. Combine the academic rigor which our schools used to demand of our students along with the behavioral expectations that once prevailed in our schools and our educational crisis will be largely solved. And it won't cost a dime of taxpayer money.

Stern goes on to say that:

The Massachusetts miracle doesn't prove that a standard curriculum and a focus on effective instruction will always produce academic progress. Nor does the flawed New York City experiment in competition mean that we should cast aside all market incentives in education. But what has transpired in these two places provides an important lesson: education reformers ought to resist unreflective support for elegant-sounding theories, derived from the study of economic activity, that don't produce verifiable results in the classroom. After all, children's lives are at stake.

Read the whole essay at the link. There's a lot of discussion on it at Tuesday's Corner blog at NRO.

RLC

Battling Cancer

Tony Snow, former press secretary to President Bush, talks about his battle with cancer. It's pretty inspirational:

He's an amazing guy.

RLC

Why Do People Believe?

According to a Fox News story Oxford University is going to spend $3.7 million to try to determine why it is that people believe in God. Is belief, the academics wonder, an evolutionary adaptation that conferred upon early man a survival advantage or is it something that we absorb from our environment:

Academics have been given a grant to try to find out whether belief in a deity is a matter of nature or nurture. They will not attempt to solve the question of whether God exists but they will examine evidence to try to prove whether belief in God conferred an evolutionary advantage to mankind.

They will also consider the possibility that faith developed as a by-product of other human characteristics, such as sociability.

I know it will sound presumptuous to suggest, but could it be that people believe in God because essentially there are only two options, belief or nihilism, and most people don't care much for nihilism. Now, it's true, I suppose, that the majority of people don't think this way, but it's really pretty hard to escape the conclusion that if God doesn't exist then life is a pointless exercise in futility and most people want to believe in something that makes their lives matter. Belief that there is a God, in other words, makes much more sense of our existential experience of the world than does belief that there is no God and most people intuitively recognize this even if they aren't able to articulate it.

I seek to defend this claim, by the way, in a paper that I've posted here. Maybe if the Oxford dons checked it out they could save themselves a considerable sum of money and use it instead to buy pints all around at the local pub.

RLC

That's a Problem

Even his supporters can't say what Senator Obama has actually done to qualify him for the presidency. Here's Texas state senator Kirk Watson being interviewed by Chris Matthews:

It matters not that Sen. Obama is all hat and no cattle, as they say in Texas. The ladies swoon at his campaign events, he inspires in the multitude "hope" of "change", and he promises, essentially, to convert a few loaves and fishes into food for everyone. What other qualifications does a president need?

Thanks to Jeff C. for the link.

RLC

Satellite Shootdown

Last night the U.S. Navy shot down an errant spy satellite about the size of a bus which threatened to dump toxic fuel in inhabited areas as it plummeted to earth. It also contained classified technology which the U.S. does not want to fall into the hands of people like the Chinese who have had difficulty obtaining American military technology secrets since the Clinton administration left office.

The shootdown is an impressive feat. The satellite and the kill vehicle collided at a combined speed of 22,000 mph about 130 miles above Earth's surface at 10:50 p.m. EST.

Hot Air has video.

No doubt this success has chagrined those around the world who would like to threaten us with nuclear missiles and also those here in the U.S. who have been for decades deriding the hope that we would one day be able to shoot down ICBMs with missiles. Hitting the satellite is not as difficult as hitting a missile but the fact that we were able to do it at all means we're well on the way to silencing those who say that ballistic missile defense is technologically out of reach.

RLC

Long Life

There's a lot of information in this NYT story, but the key graphs are these:

Living past 90, and living well, may be more than a matter of good genes and good luck. Five behaviors in elderly men are associated not only with living into extreme old age, a new study has found, but also with good health and independent functioning.

The behaviors are abstaining from smoking, weight management, blood pressure control, regular exercise and avoiding diabetes. The study reports that all are significantly correlated with healthy survival after 90.

While it is hardly astonishing that choices like not smoking are associated with longer life, it is significant that these behaviors in the early elderly years - all of them modifiable - so strongly predict survival into extreme old age.

Details can be found at the link. If only science could come up with an easy and painless way to do all of this.

RLC

Fourteen Challenges

This is strange. A BBC article lists fourteen challenges facing humanity in the next several decades, but omits the one challenge that must be met in order for any of the others to have a chance of being realized. Here are the fourteen:

• Make solar energy affordable
• Provide energy from fusion
• Develop carbon sequestration
• Manage the nitrogen cycle
• Provide access to clean water
• Reverse engineer the brain
• Prevent nuclear terror
• Secure cyberspace
• Enhance virtual reality
• Improve urban infrastructure
• Advance health informatics
• Engineer better medicines
• Advance personalised learning
• Explore natural frontiers

Some of these don't strike me as particularly urgent (e.g. advancing personalized learning), but in any event, none of them will be possible at all unless the West neutralizes the menace posed by radical Islam. Islamic imperialism is the paramount threat to the Western world and it needs to be defeated in each of three domains: the military battlefield, cyberspace, and the realm of ideas. If this challenge is not met, and it doesn't seem as if we're even addressing the third domain, none of the others in the list is going to matter much.

It's curious that this paramount and crucial challenge would be omitted from consideration by the contributors to the BBC's list. Perhaps the reason is that were it included it would be seen as at least a partial affirmation of the worldview of George W. Bush and that would be unacceptable company for sophisticated people to place themselves in.

RLC

Religion of Peace

The Danish cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard, responsible for this cartoon was targeted for death by Danish Muslims.

Police have made five arrests in the case. No doubt Islamists around the world will be apoplectic that the Danish police prevented the execution of the infidel cartoonist.

These kinds of people know deep down that they cannot prevail in a contest of ideas so they resort to intimidation, fear, and terror to protect their religion. Maybe someday a light will go off in their head, and they'll realize that if their beliefs by themselves have no persuasive power then perhaps there's something terribly wrong with their beliefs.

Or maybe the light will never go off. After all, Muslims have been living like this since the 7th century, why should we think they'll change now?

RLC

No Pride

Hillary's campaign has been trying to make a mountain out of a molehill by accusing Obama of using words plagiarized from Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick in his speeches. The charge, in my opinion, simply reveals the level of desperation of the Clinton campaign.

If they want to hit Obama for something legitimate, however, they could do well to chastise his wife Michelle for her fatuous remark yesterday that for the first time in her adult life she's proud of her country. It's hard to believe that any intelligent person not warped by left-wing bitterness could seriously make this remark, but it does tell us a lot about the Obamas and the left in general. Notice that when she utters this comment people applaud her. It's pretty depressing:

Obama
by krs601

Mrs. Obama has been an adult for almost thirty years. During that time the U.S. has brought an end to the cold war, catalyzed the fall of the Berlin wall, rescued Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo from genocide, led the world in delivering aid to the victims of the Christmas tsunami in Indonesia two years ago (as well as many lesser disasters), worked persistently to maintain peace in Israel and Palestine, done more to help the world's poor in Africa than any nation in history, liberated 25 million Muslims from the terror of the Taliban in Afghanistan, undertaken to build Iraq into a modern nation and a haven from Islamic extremism, improved the lot of many of the poor in the Western hemisphere through free trade agreements with our southern neighbors, continued to provide more opportunity for African-Americans than any country in the world (Mrs. Obama has herself graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law school), and probably lots else that I can't think of at the moment.

Perhaps the Obamas don't take any pride in these national accomplishments, perhaps the only thing that makes them proud is that they have a shot at political power, but the rest of us surely can be proud of what this country has achieved, and we can show it by rejecting at the ballot box those like the Obamas who hold those accomplishments in contempt.

Here's some advice for the media: At the next opportunity somebody please ask Senator Obama if he feels as his wife does or if he disagrees with the implication of her remark that there's nothing about the America of the last twenty five years of which to be proud.

HT: Michelle Malkin

RLC

At Last

After 50 years of murderous, oppressive rule, 81 year-old Fidel Castro is finally relinquishing power in Cuba. His brother Raul, 76, is taking over, but he will probably not last more than a couple of years so maybe the long-suffering people of Cuba can finally catch a glimpse of shore after their long ordeal at sea.

During the course of his dictatorship Castro executed tens of thousands of political opponents and tortured and imprisoned thousands more. It's ironic that our "progressive" media have given him a pass on these crimes, but have been apoplectic over our imprisonment of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. There are thousands of prisoners in Cuba who would give anything to be transferred to that American facility, which they would doubtless regard as a tropical paradise compared to their current accomodations, but the plight of these wretched people is not something the liberal media troubles itself over. It makes one wonder about the sincerity of their concern for human rights.

To get an idea of what life has been like for political opponents of Castro read Jeff Jacoby's Boston Globe essay on Oscar Biscet or, if you have time, read Armando Valladares' horrifying account of his suffering in Castro's prisons in Against All Hope.

RLC

Curious Vote

The Senate voted last Wednesday to ban waterboarding as a means of interrogation of detainees in the war on terror. The vote was 51 to 45 and went pretty much along party lines, but the strange thing is that one of the chief opponents of waterboarding voted against the ban. Senator John McCain, perhaps feeling the heat from conservatives, voted against the position he has held for decades. Very curious. His sidekick Senator Lindsey Graham did not vote. Nor did Senators Clinton or Obama.

Our thoughts on the subject of torture can be found by using our search function. Just type the word "torture" in the text box or click on "The NAE on Torture" in the Hall of Fame on the left side of this page.

RLC

The New Cigarette

Another study has shown a link between cell-phone use and health problems:

An Israeli scientist, Dr. Siegal Sadetzki, has found a link between cell phone usage and the development of tumors. Dr. Sadetzki, a physician, epidemiologist and lecturer at Tel Aviv University, published the results of a study recently in the American Journal of Epidemiology, in which she and her colleagues found that heavy cell phone users were subject to a higher risk of benign and malignant tumors of the salivary gland.

Those who used a cell phone heavily on the side of the head where the tumor developed were found to have an increased risk of about 50% for developing a tumor of the main salivary gland (parotid), compared to those who did not use cell phones.

The rest of the article can be read at the link. Are cell-phones the new cigarette - an addictive pleasure that'll wind up shortening your life? I'm hoping that restaurants will soon have cell-free sections just like they have smoke-free areas. I know I'll sound like a curmudgeon, but it's an annoyance when someone across the room carries on a phone conversation at an amplitude ten decibels higher than were they talking to the person sitting across the table from them. I think I'd almost rather be assaulted by cigarette smoke.

RLC

Re: Endocrine Disruptors

A couple of weeks ago we did a post on some research involving the chemical BPA found in plastic bottles. The studies showed that BPA leaches out of the plastic when exposed to high temperatures and that it can interfere with the endocrine system of test animals. The implications for humans are, of course, important since these bottles are used to contain all sorts of liquids that people consume.

A reader who works for a company that makes these plastics has written in response to the post and her very well-informed thoughts are posted on our Feedback page.

RLC

The Three Worst

Yesterday we posted a piece on the ten best presidents in American history. Ari Kauffman at The American Thinker opines on who he thinks are the three worst. Hint: Two of them served since 1960.

RLC

Chauncey Obama

Bob Gorrell comments on the politics of saying nothing with Barackian panache:

RLC

More on Muggy's Demise

The assassination in Damascus of the mass murderer Imad Mughniyeh (even his name is ugly) continues to ramify. DEBKAfile reports on a number of developments including a theory being put forth in the West that the hit was really a charade:

An intriguing conspiracy theory emanating unexpectedly from Western sources was suggested by the veteran CNN correspondent Jim Clancy. In his view, Mughniyeh, the consummate master of deception, may still be alive. Others took the theory further and suggested his death may have been fabricated to provide Iran, Syria and Hizballah with a strong casus belli to attack Israel without further delay, and so repeat the Arabs' Yom Kippur success 35 years ago in catching Israel unawares.

Others say Mughniyeh was indeed killed and that whoever did it did more damage than has been heretofore reported:

Not only was Mughniyeh killed by the bomb planted in his car but also some of his bodyguards and senior Hizballah operatives. Syria's secret services have fallen down completely in guarding Iranian officials and officers resident or visiting their capital.

There's much more at the link.

RLC

Presidents' Day Ten Best

On this Presidents' Day we feature a Harris poll of Americans which produced a ranking of the top ten presidents in American history. The list has some surprises. Seven of the ten are understandable, I suppose, but John Kennedy at #4, and Bill Clinton at #6 are hard to justify. What did either man do to rate so high? Kennedy served for less than three years, pretty much punted on civil rights, got us into Vietnam, and betrayed the Cubans at the Bay of Pigs.

It's true that he got the Soviets to remove their missiles from Cuba, but only by removing ours from Turkey. In other words, the Soviets actually won the showdown over the "Cuban Missile Crisis". It's hard to think of any accomplishments JFK may have had to offset these liabilities unless one counts managing to carry on an affair with Marilyn Monroe as an achievement worthy of placing him among America's greatest presidents.

Bill Clinton's rank is equally hard to fathom. His only accomplishment as president was to surf along on the crest of an economic boom that was really the result of Reagan's tax policy. He did sign welfare reform, but this was a GOP initiative, not his. Meanwhile, his laxity toward world terrorism, his refusal to support our soldiers in Mogudishu, and his reluctance to enforce the 1991 cease-fire agreement with Saddam Hussein set the stage for 9/11. Clinton served two terms, but will be remembered primarily for his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky and an administration that limped from one crisis of their own making to another, squandering the opportunity history offered him to achieve genuine greatness.

The third surprise is that George Bush is ranked #10. I'm surprised he made the list at all, given the popular perception of the man as an utter failure, but, as I've argued before on Viewpoint (Do a search for the phrase "50 million people" to find some of our previous posts), I think he deserves to be ranked even higher, certainly above Clinton and JFK. His administration has been filled with achievements of historical significance.

He has, for example, secured the liberation of 50 million people from oppression in Afghanistan and Iraq, induced several terrorist states to give up, or at least suspend, their plans to develop nuclear weapons, successfully (so far) prevented another terrorist attack on our soil, presided over an economic recovery in very difficult circumstances (inheriting a recession, 9/11, and several very costly natural disasters), and has appointed two extremely competent jurists to the Supreme Court.

He has also done more to relieve the suffering of the poor in Africa than any president in history and has done more to put minorities and women in positions of power than any president before him. He has accomplished all this despite constant, vicious calumnies from his political opponents without ever returning their fire in kind. He has shown far more grace, virtue and class than have the carping, vitriolic, ankle-biters who, out of sheer hatred, attack every move he has made.

Few presidents have accomplished even a fraction of what George Bush has achieved, especially in the face of such relentless and withering opposition, and surely his predecessor did not. I'm not a historian, but given what he has achieved, I believe he deserves to be ranked in the top three on the Harris list. I also believe that a couple of decades from now fair-minded historians who don't have an ideological axe to grind will put him there.

RLC

Governor Barkley

Charles Barkley, the former NBA star, tells CNN's Wolf Blitzer that he's pro-choice, pro-gay marriage and that he's running for governor of Alabama in 2014. Good luck. I'm sure those will be very popular positions among the Alabaman electorate.

Mr. Barkley also calls Christians hypocrites for opposing abortion and gay marriage. The word conservative, he attests, makes him sick in his tummy. After all, Christians, according to Mr. Barkley, aren't supposed to judge others.

fake christians
by luvnews

Well, this is as wrong-headed an opinion as it is widespread. Set aside that Mr. Barkley is doing to Christians and conservatives exactly what he condemns them for doing, he's just wrong about Christians violating their creed when they pass judgment on the moral conduct of others. In fact, Christians are among the few groups of people who have any basis at all for making moral judgments.

If people do wrong why is it wrong to point that out? Indeed, it's a sign of a morally vigorous society that it's people recognize the difference between right and wrong, and it's a symptom of moral decrepitude if they cannot.

There's nothing wrong with making moral judgments. What is wrong is to make those judgments without knowing or caring about the relevant facts. That's judgmentalism and that's what Christians are proscribed from doing, but there's no reason to think that opposition to abortion or gay marriage is due to an ignorance of the critical facts.

To say that because someone is a Christian they shouldn't assess the conduct of others is absurd. It would mean that Christians could never condemn the holocaust or slavery or child abuse or anything else. Christians might be mistaken in their opposition to abortion and gay marriage, but Barkley doesn't offer any reason for thinking that they are. He only suggests that they're hypocrites for doing so, and he leaves us with the impression that his definition of a hypocrite is someone who disagrees with him.

It seems that Barkley is not himself a Christian, I don't know, but if that is so, I wonder on what grounds he bases his own belief that judging other people's behavior is wrong. If he's not a theist of some sort then his own judgments are rooted in nothing other than his subjective likes and dislikes. A non-theist, as we have pointed out at this site on numerous occasions, has no grounds whatsoever for saying that anything anyone does is wrong in a moral sense. So when Barkley criticizes Christians and conservatives all he's saying is that they make him sick because they don't hold the same views he does, which is a pretty silly position.

In a world without God there is no moral right and wrong. There are only things one likes and things one doesn't. There are things which work and things which don't. Whatever one has the power to do one can do and nothing one does is "wrong."

It is only the theist, or in the context of the present discussion, the Christian, who has any moral constraints placed upon his will and his power. Those constraints are placed there by God who desires not that we refrain from judging but that we always judge with justice and compassion. There are no such constraints acting in the lives of those who do not believe that they're obligated to God or anything else. For them, if they were consistent, the only ethic would be might makes right.

But consistency is probably not something Charles Barkley worries himself about very much. Nor can he afford to. He aspires, after all, to be a politician.

RLC

Saving Conservatism

Joe Carter is doing a series of posts on how to save the conservative movement in America, and he says a lot of good stuff. The first of the four posts on the topic can be read here and the others can be found here, here,and here.

If you're interested in politics, and especially if you incline toward conservative politics, you'll find Carter's suggestions very interesting.

RLC

Just Not Serious

Last night at midnight the Protect America Act expired. The PAA enabled us to maintain surveillance of terrorists in foreign countries who were using our communications networks. A 2 to 1 bipartisan consensus in the Senate agreed that it was crucial to our national security that it be renewed and voted to do so last week. President Bush thought it so important that he yielded on a number of points that Democrat senators insisted on in order to get their votes. All that was left was for the House of Representatives to follow suit. Our national security depended upon it.

What the security of your children and mine were subordinated to, however, were Nancy Pelosi's vacation plans. Ms Pelosi refused to bring the bill to the floor where it would have passed overwhelmingly. Instead she adjourned the House for a week's vacation.

As a result there are gaping holes as of midnight last night in our ability to monitor the machinations of those who wish to perpetrate another 9/11. Ms Pelosi demonstrates yet again why it is imperative that Democrats not be entrusted with our national security. They're just not serious about it. Indeed, the Democrats spent hours of the people's time this week harrasing former administration officials over a matter that nobody but the zealots at Moveon.org cares about (the firing of Department of Justice attorneys) and hounding a major league baseball pitcher over allegations that he used steroids, but to enhance the safety of our children the House leadership could not find a few extra minutes to take a crucial vote before running out to begin their tax-payer funded vacations.

Andrew McCarthy explains this abrogation of responsibility at NRO.

One important point that McCarthy doesn't mention is that:

[O]ne of the signal virtues of the PAA is the fact that it provides liability protection to private companies, like telecoms, who cooperate with the government and aid surveillance efforts. Companies like AT&T already face multibillion dollar lawsuits from leftist activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who charge that the companies broke the law by assisting government efforts to prevent terrorist attack. With the expiration of the PAA, these companies will lose their legal protections. In the current litigious climate, it is more than likely that they will simply stop aiding the government in its intelligence work....[T]he most likely consequence of the PAA's lapse is that, starting this Saturday, the country will be more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

How do these people keep getting elected to public office?

RLC

Police Brutality

You've no doubt by now caught wind of the firestorm of outrage sweeping the nation over the story out of Florida of an unbelievable act of police brutality and racism. Apparently a white male police officer grabbed the wheelchair of a black female quadriplegic, dumped her out of the chair onto the floor, and then frisked her while she lay helpless on the lineoleum. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are reportedly enroute to Florida to lead massive protest demonstrations against the insidious racism underlying this atrocity and others like it.

You haven't heard about any of this, you say? Well, here's the video:

Oops. I got the races and genders mixed up. I guess maybe that's why you haven't heard anything from Jesse and Al.

RLC

How to Destroy America

Several years ago former Colorado governor Richard Lamm gave a speech on his plan to destroy America. It's worth revisiting today. He begins this way:

I have a secret plan to destroy America. If you believe, as many do, that America is too smug, too white bread, too self-satisfied, too rich, let's destroy America. It is not that hard to do. History shows that nations are more fragile than their citizens think. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and they all fall, and that "an autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide." Here is my plan:

1. We must first make America a bilingual-bicultural country. History shows, in my opinion, that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual. One scholar, Seymour Martin Lipset, put it this way: "The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension and tragedy. Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, Lebanon all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with its Basques, Bretons and Corsicans."

2. I would then invent "multiculturalism" and encourage immigrants to maintain their own culture. I would make it an article of belief that all cultures are equal: that there are no cultural differences that are important. I would declare it an article of faith that the black and Hispanic dropout rate is only due to prejudice and discrimination by the majority. Every other explanation is out-of-bounds.

There are eight points altogether. You can read the rest of them at Michelle's.

RLC

The Conscious Mind

David Chalmers, one of the foremost researchers on the nature of consciousness, writes in his book, The Conscious Mind, that:

"Consciousness is a surprising feature of our universe. Our grounds for belief in consciousness derive solely from our experience of it. Even if we know every last detail about the physics of the universe-the configuration, causation, and evolution among all the fields and particles in the spatial temporal manifold-that information would not lead us to postulate the existence of conscious experience. My knowledge of consciousness in the first instance comes from my own case, not from any external observation. It is my first-person experience of consciousness that forces the problem on me." (pp. 101,102)

What Chalmers is saying is that the materialist view that everything that exists can be reduced to matter and energy still leaves consciousness unexplained. No matter how far we reduce the processes of the brain to their constituent chemicals and reactions we can find nothing that accounts for self-awareness or sensations like greenness. Nor can we begin to explain how a feeling like guilt, or a belief, or an intention could be described in terms of chemical processes occuring in neurons.

Consciousness seems to be sui generis, unique. There's nothing else like it in the universe, and what it is and how it could have evolved are complete mysteries.

RLC

The Other War

For those readers interested in how progress in Afghanistan stands at the moment an essay in The New York Post by Ann Marlowe provides an excellent overview.

The short version is that things are much better than many media reports would have us believe, but that should come as no surprise.

RLC

Who Was Imad Mugniyeh?

Terrorism expert Kenneth Timmerman is interviewed at FrontPage mag on the significance of the recent assassination of Imad Mugniyeh. In the course of the interview we learn something of who this man was and why his death leaves the earth a safer place. Here are some highlights from the interview:

Before 9/11, Mugniyeh was the world's most wanted terrorist, for the simple reason that he had killed more Americans than anyone else. The CIA has said he was behind the April 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 63 people. Later that year, he orchestrated the bombing of a U.S. military barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. Marines. The very next year, he kidnapped, tortured, and murdered the CIA station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, and carried out another attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut. In 1985, he hijacked TWA flight 847 in a famous standoff in Beirut, where he and his accomplices brutally murdered U.S. Navy diver Robbie Stethem and threw his body out onto the tarmac. He kidnapped reporter Terry Anderson and others in Lebanon, then moved to Argentina in the 1990s, car-bombing the Israeli embassy there in 1992 and the AMIA Jewish center in 1994. And that's just his more famous attacks.

There is absolutely no doubt that Mugniyeh and his masters in Iran were directly and materially involved in the 9/11 plot.

First, there is the evidence discovered very late in the day by the 9/11 Commission, which I describe in detail in Countdown to Crisis. What is astonishing is that this information has not been widely publicized. I spoke again just yesterday with one of the top investigators involved in reviewing the highly-classified U.S. intelligence reports on Mugniyeh's involvement in convoying 9/11 hijackers in and out of Iran prior to 9/11. He was astonished when I told him that few people were yet aware of this. "That's like saying you didn't know that Jesse James was a crook," he said.

The Iranians were terrified on the day of 9/11 and for the next month that the United States would "connect the dots" and discover their involvement to the 9/11 plot, as I reported in Countdown to Crisis.

Senior Iranian government officials were making desperate phone calls to relatives in the United States, asking them to rent apartments for family members so they could get out of Tehran before what they assumed would be a massive retaliatory U.S. military strike.

Of course, as we know now, that U.S. retaliatory strike never occurred - because the CIA and other U.S. government agencies succeeded in burying the information they had collected (or the case of our technical agencies, that they had siphoned up).

I believe when Americans realize the full extent of the Iranian government involvement in the 9/11 plot, they will demand action from their president - no matter what party affiliation that president may have.

You can read the rest of the interview at the link.

RLC

Your Rebate Check

President Bush signed the bill yesterday that will start rebate checks flowing in May. How much can you expect to get?

Singles earning $3,000-$75,000: $300-$600; partial rebates for singles earning up to $87,000.

Couples earning less than $150,000: $1,200; partial rebates for couples earning up to $174,000.

Parents will receive an additional $300 per child.

Spend it wisely.

RLC

Being There

A lot of people are remarking how Barack Obama has become the Chauncey Gardener of American politics. Chauncey Gardener was the character played by Peter Sellars in the 1979 movie Being There. Gardener was a complete naif, somewhat dim and totally innocent. It's not these traits, however, which invite the comparison to Obama, but rather the fact that in the movie Gardener finds himself, for a number of reasons, in the public spotlight, and every time he opens his mouth, no matter how vacuous or irrelevant whatever comes out may be, the public goes wild with admiration for his wisdom and insight. Chauncey can say nothing that is not taken by his listeners as profound and trenchant. At the end of the movie Gardener even walks on water.

This is exactly parallel to the Obama phenomenon, and it must be driving Hillary's people nuts. Indeed, the movie was based on a novel by Jerzy Kosinski whose purpose was to highlight the foolish way people eagerly accept whatever the media and our political figures serve up, no matter how inane. Obama gives speeches that cause people to swoon, but when one digs through the words there's nothing there other than platitudes, political cliches and resounding nullities. Obama can speak for twenty minutes and say nothing, but he says it so seductively that everyone in his audience leaves the room determined to vote for him.

Being There is a funny movie and with the ascendancy of "Chauncey" Obama you might wish to watch it. Unless Obama starts to put some content into his speeches you'll probably hear it referred to more than once in the coming months.

RLC

Refusing to Protect a Hero

Hot Air asks the right question, which I will paraphrase: Why, in a country that is so compassionate that we open our hospital doors to illegal aliens who need emergency care and provide all manner of other services for those who are here illegally, can we not find it within ourselves to fund emergency protection for a genuine hero in the war against terrorism who is (was) here in this country legally?

The ultimate disgrace is that because the United States would not finance her security, Hirsi Ali has been forced to turn to .... France, and the French, if you can believe it, may even provide it. The shame of it all.

To learn more about who Hirsi Ali is click on our search button and type her name in the search field.

RLC

Another Killer Sent to Allah

It took twenty five years but another terrorist leader and vicious killer has been dispatched to Allah to receive whatever reward Allah dispenses to bloodthirsty thugs:

Imad Mughniyeh, a senior but shadowy Hezbollah commander accused by the United States and Israel of masterminding suicide bombings, hijackings and hostage-taking that spanned 25 years, was killed by a car bomb in the Syrian capital of Damascus, the Shiite Muslim group and other officials said Wednesday.

Hezbollah accused Israel of carrying out the attack on Mughniyeh. A spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Mark Regev, said Olmert's office had no comment.

The elusiveness of Mughniyeh, the target of several assassination attempts and kidnappings by the United States and Israel, rivaled only that of Osama bin Laden and stretched over many more years. Until Sept. 11, 2001, the attacks for which the United States blamed him represented some of the deadliest strikes against Americans. Along with bin Laden, he was included on the list of 22 "most wanted terrorists" released by President Bush a month after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Although Hezbollah has always denied a role, the United States said he orchestrated two bombings of the U.S. embassy in Beirut -- in 1983 and 1984 -- killing 72 people, including the CIA's then top Middle East expert, Robert Ames. Even more devastating were the suicide truck bombings organized against U.S. Marines and French paratroopers in Beirut in October 1983. Together, those attacks killed 300 men.

Israel accused Mughniyeh, 45, of masterminding the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires that killed 87 people and of a role in a 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in the Argentine capital that killed 28. He was wanted by the authorities there.

See Hot Air for more on Mughniyeh. Some think his killing was an inside job.

RLC

Of Pro Bowls and Nematodes

Mike Metzger at The Clapham Commentary asks why no one really watches the NFL's Pro Bowl. He suggests that it's because it's not a competitive event and therefore there's little interest in it. He uses this as context for stitching a silver lining into the dark cloud of the exclusion of religious ideas from university campuses. Putting the best face on this sad phenomenon he suggests that it may be a good thing that universities are attempting to create a monopoly for materialist explanations of life and the world by banishing all competitors. Monopolies, Metzger notes, are not competitive and, like the Pro Bowl, there's little interest generated by them.

I think there's merit to this view, but I'd like to look at his idea from a slightly different angle. The Pro Bowl is not competitive because it doesn't mean anything. Nothing comes of it. This I think is the fundamental problem for the materialist hegemony on campus.

Materialism, the belief that matter is all there is, strips life of any real meaning. Nothing comes of it. If all we are is a pile of atoms then death is the complete and utter end of our existence, and there's nothing about life that makes it in any way purposeful. When people realize this, when they realize that only through the categories of traditional religion can there be any real meaning to their lives, then it won't matter whether materialism is the only metaphysics on offer on campus. It will be rejected root and branch by those looking for something to make their existence, their work, and their loves significant. And perhaps they will then see that significance can only be achieved if physical death is not the end of our being. If it were, then, sub specie aeternitatis (as Spinoza would say), our lives really would be no more meaningful than the life of a nematode.

Thanks to Byron for the tip on Metzger's essay.

RLC

Quitters Never Win

A diary belonging to a top al Qaeda leader was recently seized by US forces in Balad and a communiqu� from al Qaeda in Iraq's leader was intercepted by US intelligence. Together they paint a bleak picture of the terror groups' ability to conduct operations in former strongholds.

The diary was found during a raid on a safe house in Balad in early November. It was written by Abu Tariq, the emir, or leader, of the region near the city of Balad in northern Salahadin province. Tariq's diary meticulously documents the terror group's decline, the desertion of its fighters, and logistical problems incurred in the wake of the surge. The diary is also an intelligence coup for US forces, as Tariq names current members of the groups and companies and individuals used in al Qaeda's support network in the region.

You can read some of what was in the diary at The Fourth Rail.

There's a lesson in the way things have gone in Iraq since last summer. When things looked bad last spring a lot of people were calling for us to pull out, including some Republicans. A withdrawal then would have been a calamity. The lesson is that quitters never win, and winnners never quit. It's a lesson many of our politicians could learn from our military and our President.

RLC

Admiring Evil

Here's a pic taken from a Fox news clip that briefly showed an Obama campaign office. Notice anything odd? Anything that would tell you something about the sort of people who find Obama's candidacy the fulfillment of their dreams and hopes?

HT: Hot Air

If you're over forty you'll recognize the poster on the wall as bearing the image of Che Guevara, one of the most murderous of the communist revolutionaries to have plagued the Western hemisphere in the 20th century, but a man who nevertheless achieved iconic status among the left simply because he was a "revolutionary".

Eugene Volokh describes the man whose image adorns the walls of these Obama supporters:

Recent books by Humberto Fontova and Alvaro Vargas Llosa describe the real Che, and will hopefully cut down the number of his admirers. In those accounts we learn that:

1. Che was responsible for the execution of thousands of political prisoners in Cuba (most of them purely for their opposition to Castro's communist policies, or for no reason at all).

2. Che enjoyed torturing and abusing the prisoners, including children.

3. Che was instrumental in setting up the Castro regime's massive forced labor camps and secret police apparatus.

4. Che tried to organize campaigns of terrorism against civilians in the US and elsewhere (though he largely failed in these efforts).

5. Far from being merely a Third World nationalist or pragmatic leftist, he was a committed, hard-line Stalinist, even going so far as to call himself "Stalin II" early in his career.

However, as Vargas Llosa points out in a New Republic article, Che was no uncritical admirer of the Soviet Union. To the contrary, he thought the Soviets had not taken communist totalitarianism far enough. In his travels through the Soviet bloc, Che was, by his own account, most impressed with North Korea - not coincidentally also the most oppressively totalitarian of all communist states at the time. Later, as Vargas notes, he criticized the Soviets for giving the private sector too much scope, and for their unwillingness to take even greater risks of touching off a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

As Fontova points out, during the 1960s alone, the regime Che helped set up executed over 100,000 people, and incarcerated some 350,000 political prisoners out of a Cuban population that numbered only 6.3 million in 1960 (for more detailed figures, see the chapter on Cuba in the thorough Black Book of Communism). Undoubtedly, there would have been even more executions and political prisoners if not for the fact that so many Cubans were able to flee to the nearby United States.

It would be unthinkable, today, for hip college students to wear T-shirts praising a functionary from a right-wing authoritarian military regime, even though few if any such governments committed crimes on the same scale as Castro's. One small step towards putting the crimes of communism in proper perspective would be to finally consign Che to the ignominy he so richly deserves.

This is the man these Obama workers wish to honor. What does that tell us about what they see in Obama? What conclusions would we draw about John McCain if people who worked on his behalf had posters of David Duke or Adolf Hitler on their office walls?

RLC

Another Sharia Outrage

Iranian Muslims commit another atrocity and outrage against justice:

Two sisters - identified only as Zohreh and Azar - have been convicted of adultery in Iran. They have now been sentenced to be stoned to death.

Adultery is a crime punishable by death in the Islamic Republic of Iran, in accordance with the canons of Islamic Sharia law. The Iranian Supreme Court has upheld the stoning sentence.

As horrifying as this is here's the paragraph that reveals the depth of the depravity of Iranian system of Islamic justice:

Zohreh and Azar have already received 99 lashes for "illegal relations." Yet they were tried again for the same crime, and convicted of adultery on the evidence of videotape that showed them in the presence of other men while their husbands were absent. The video does not show either of them engaging in any sexual activity at all (emphasis mine).

Their crime is non-existent, their trials a miscarriage of justice, and their sentencing a barbarity. All those who believe in human rights and human dignity should protest against this sentence.

But, the article goes on to note, thus far the American left in general, and feminists in particular, even those who promote feminist concerns globally, have remained silent about this case, as they have with others like it. Now, whether they've actually been mute in this instance, I cannot say. I certainly haven't seen anything about it in the news or on the left-wing websites I sometimes visit. If the left has suddenly lost its voice then maybe it's just a temporary condition, but surely if something as savage as this had happened in Israel they would have been in immediate full-throated fury. Why does there seem to be a reluctance on the left to speak out against the brutality perpetrated against women in the Arab/Islamic world?

I think that perhaps there are several reasons:

• The worse the rest of the world appears the better American society looks by comparison. This is unacceptably incompatible with much of leftist ideology which teaches that America and American capitalism is the source of most of the evil in the world.
• The left doesn't want to say anything that would incite or justify American hostility toward others because they're afraid it may contribute to a bellicosity which might lead to war.
• To condemn Iranian society would implicitly conflict with the cultural relativism accepted on the left which holds as a fundamental axiom that all cultures are equally noble.

So, rather than risk making American society and culture look superior to another or risk weakening the reluctance among the American people to engage in another conflict in the Middle East, they simply set aside their principles concerning human dignity and human rights and tacitly acknowledge that those principles are superficially, and tendentiously, held.

RLC

Dreadfully Sorry

Keith Olbermann apologizes to the Clintons on behalf of MSNBC for David Shuster's intemperate vulgarism equating Chelsea Clinton to a hooker, suggesting that she's being "pimped out" by the Clinton campaign. Unfortunately, Olbermann is not the best person at the network to issue apologies for the use by others of this indelicate colloquialism. Olbermann Watch puts together the following video of Olbermann's apology remixed with some of his own offensive remarks to show us why he's got his own problems with polite speech:

I wonder if Olby or MSNBC would have been "dreadfully sorry" had Shuster made his ill-considered comment in reference to one of the Bush daughters.

Anyway, while we're at it wasn't it another NBC reporter, Erin Burnett, who called President Bush a monkey? NBC must be a real class outfit.

RLC

Darwin Day Observance

Today is Darwin Day (b. 2/12/1809) and rather than run about in the woods naked or whatever it is the humanists do on Darwin Day we thought we'd observe the occasion by passing along this video. It features a CGI of the cellular machinery that "chaperones" recently synthesized polypeptides into the golgi bodies where they're folded into the characteristic shape of the protein.

Keep in mind that all of this illustrates just a tiny fraction of the breath-taking complexity of the cell which, the Darwinists would have us believe, all evolved through blind, purposeless serendipity without the benefit of intelligent input.

HT: Telic Thoughts

Happy Darwin Day,

RLC

Rumors of a Terrorist's Death

Rumors abound that the American terrorist Adam Gadahn, who has made several propaganda videotapes for al Qaeda, was killed recently in an airstrike in Pakistan that also took the life of senior al Qaeda leader Abu Laith al Libi. Gadahn's death has not been confirmed and the military claims no knowledge of it, but he was believed to have been in the area that was attacked and has been missing since the strike.

There's much more on Gadahn, his role in al Qaeda, and the reasons for thinking he may have been killed here. It's sad that of all the Americans who have been killed in this terrible conflict the Islamists have declared against us, perhaps the only one whose death would not be mourned by his countrymen is Gadahn's.

RLC

Declaration Against Genocide

The folks at the David Horowitz Freedom Center have crafted a Declaration Against Genocide that will serve as an invitation to campus groups around the country to stand against those who practice and threaten genocide everywhere it is found around the globe:

In describing the objectives of the Declaration, David Horowitz, President of the Freedom Center, says: "We are asking all campus groups to repudiate the genocidal passage in the Islamic Hadith which reads: 'The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: "The time [of judgment] will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!"'"

Horowitz continues: "We are also asking all campus groups, including the Muslim Students Association, to condemn the Hamas Charter which says: 'Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.' Signers of the Declaration will also be asked to repudiate the Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has said 'The accomplishment of a world without America and Israel is both possible and feasible,' and Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah, who called the Jews 'a cancer which is liable to spread again at any moment,' and has said, 'If the Jews 'all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.' These are hateful doctrines that threaten the lives not only of Jews, but of all Americans."

In addition to condemning the genocidal agenda of these leaders and organizations, the Declaration calls on campus groups to affirm "the freedom of the individual conscience and the right to change religions or have no religion at all; the equal dignity of men and women; and the right of all people to live free from violence, intimidation and coercion."

One might think that politically active students would jump at the opportunity to endorse such a document, but Horowitz is not optimistic:

"Although a Declaration Against Genocide should be seen as a document with universal appeal," Horowitz notes, "a coalition of groups with ties to the Islamo-fascist jihad are bound to protest this effort. Our goal is to test universities' claims that they support religious and ethnic tolerance, and to challenge the campus left, which consistently overlooks statements by Islamic radicals which are nothing less than an invitation to mass murder."

This is [also] a golden opportunity for Muslim groups who profess moderation to demonstrate their sincerity and willingness to confront the jihadists, and for non-Muslim groups to stand with them against the depredations of genocidal Islamic terror. It will also be interesting - and highly illuminating - to see which groups refuse to endorse the Declaration.

The secular left's opposition to genocide is most incandescent when mass murder is inflicted by white capitalists (which is historically rare)on third world poor. It cools when the murderous threats, and genocide itself, are perpetrated by anyone else, especially if they are perpetrated by Arabs against Jews. Indeed, threats against Israel by Muslim nations have heretofore elicited little more than yawns from many of those on our campuses who claim to be champions of human rights.

But maybe I'm reading this all wrong. Maybe thousands of leftist students in universities across the land will enthusiastically affix their signatures to this document and condemn those writings and voices which encourage and condone mass murder against Jews. We'll see, but I'm not going to bet dinner on it.

RLC

Mortal Peril

Rachel Neuwirth at the American Thinker writes a somewhat lengthy but critically important warning to Jews everywhere. They are, she argues, in mortal danger and need to wake up before it's too late.

Read Neuwirth's piece to find out why.

RLC

Nothing Buttery

The debate between materialistic monists and substance dualists regarding the nature of the mind/brain relationship continues apace. Materialism is the view that all there is to us is matter. There is no mind. Mind is to the brain, for the materialist, what digestion is to the stomach. It's just a word we use to describe the function of the brain. Substance dualism, on the other hand, holds that there is, as part of us, a mental substance that is not reducible to matter or brain and which corresponds to what we call mind.

With this in mind (forgive me) Michael Engor addresses the surprising claim made by Yale neurologist Steven Novella that materialism has been proven true by research:

Consider this: if the mind arises entirely from the brain, materialism predicts that there must be a specific material cause for each mental state. That is, a specific mental state must be a specific brain state, nothing more or less. For example, if I am thinking "the White House is in Washington, D.C.", there must be a specific arrangement of molecules and neurons and action potentials in my brain that are the thought itself. In the materialistic paradigm, please understand, matter doesn't just correlate with the thought; matter is the thought.

Materialism is the proposition that all things are material, including thoughts. Every time I think "the White House is in Washington D.C.", there must exist in my brain that exact configuration of matter: 2,433 neurons with x concentration of acetylcholine located in 87,456 dendrites arrayed in a discrete geometrical pattern with action potentials precisely defined. That exact configuration is the thought. If I had a different configuration of matter - any difference - I would have a different thought. If each mental state is a brain state, then this reduction must hold for every thought. This is a straightforward prediction of materialism.

We have a vast knowledge of neuroscience. Yet what is the scientific evidence supporting this most fundamental prediction of materialism - that every thought is reducible at the molecular level to a discrete and unique brain state? There isn't a shred of evidence that any discrete mental state - any specific thought - can be reduced at the molecular level to a unique material brain state. Not a shred.

The notion that the mind is nothing but chemical reactions in the brain may have been plausible a century ago, but in light of modern knowledge of the brain and consciousness that type of simple reductionism, what is sometimes called "nothing buttery", seems quaint. Read Engor's full response to Novella at the link.

RLC

Two Cheers for Stigma

An alarming news story in the Canadian Star points out that there has been a stunning increase in the number of young girls convicted of violent and vicious crimes:

According to a Statistics Canada report last Thursday, the number of females age 12 and up accused of violent crime climbed between 1986 and 2005.

One statistic in particular is worrying. Among girls, says Female Offenders in Canada, the rate at which they're charged for "serious violent crime" has more than doubled, to 132 teens per 100,000 in 2005 from 60 in 1986. Meanwhile, the rate among adult women climbed to 46 from 25 per 100,000.

For young women, that's an alarming leap - and it's been reflected in some shocking news.

From the brutal swarming, beating and drowning death of B.C.'s Reena Virk in 1997 to last fall's torture by Nova Scotia girls of another teen, girls have been accused of bullying, burning and battering.

In Toronto, one girl, aged 16 - but 15 at the time of the incident - was denied bail last week in connection with the New Year's Day slaying of 14-year-old Stefanie Rengel. The motive, according to the judge, was "senseless jealousy."

While Statistics Canada offers no explanation for any of this increase, Silja J.A. Talvi, author of the recently published Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System, writes, "Girls and women enter the criminal justice system with far higher rates of drug abuse, sexual violence, childhood abuse, mental illness, and experiences with homelessness."

As criminologists and others who study female offenders say, violent girls are often the product of violent homes, and subject to much more stress - from sexual abuse, in particular - than boys.

You can read the rest of this disturbing report at the link.

Sadly, this article confirms the crucial role dysfunctional families, especially emotionally or physically estranged fathers, play in producing aberrant offspring. The one commonality between male and female inmates in our prisons is that their fathers in almost every case were either physically or emotionally absent from their lives or physically or emotionally abusive. Kids need good fathers, and a culture in which parents feel free to split up to pursue their own "happiness", or never marry in the first place, is spawning alarming numbers of wretched children.

Perhaps it's time to restore the social stigma that once attached to unwed motherhood and any divorce that wasn't a last resort. There's a danger, of course, in being too censorious, and we certainly don't want to be the kind of cold, merciless society Hawthorne depicts in The Scarlet Letter. On the other hand, the danger to our children posed by the breakdown of traditional views of marriage and family is too serious and too deadly to allow us to continue to treat marriage as though it were just one of many legitimate ways to raise children.

Parents who aren't willing to commit themselves to each other and to their children should not have them, and, if they do, they deserve the opprobrium of a society that cannot afford the personal tragedy and costs these irresponsible, selfish individuals are inflicting upon everyone else.

RLC

Archbishop of Appeasement

Should one laugh at the utter looniness of the Archbishop's suggestion or weep over evidence that in Britain the spirit of Neville Chamberlain lives on:

Dr. Rowan Williams told Radio 4's World at One that the UK has to "face up to the fact" that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system. Dr. Williams argues that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion.

For example, Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court. He says Muslims should not have to choose between "the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty".

The good prelate appears to be excellent raw material for dhimmitude, having mastered the fine art of obsequious self-abasement. What he advocates, capitulating to Muslim pressure and intimidation, is that Muslims be permitted to live under one set of laws and everyone else be required to live under another. This seems an odd way to achieve integration, assimilation and national cohesion.

Moreover, once Islamic courts were legitimized in Britain how long does the reverend bishop think it would be before Muslims were demanding that they be judged in all matters under their law rather than British law? What grounds would the Archbishop have for denying them this privilege? And what if other religious groups demanded exemption from British law? On what grounds would he deny their demands, if he even would?

So far from establishing one set of laws for one group of citizens and another for a different group European governments should be informing their Muslim citizens that if they wish to live under Sharia law they are free to emigrate to an Islamic country but that as long as they live in Europe they'll live under the same laws as everyone else.

RLC

Nincompoopery

I don't know how many Viewpoint readers watch MSNBC's evening lineup, but the programming there ranges from liberal to very liberal. That's okay, in fact it's healthy to have ideological diversity on cable television. Chris Matthews (liberal) and Keith Olbermann (very liberal) offer a counter to conservatives like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly at Fox.

In any event, it's amusing that some of the MSNBC people, given their avid support for left-wing politics, have gotten themselves into trouble with the Clinton campaign twice in recent weeks, not over matters of political substance but because of ill-considered remarks by their anchors.

First Chris Matthews made the comment that Hillary Clinton is where she is only because her husband was a philanderer. Now I happen to think there's a lot of truth to that, but the Clinton campaign was incensed and Matthews dutifully delivered an abject on-air apology. Then came this on Thursday:

A distasteful comment about Chelsea Clinton by an MSNBC anchor Thursday could imperil Hillary Rodham Clinton's participation in future presidential debates on the network, a Clinton spokesman said.

In a conference call with reporters, Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson Friday excoriated MSNBC's David Shuster for suggesting the Clinton campaign had "pimped out" 27-year old Chelsea by having her place phone calls to Democratic Party superdelegates on her mother's behalf. Wolfson called the comment "beneath contempt" and disgusting.

"I, at this point, can't envision a scenario where we would continue to engage in debates on that network," he added.

This was insulting in the same way that Don Imus' comments about the Rutgers girls' basketball team were offensive, and Shuster should be called to account for it. The irony is that Shuster, like Imus, probably didn't know until someone explained it to him why his remark has landed him in hot water.

Here's Shuster making the slur, along with his first apology:

Well. It seems Shuster is surprised that the Clintons got upset that he essentially called their daughter a whore. Can't they take a joke? Is Shuster really that dumb?

Update: Hot Air reports that Shuster has been suspended by NBC.

RLC

The Conservative Strategy

There is, I think, a good explanation for the apparent inclination of many prominent conservatives (Rush limbaugh, Ann Coulter, James Dobson, to name just a few) to abandon the Republican John McCain and let Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama coast to victory in November.

Conservatives feel that they have only one or two cards left to play now that McCain has all but won the nomination. The "Maverick" would be acutely aware that without enthusiastic conservative support he'd have very little chance of defeating the Clinton steamroller or of prevailing against Obama's winsome, if vacuous, political charms. He doesn't just need conservatives to vote for him, he needs them to work for him. He needs them to be excited about winning.

I suspect that conservatives are threatening to sit out an election that offers them a choice between McCain and Hillary/Barack not because they actually will but because they want McCain to think they will, or to at least think that their support for him will be so tepid as to be inconsequential. If he's worried enough that the base of the party will decide to mow the grass on election day he might be amenable to a quid pro quo.

Conservatives are no doubt hoping to extract some guarantees from McCain that he'll appoint Supreme Court justices like Roberts and Alito, that he'll not sign an illegal alien amnesty bill, that he'll sincerely work to secure our borders, that he won't sign legislation that normalizes gay marriage, and that he won't raise taxes. A credible pledge to fulfill all or most of these would go a long way toward mollifying the right and kindling some enthusiasm for his candidacy.

Whether he'd be willing to commit himself to such promises, or whether he would even keep the pledge if he made it, I don't know, but such a strategy is the only thing that makes sense out of the asseverations of some conservatives that they'd sooner see Hillary elected president than vote for John McCain. No conservative who cares about the country can say that and hope to be taken seriously.

RLC

Unremarked Remarkable Fact

It should seem odd, but doesn't, that the media don't show much interest in a couple of significant facts about the primary election campaign: The African-American Barack Obama is scoring heavily among white southern men, and the Mormon Mitt Romney was doing well among Christians before he pulled out and would have done even better were Mike Huckabee not in the race.

Since some in the media believe that the country is chronically and irredeemably racist and that Christians are narrow-minded religious bigots, and since we often fail to see what we do not expect to see, this state of affairs is floating unseen right past their eyes. As is often the case, the things that every liberal just knows to be true about race and religion in the U.S., aren't.

Nevertheless, it's a remarkable fact about where we are as a nation that Obama has such strong support among southern white males and that Romney had strong support among evangelical Christians.

Evidently a lot of Christians recognize that the values a man holds are more important to his qualifications to govern than are the beliefs which give rise to those values, no matter how peculiar and heterodox those beliefs may be. It's a shame that this example of Christian tolerance and good-will isn't getting more attention from the media.

RLC

Endocrine Disruptors

We wrote about this in the course of a review of the Leonard Sax book Boys Adrift in December. It's a very disturbing story given the ubiquitous use of plastic bottles in our society:

BPA is one of many man-made chemicals classified as endocrine disruptors, which alter the function of the endocrine system by mimicking the role of the body's natural hormones. Hormones are secreted through endocrine glands and serve different functions throughout the body.

The chemical-which is widely used in products such as reusable water bottles, food can linings, water pipes and dental sealants-has been shown to affect reproduction and brain development in animal studies.

"There is a large body of scientific evidence demonstrating the harmful effects of very small amounts of BPA in laboratory and animal studies, but little clinical evidence related to humans," explains Belcher. "There is a very strong suspicion in the scientific community, however, that this chemical has harmful effects on humans."

When these plastics were exposed to boiling water BPA leached into the water at high rates:

Prior to boiling water exposure, the rate of release from individual bottles ranged from 0.2 to 0.8 nanograms per hour. After exposure, rates increased to 8 to 32 nanograms per hour.

One question that the article doesn't answer is whether boiling causes the bottle to leach out BPA continuously after the plastic has been heated or whether the leaching only occurs during the boiling. It would also be helpful to know whether and how the "normal" amount of BPA leached by these bottles affects the body.

RLC

Determinists Cheat

An article published in Psychological Science reports the unsurprising finding that people who are persuaded that they're really not responsible for their choices are more likely to cheat than those who believe themselves to be morally accountable. Here's the abstract of the paper:

Does moral behavior draw on a belief in free will? Two experiments examined whether inducing participants to believe that human behavior is predetermined would encourage cheating. In Experiment 1, participants read either text that encouraged a belief in determinism (i.e., that portrayed behavior as the consequence of environmental and genetic factors) or neutral text. Exposure to the deterministic message increased cheating on a task in which participants could passively allow a flawed computer program to reveal answers to mathematical problems that they had been instructed to solve themselves. Moreover, increased cheating behavior was mediated by decreased belief in free will. In Experiment 2, participants who read deterministic statements cheated by overpaying themselves for performance on a cognitive task; participants who read statements endorsing free will did not. These findings suggest that the debate over free will has societal, as well as scientific and theoretical, implications.

Wait until the full implications of secularism finally begin to sink into the public consciousness and people realize that, in a post-Christian world, there is no real right or wrong, only subjective preferences. Cheating on math problems will be the least of our worries.

HT: Uncommon Descent.

RLC

Feedback

A couple of friends write to share some very interesting thoughts on several of the posts that have appeared recently on Viewpoint. Check them out on our Feedback page.

RLC

Muslim Modesty v. Modern Hygiene

Some Muslim female medical students in England are refusing to practice standard hygienic procedures. Citing modesty as their reason they decline to wash their arms to the elbow as is required of all medical practitioners in the U.K.:

Women training in several hospitals in England have raised objections to removing their arm coverings in theatre and to rolling up their sleeves when washing their hands, because it is regarded as immodest in Islam. Universities and NHS fear many more will refuse to co-operate with new Department of Health guidance, introduced this month, which stipulates that all doctors must be "bare below the elbow".

The measure is deemed necessary to stop the spread of infections such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile, which have killed hundreds.

Minutes of a clinical academics' meeting at Liverpool University revealed that female Muslim students at Alder Hey children's hospital had objected to rolling up their sleeves to wear gowns.

Similar concerns have been raised at Leicester University. Minutes from a medical school committee said that "a number of Muslim females had difficulty in complying with the procedures to roll up sleeves to the elbow for appropriate handwashing".

Sheffield University also reported a case of a Muslim medic who refused to "scrub" as this left her forearms exposed.

Documents from Birmingham University reveal that some students would prefer to quit the course rather than expose their arms, and warn that it could leave trusts open to legal action.

Hygiene experts said last night that no exceptions should be made on religious grounds. Dr Mark Enright, professor of microbiology at Imperial College London, said: "To wash your hands properly, and reduce the risks of MRSA and C.difficile, you have to be able to wash the whole area around the wrist.

"I don't think it would be right to make an exemption for people on any grounds. The policy of bare below the elbows has to be applied universally." Dr Charles Tannock, a Conservative MEP and former hospital consultant, said: "These students are being trained using taxpayers' money and they have a duty of care to their patients not to put their health at risk.

"Perhaps these women should not be choosing medicine as a career if they feel unable to abide by the guidelines that everyone else has to follow." But the Islamic Medical Association insisted that covering all the body in public, except the face and hands, was a basic tenet of Islam. "No practising Muslim woman - doctor, medical student, nurse or patient - should be forced to bare her arms below the elbow," it said.

The long march into the dark ages continues.

RLC

Teddy Roosevelt

"There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition. No grotesque repulsiveness of medieval superstition, even as it survived into nineteenth-century Spain and Naples, could be much more intolerant, much more destructive of all that is fine in morality, in the spiritual sense, and indeed in civilization itself, than that hard dogmatic materialism of to-day which often not merely calls itself scientific but arrogates to itself the sole right to use the term.

"If these pretensions affected only scientific men themselves, it would be a matter of small moment, but unfortunately they tend gradually to affect the whole people, and to establish a very dangerous standard of private and public conduct in the public mind."

Theodore Roosevelt, "The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit," Outlook, Dec. 2, 1911.

Teddy should be alive today to witness the inquisition that the dogmatic materialists are carrying out in the nation's universities and courtrooms in the name of science. He'd be speechless.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

Backroom Politics

Making the rounds on the net:

RLC

They'll Know We Are Muslims By Our .......

These are the people who can't understand why everyone wouldn't want to embrace their religion and who wish therefore to impose it upon the whole world:

Two women suicide bombers who have killed nearly 80 people in Baghdad were Down's Syndrome victims exploited by al Qaida.

The explosives were detonated by remote control in a co-ordinated attack after the women walked into separate crowded markets, said the chief Iraqi military spokesman in Baghdad General Qassim al-Moussawi.

Other officials said the women were apparently unaware of what they were doing in what could be a new method by suspected Sunni insurgents to subvert toughened security measures.

More than 70 people died and scores were wounded in the deadliest day since the US "surge" of 30,000 extra troops were sent to the capital this spring.

Imagine for a moment that some fanatical sect of Christians did something as depraved as this and no mainstream Christians were heard raising their voices in condemnation. Would it be fair to assume that the mainstreamers really weren't too put out by the atrocity perpetrated in the name of Christ? We cup our ears and listen for the American Muslim community's expressions of outrage and anger over the use of mentally retarded women to murder dozens of innocents in the name of Allah. We listen for them to do more than issue a perfunctory "This is not Islam" press release. We listen for signs that they are announcing an all-out public jihad against any and all who besmirch the name of their prophet with such bestial behavior. But, alas, all we hear is the sound of silence.

I wonder what is the Muslim equivalent of the song that goes: "They'll know we are Christians by our love."

RLC

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