On Behalf of Freedom

Senators Arlen Specter (R, PA) and Joe Leiberman (I, CT) have submitted a bill to the Senate that would protect the free speech rights of Americans against the abuses of foreign jurists and plaintiffs. The problem, as Specter and Leiberman outline it in the Wall Street Journal, is that American authors are being sued by Islamic plaintiffs in foreign courts for writing books and articles critical of Islam. In the U.S. the plaintiff has to prove that a claim is false in order to establish libel, but in England the defendant has to prove the contested claim is true. If he can't he has to pay all costs and damages.

The Senators write that:

Consequently, English courts have become a popular destination for libel suits against American authors. In 2003, U.S. scholar Rachel Ehrenfeld asserted in her book, "Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It," that Saudi banker Khalid Bin Mahfouz helped fund Osama bin Laden. The book was published in the U.S. by a U.S. company. But 23 copies were bought online by English residents, so English courts permitted the Saudi to file a libel suit there.

Ms. Ehrenfeld did not appear in court, so Mr. Bin Mahfouz won a $250,000 default judgment against her. He has filed or threatened to file at least 30 other suits in England.

To counter this lawsuit trend, we have introduced the Free Speech Protection Act of 2008, a Senate companion to a House bill introduced by U.S. Rep. Pete King (R., N.Y.) and co-sponsored by Rep. Anthony Weiner (D., N.Y.). This legislation builds on New York State's "Libel Terrorism Protection Act," signed into law by Gov. David Paterson on May 1.

Our bill bars U.S. courts from enforcing libel judgments issued in foreign courts against U.S. residents, if the speech would not be libelous under American law. The bill also permits American authors and publishers to countersue if the material is protected by the First Amendment. If a jury finds that the foreign suit is part of a scheme to suppress free speech rights, it may award treble damages.

Kudos to senators Specter and Leiberman and to representatives King and Weiner. It will be interesting to see who votes against these bills and why.

RLC

Paging Al Sharpton

At a recent meeting of city officials in Dallas County, Texas, county commissioners were hashing out difficulties with the way traffic tickets are handled. Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield observed that the bureaucracy "has become a black hole" for lost paperwork and for this he was immediately pounced upon by fellow commissioner John Price, who is black and whose education is sadly deficient in the rudiments of scientific terminology.

According to the Dallas Morning News' City Hall Blog, Price took umbrage shouting, "Excuse me! That office has become a white hole."

Seizing on the opportunity to also be offended, Judge Thomas Jones demanded that Mayfield apologize for the "racially insensitive analogy".

The problem obviously is that none of the aggrieved has any idea what a black hole is or why it's called that. Since Mayfield used the word "black" in connection with the bureaucracy his African American colleagues simple-mindedly assumed he was making an offensive racial reference.

The episode reminds me of the incident in Washington, D.C. a couple of years ago when a white councilman lost his job for correctly applying the word "niggardly". None of the people who demanded his ouster for this outrage were familiar enough with the workings of a dictionary to actually look the word up.

It might not have mattered if they did, of course, since they might well have looked up the wrong word.

It's embarrassing enough that politically correct illiterates like these are in positions of public responsibility, but it's unconscionable that they have the power to make life miserable for more intelligent colleagues.

RLC

Why I Will (Probably) Vote for McCain

Last week I gave my reasons why I won't vote for Barack Obama in November. Today I'd like to explain why I probably will vote for John McCain.

I should say first that McCain's campaign has been desultory and disappointing. He seems unfocussed, unable to articulate his positions and unwilling to differentiate himself clearly from his rival. Like Obama, he has been, until the primaries, pretty much of an open borders/amnesty guy. He says things that cause me to shake my head in puzzlement. The Democrats have never won the White House with a candidate of the left, and yet they appear poised to do so this year. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton ran as moderates. George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry, all left-wingers, all lost. Obama might have been already out of the running had the GOP been able to find a principled, articulate conservative to run against him. As it is we have John McCain who seems intent on playing General Custer to Obama's Sitting Bull.

Nevertheless, despite his inadequacies as a campaigner, McCain can be relied upon to do what needs to be done to prevail in the Middle East, and he will probably also expand domestic oil supplies. He's much more likely than Obama to follow through on his new-found commitment to border security and appoint judges who believe their role is to interpret the law rather than make it. He's a deficit hawk who will oppose unnecessary spending and the boondoggle earmarks which are attached to so much legislation. He has also vowed to keep the Bush tax cuts in place which will help a struggling economy. He has throughout his career been reliably pro-life and has certainly demonstrated personal toughness and courage, especially during his five years as a POW.

All of this makes him a more qualified candidate than his opponent, who, by any measure, has no qualifications for the office whatsoever other than a personal afflatus that many find endearing.

I have qualified my claim to vote for McCain with the word "probably" because though he seems to be better than Obama on most important issues, one can't be sure how committed he is to some of them since he has arrived late to the need for off-shore drilling, secure borders, and low tax rates.

Even so, at this stage of the game there's no other plausible choice in the race, nor is there likely to be. Libertarian Bob Barr is a good man who I wish was still in Congress, but he has no chance of gaining sufficient name recognition by November to be a contender. He could, though, cost McCain the election by taking votes in close states that would otherwise go to McCain, just as Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the election in 2000 by pulling several hundred votes away from him in Florida, and Ross Perot may have cost George Bush, Sr. the election in 1992. For this reason, I will cast a protest vote for Barr only if election-day polls show a lop-sided Obama victory pending in Pennsylvania where I vote.

Otherwise, I will pull the lever for John McCain with the same diminished enthusiasm I had for Bob Dole in 1996. Unfortunately, McCain's candidacy seems in many respects to be a reprise of that ill-fated venture. You'd think the Republicans would have learned from the Dole experience not to run an aging war veteran with few deep ideological commitments against a young, charismatic charmer who's able to mask his leftism behind a smokescreen of seductive speeches. Time will tell whether this time things work out differently.

RLC

Obama on Iraq

Senator Barack Obama lays out his thinking on Iraq in a column in the New York Times, but I don't think he succeeds in clearing up the questions that surround his position. He writes that:

The differences on Iraq in this campaign are deep....I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president.

What does this mean to people who read it? McCain would also end the war if he could. So would Bush. The question is what are the deep differences in how and when Obama would end it. If there really are significant differences then to end the war can only mean that he will quit fighting and start an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. If this is not what he's prepared to do then his plan is essentially the Bush/McCain policy of staying in Iraq until it's stable and able to fend for itself.

Obama assures us that, as president, he will have most of our troops out of Iraq in two years. Unless he can't. But what would prevent him? Conditions on the ground, says he, but then how is this any different than saying that he'll take as long as he needs to get the job done?

Obama is trying to pull off a bit of rhetorical legerdemain. He says he'll end the war, and the left hears him say that the shooting will stop as soon as he's president. Then he says he'll listen to the generals, and the moderates hear him say that he'll not surrender or retreat until Iraq is stable. So, while winking at his anti-war base he actually adopts, for all practical purposes, the Bush/McCain position.

Besides, as we noted before, to get the troops out in the 16 months he has promised they'll have to leave behind all their equipment. That's simply not going to happen.

Obama admits in his column that the surge has worked, but even so:

[T]he same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we've spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq's leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.

None of these are good reasons to leave. They're reasons for ratcheting up the pressure on the Maliki government, perhaps, and for getting more international help in Afghanistan, but not for abandoning Iraq before it's capable of standing on its own.

The Senator thinks we could leave the Iraqis to their own devices and "protect their stability by diplomatic negotiations". Well, perhaps we could persuade Kuwait not to invade Iraq and seize their southern oil fields, but I doubt diplomatic negotiations with no threat of real force would do much to persuade Iran and Syria, not to mention al Qaeda. Obama is terribly naive if he thinks that people can just be talked into doing what he wants.

But here's the fine print. He admits that he's not going to end the war. He's only going to end the fighting in the Iraq theater:

Ending the war [in Iraq] is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won't have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq.

As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there.

So Barack is not going to end American involvement abroad. He's not going to end military operations. He's just going to end them in Iraq, for reasons hard to make sense of, and move those operations to Afghanistan. He's going to send at least two brigades (minus their equipment, remember)to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban.

So where are the "deep differences"? His difference with McCain is simply one of tactics. McCain wants to hang on in Iraq until the Iraqis can defend themselves and then move troops to Afghanistan. Obama wants to abandon Iraq and transfer the troops to Afghanistan now where they'll still be fighting Islamic extremists.

It all makes me wonder why anti-war people continue to support Obama. Do they not think he really means what he's saying? Are they hoping that he's lying about going to Afghanistan? Do they agree with him that there's some significant difference between fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan and fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq? What principles guide their opposition to the war, and where does Obama really stand on all this?

RLC

PA Turning Purple

Suddenly Pennsylvania, which had been a pretty solidly blue state, has been put in play and Barack Obama has no one else to thank for this blow to his campaign than his fellow Democrats in the Pennsylvania state legislature. Twelve of them are now under indictment, two high ranking elected officials and ten staffers, for using millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to pay for political work and personal benefits.

Among the most egregious of their offenses was the practice of rewarding staffers with bonuses for doing work in political campaigns. The bonuses were paid with public funds and some of the staffers, whose salaries were paid by the taxpayer, did nothing but political fundraising and other campaign work in their offices in Harrisburg.

The Philadelphia Inmquirer notes:

[The bonuses] helped trigger the investigation, which has centered on Democrats because of the sheer dollar amount of the bonuses.

At the end of 2006, after winning back control of the lower chamber, House Democrats gave nearly $1.9 million in bonuses to 717 aides - more than the other three caucuses combined.

House Democrats, according to the charges, had the bonuses down to a science. House aides, at the request of Veon and Manzo, created a grading system for rewarding staffers who had done political work. The grades: "OK," "good," and "rock star." Depending on the grade, aides got anywhere from $250 to $25,000.

By 2006, the system of bonuses for political work was so ingrained that finding aides for campaigns was a cinch, the charges state.

The investigation is continuing and perhaps hundreds more Democratic staffers and elected officials may be implicated before it's all over. The Democrats are almost sure to suffer a backlash in November from Pennsylvanians who are already outraged that the legislature voted themselves a pay raise two years ago in the dead of night. The only question is how severe the backlash will be. There is also the possibility that some Republicans might also be charged in the investigation, thus blunting voter anger against the Democrats.

If this turns out to be a purely, or mostly, Democratic scandal, however, Obama may well lose Pennsylvania in November.

RLC

Logistical Nightmare

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air writes that Senator Obama's plan as outlined on his website for a withdrawal from Iraq in 16 months is a logistical impossibility and that the Senator is telling us something important about his lack of understanding of matters military by proposing it. Citing this ABC News report Morrissey writes:

This is the kind of information that policy makers usually get before formulating policy. We can rotate troops out of Iraq on the kind of timetable Obama suggests, but we'd have to leave all of our heavy equipment in Iraq. Unless Obama plans some kind of nationwide garage sale, that would be a rather large loss for the American military in material as well as making our exit look more like Dunkirk.

Obviously, Obama didn't have any awareness of logistics when he made this proposal - and that's the point. His lack of experience, combined with a hubris that he has consistently shown on the campaign trail, makes clear that he is in way over his head at this point of his career. He has no sense of military policy at all, and got the biggest call of the war - the surge - completely wrong. Yet he insists that he's ready to lead this nation's military during a time of war as Commander in Chief?

The troops in the field have strong feelings about premature withdrawal under any circumstances. As one soldier put it, pointing to his bulletproof vest, he doesn't want his children having to wear the same gear in Iraq in 30 years because we (once again) bugged out before the job was finished. When Obama visits Iraq this summer, he will undoubtedly hear plenty of that sentiment - but they will also include a primer on logistics that Obama should have requested long before he started making promises about the pace of withdrawal.

Here's a video of the ABC News reporter on Good Morning America:

Morrissey concludes by asking that if casualties in Iraq have dropped to effectively zero by the time Barack takes office what would be the hurry?

Good question. Here's mine: When the anti-war folks realize that many of the combat brigades that will leave Iraq are going to be redeployed to Afghanistan are they still going to insist that they should be pulled out of Iraq? Haven't many of those who have opposed the Iraq venture been saying all along that we should be in Afghanistan hunting down Osama bin Laden? It'll be interesting to see what they have to say once it appears that their words will be heeded.

RLC

Tony Snow (1955-2008)

Tony Snow was loved by millions who watched him work as a political commentator, and his struggle with cancer over the last three years, to the extent he spoke of it publicly, showed him to be a man of immense courage and an amazingly positive outlook on life.

Snow studied philosophy at Davidson college and philosophy and economics at the University of Chicago before moving into journalism and eventually replacing Scott McClellan as George Bush's Press Secretary in May of 2006. He battled a recurrence of colon cancer - he had his colon removed in 2005 - from almost the start of his tenure at the White House and finally succumbed to complications from the chemotherapy early today.

It's a shame that on the occassion of his death at the age of 53 his life has been tarnished by essays like that of Douglass K. Daniel at the AP who evidently found it difficult to write about Snow's death without taking a few cheap shots at him:

With a quick-from-the-lip repartee, broadcaster's good looks and a relentlessly bright outlook - if not always a command of the facts - he became a popular figure around the country to the delight of his White House bosses.

This is the sort of hit-and-run insult that causes many people to simply abhor so much of the media. If Daniel isn't going to explain what he means by lacking a command of the facts, why say it? Why, on the death of a good man and father, someone who tried his best to serve his country, take an unsubstantiated swipe at him? It's easy, I suppose, to impugn the professionalism of someone who's no longer around to defend himself, but it reflects poorly on the character of the one who does it.

In that year and a half at the White House, Snow brought partisan zeal and the skills of a seasoned performer to the task of explaining and defending the president's policies. During daily briefings, he challenged reporters, scolded them and questioned their motives as if he were starring in a TV show broadcast live from the West Wing.

In other words, he refused to roll over for the media as did his predecessor. In retaliation for this insufferable l�se majest� Daniel portrays Snow as a narcissistic harpy.

Critics suggested that Snow was turning the traditionally informational daily briefing into a personality-driven media event short on facts and long on confrontation. He was the first press secretary, by his own accounting, to travel the country raising money for Republican candidates.

Daniel seems resentful that Snow outshone the media stars in the White House press corps, and, like a jealous Middle Schooler, he seems to want to get back at the one who draws more attention than he does.

Although a star in conservative politics, as a commentator he had not always been on the president's side. He once called Bush "something of an embarrassment" in conservative circles and criticized what he called Bush's "lackluster" domestic policy.

Daniel seems to assume that if one is a conservative he should be expected to support President Bush one hundred percent. If he he's not assuming that here then why is Snow's dissatisfaction with some of Bush's policies worth mentioning? George Bush is not himself a thoroughgoing conservative, but even if he were, why does Daniel think that conservatives are ideologically monolithic?

Most of Snow's career in journalism involved expressing his conservative views.

No kidding. Imagine that. And what views does Daniel think a conservative writer should express?

How rigorous is the course work these days that journalists have to pass in order to get hired by the AP?

RLC

Low Entropy

Sean Carroll is a physicist at Cal Tech and a proponent of the idea of the multiverse, the notion that reality consists of an infinite number of "universes". He was interviewed recently by the LA Times and the first part of the Q&A provides us with a good explanation of what the multiverse hypothesis is.

The most interesting part of the interview for me, though, was the second part. Carroll is inclined toward belief in a multiverse because, among other things, it provides a possible naturalistic explanation for a very puzzling aspect of our universe. Our universe started out, according to the standard Big Bang model, in a state of exceedingly low entropy. This means that it was very highly ordered. It's like mixing hot and cold water and having all the hot molecules, just through their random motions, all collect on one side of the basin and the cold molecules all collect on the other. It's possible but highly improbable.

Carroll compares it to opening a new pack of cards and finding the cards arranged in sequence by suit. We're not surprised by that when we buy a new deck of cards because we know that the cards were put into order at the factory. Since the universe was highly ordered when it was brand new, which is an extraordinarily improbable state, there must have been some other universe, or factory, from which it came because for it to have started out this way by chance is breathtakingly improbable.

Let's read the interview:

So what's the problem?

If you really believed the conventional story that the Big Bang was the beginning, that there was nothing before the Big Bang, I think that's a very difficult fact to explain. . . .

There's no law of physics that says it should start at a low-entropy state. But the actual universe did that.

So you think the way the universe began is unnatural?

Low-entropy configurations are rare.

If you take a deck of cards and you open it up, it's true that they're in order. But if you randomly chose a configuration of a deck of cards it would be very, very unlikely that they would be in perfect order.

That's exactly low entropy versus high entropy.

The universe is more than what we see?

The reason why you are not surprised when you open a deck of cards and it's in perfect order is not because it's just easy and natural to find it in perfect order, it's because the deck of cards is not a closed system. It came from a bigger system in which there is a card factory somewhere that arranged it. So I think there is a previous universe somewhere that made us and we came out.

We're part of a bigger structure.

Are you saying that our universe came from some other universe?

Right. It came from a bigger space-time that we don't observe. Our universe came from a tiny little bit of a larger high-entropy space.

I'm not saying this is true; I'm saying this is an idea worth thinking about.

Indeed it is, so let's think about it. What Carroll doesn't mention is that the low entropy of the playing cards is due to the fact that there was an intelligently designed system at the factory which was intentionally constructed to place the cards in an orderly sequence. If there was a "factory" which produced a low entropy Big Bang then, following Carroll's deck of cards analogy, the factory should consist of an intentional, intelligent agent.

Carroll is asked by the interviewer about whether God has a role in his physics, and he pretty much answers no, but everything he has said in the interview up to that point leads to the conclusion that whatever produced the universe, it very likely was intelligent.

Carroll thinks that our universe was somehow spawned by another world in the multiverse, but this just sets the problem back a step. It doesn't really explain why or how our universe had such low entropy at it's beginning. It's as if his deck of cards was packed in perfect sequence just by coincidence. He's left clinging to the very unscientific belief that there are an infinite number of universes with an infinite number of initial conditions and that one of them just has to have had the initial conditions ours did.

The problem is that we know intelligent agents can produce low entropy states, but we don't have any evidence that there are an infinite number of other worlds, or if there are, that there were an infinite number of initial conditions. Each of the infinite worlds could have the exact same initial conditions for all we know. Postulation of the multiverse is an act of metaphysical desperation that enables those who are disinclined to believe in a purposeful creation to avoid having to draw the conclusion that it sure looks like it was intentionally designed.

It's funny that the multiverse hypothesis is an acceptable topic for discussion among scientists and would be a fascinating topic for a high school physics class, even though there's not a shred of empirical evidence for it. Yet our students must at all costs be protected from exposure to the toxic implications of believing that our universe is the only one that exists. They must not, on pain of litigation, have it suggested to them that a low entropy Big Bang entails the possibility of a purposeful origin to the universe.

RLC

The Roots of Civilization

George Will maintains that Western civilization owes its very existence to beer, of all things. Here's part of his interesting column:

The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer. To understand why, consult Steven Johnson's marvelous 2006 book "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World." It is a great scientific detective story about how a horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighborhood pump for drinking water. And Johnson begins a mind-opening excursion into a related topic this way:

"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol."

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol -- in beer and, later, wine -- which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, "Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties." Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

Back in my college days there were a number of people I knew whose appetite for this beverage seemed extraordinary. Now, thanks to Mr. Will's column, I see that their excesses were in fact a heroic and altruistic attempt to improve the genetic stock of the species, and that they deserve the gratitude of humanity.

HT: Jason

RLC

Merci Beaucoup

Senator Obama believes it's more important for Americans to learn Spanish than to have a law making English the national language:

Powerline believes the Senator is out of touch with the mainstream of American opinion on this matter:

Attending to the news of the day, Scott Rasmussen polled the comparative importance to Americans of immigrants learning English versus Americans learning a foreign language. Rasmussen reports, in English, that Americans reject Obama's call for bilingualism, with 83 percent of respondents placing a higher priority on encouraging immigrants to speak English as their primary language. Just 13 percent took the opposite view saying it is more important for Americans to learn other languages. Rasmussen does not report how many respondents associated the latter view with Obama.

Rasmussen also found that only 26 percent believe that every American should be able to speak at least two languages. Breaking the results down along party lines, Rasmussen found that 79 percent of Republicans and 59 percent of Democrats reject the idea that all Americans should know multiple languages. Sixty-eight percent of independent voters rejected the importance of American bilingualism.

The question I have for Senator Obama is, if all the rest of the world can speak our language, why do we need to learn theirs?

Anyway, if Senator Obama wins in November maybe we would all do well to learn Arabic.

RLC

Guillermo Gonzalez Update

Readers with good memories will recall that Guillermo Gonzalez is a distinguished astronomer and author of The Privileged Planet who was denied tenure at Iowa State University ostensibly because he believes that planet earth is uniquely situated to permit the development of life forms (us) capable of doing astronomical research. In other words, it looks to professor Gonzalez as though earth was intentionally placed precisely where it is in the cosmos so that we could learn about the universe. Almost any other location would have stifled man's ability to study the heavens and science probably would never have progressed beyond the most rudimentary stages. It's a fascinating thesis and in his book he makes a powerful case for it, a case for which his materialist colleagues at Iowa state have made him pay dearly.

At any rate, it now turns out that Dr. Gonzalez has obtained a teaching and research position at Grove City College in western Pennsylvania where he will continue his fascinating work.

Photo of solar eclipse taken by Dr. Gonzalez

RLC

<i>Bella</i>

Like many folks, I guess, I rarely see movies until they're out on DVD, and even then it's often a year after their theater release that I finally catch up to them. Such is the case with the film I watched last night, but if you haven't seen it you shouldn't put it off.

The movie is Bella, the inaugural effort of a small indy film company released last fall. In the behind the scenes stuff that's included on the DVD one of the actors notes that this may be the first film made about Mexicans that's not about drugs, murder and foul language. Indeed, Bella is a movie about family, love, redemption and forgiveness. It's a simple but beautiful story of a troubled, lonely young woman, Nina, who finds herself pregnant and who wrestles with whether to have an abortion (it reminds me in this respect of Maria, Full of Grace which, however, was much more violent and dark), and a young man, Jose, whose professional soccer career has been shattered by an accident, and who finds himself befriending Nina and changing both her life and his.

The film struck me as a cinemagraphic version of the parable of the lost sheep in the New Testament with Jose as an obvious but understated Christ-figure.

The acting is excellent, even among the supporting cast, and you grow fond of every character in the film. Parts of the story might be confusing or troubling for younger children, but I enthusiastically recommend Bella for families with older children looking to share an evening together. It'll give you a lot to talk about.

If you do watch it be sure to also watch the extra background material on the DVD.

RLC

Squeezing Us

This is not an endorsement of NozzleRage.com about whom I know nothing except that they've made a video which is a pretty good parable of the consequences of our failure to become energy independent:

HT: PowerLine

RLC

LSEA

John G. West at National Review Online explains why the recently passed Louisiana law protecting teachers who try to promote critical analysis of ideas in their classrooms is a good step for Louisiana and the nation. If you haven't been following this act as it has been buffeted and battered along its way through the state legislature suffice it to say that it has been opposed by the usual enemies of free speech and academic freedom among the Darwinists and other secularists, but in the end only three legislators voted against it.

Here's West's introduction:

To the chagrin of the science thought police, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has signed into law an act to protect teachers who want to encourage critical thinking about hot-button science issues such as global warming, human cloning, and yes, evolution and the origin of life.

Opponents allege that the Louisiana Science Education Act is "anti-science." In reality, the opposition's efforts to silence anyone who disagrees with them is the true affront to scientific inquiry. Students need to know about the current scientific consensus on a given issue, but they also need to be able to evaluate critically the evidence on which that consensus rests. They need to learn about competing interpretations of the evidence offered by scientists, as well as anomalies that aren't well explained by existing theories.

Yet in many schools today, instruction about controversial scientific issues is closer to propaganda than education. Teaching about global warming is about as nuanced as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Discussions about human sexuality recycle the junk science of biologist Alfred Kinsey and other ideologically driven researchers. And lessons about evolution present a caricature of modern evolutionary theory that papers over problems and fails to distinguish between fact and speculation. In these areas, the "scientific" view is increasingly offered to students as a neat package of dogmatic assertions that just happens to parallel the political and cultural agenda of the Left.

You can read the rest of West's article at the above link. To read more about LSEA you can go here.

RLC

Why I Won't Vote for Barack Obama

Voting is a grave responsibility. When one casts one's ballot he votes for the kind of future he wants for his children and grandchildren. John McCain would not ordinarily be my first choice for President, but he is, by my lights, far more qualified for the office than is Barack Obama.

Obama voted "present" almost 130 times in the Illinois state senate, refusing to take positions on tough votes, but he roused himself sufficiently to vote against a bill that would have given protection to babies born alive after a failed abortion procedure. He surrounds himself with shysters, charlatans, and unrepentant terrorists. His early experience as a community organizer was working with the far-left group ACORN which has a reputation for voter fraud and other malfeasances. He often seems to take multiple positions on issues of importance and switches his position when it's politically expedient (a partial list of such changes includes his views on nuclear power, FISA, gun laws, campaign financing, Jerusalem, NAFTA, gay marriage, welfare reform, and Iraq. He even vowed in 2006 that he would not run for president). He sacrificed his pastor and friend to political expediency after telling us that he couldn't do such a thing and was willing to denigrate his own grandmother to advance his political fortunes.

He chooses Clinton administration officials as policy advisors while promising to break with the politics of the past. He opposes increasing our oil supply and any restrictions on partial-birth abortion. He favors open borders, high fuel prices, higher taxes, tax-payer funded abortion, and the redistribution of wealth from producers to non-producers. He also favors increased regulations on business, a universal health care plan that will, many experts claim, diminish the quality of health care in the country, and a toothless foreign policy.

Moreover, he is very likely to appoint judges and justices, like Justices Stevens and Ginsburg, who will use their power to create law rather than to interpret it, and has promised that he will appoint jurists to the Supreme Court who will uphold Roe v. Wade. At least that's where he stands as of today, tomorrow might be different.

Other than his personal charm and likeability he has nothing to commend him. He has no r�sum�. He has never been an executive or administrator. He has served neither in the business world nor the military. His only previous employment was as a "community organizer", whatever that is, and he has served in the U.S. Senate for about 150 days. There is nothing in his background which qualifies him for the post of either Chief Executive or Commander-in-Chief.

Abroad we are faced with an enemy determined to annihilate our way of life, our culture and our children. At home we are oppressed by an enormous regulatory bureaucracy and a culture of litigiousness that oppresses and stifles innovation and public life. Senator Obama is ill-prepared to confront the first - he was, in fact, endorsed by the terror organization Hamas - and is actually favorably disposed toward the second.

In short, based on what we know of him, I fear his election would be a grievous setback for our country and its people.

RLC

The Rock and the Hard Place

There seems to be some reason to think that Democrats may be starting to see the light on offshore oil drilling:

A top U.S. Democratic senator said in a newspaper interview published Wednesday that he would consider supporting opening up new areas for offshore oil and gas drilling.

"I'm open to drilling and responsible production," Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin told The Wall Street Journal, adding that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could also support the move.

It's great that the Democrats are beginning to realize that their previous strategy of blocking offshore drilling was growing increasingly untenable with gasoline exceeding $4.00 a gallon at the pump, but I still have a couple of questions for them:

1. If their original opposition had been predicated on a desire to maintain the natural beauty of our coasts I would have thought them mistaken, but I would have empathized with their concern. However, the reason we heard from many Democrats (though I don't know if Durbin and Reid themselves ever specifically said this) was that even if we drilled today it would be years before the oil reached the market and anyway there wouldn't be enough of it to make a significant difference in the price. Now if this was really the basis for their opposition to drilling before why would they now change their view? Have the facts changed or were they being less than sincere before citizen outrage concentrated their minds?

2. Where does this put Barack Obama who opposes drilling and consequently now risks appearing to be out of step on this issue not only with most of America but also with his own party? Can he afford to switch yet another previously held position? Does he remain steadfastly opposed to drilling and suffer the slings and arrows of voter disenchantment? The more Democrats warm to tapping domestic reserves the more unsustainable becomes his opposition to it, and yet he can't change his mind without reinforcing his self-inflicted image as a complete political opportunist. Obama is going to find himself between a very hard rock and a very rocky hard place on this one.

RLC

Waiting for Godot

Listening to media forecasts of impending economic recession is like watching Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot. Commentators keep insisting a recession is on its way, but it never seems to arrive. A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, and so far we have yet to have even one negative quarter, much less two in a row. I know the Dems want to paint this as the worst economy ever but, as is often the case, the facts are just not on their side.

The stock market is down and the economy is not great (1% growth in the last quarter), but it's not in recession. It could be, however, if Democrats have their way and taxes are raised on everything we earn, social security remains unfixed, fuel prices are allowed to continue their rise, and business is taxed and regulated into the economic doldrums. The left's solution to a sluggish economy is to smother it with taxes and regulations that drive investment and jobs overseas, the end result of which is to make the problem worse, rather than better.

Their slogan this election might well be: Bring Back the 70s; Vote for Obama!

HT: Hot Air

RLC

The God of the Philosophers

Philosopher William Craig offers readers of Christianity Today a fine introduction to natural theology, the attempt to demonstrate God's existence apart from special revelation. He points out that natural theology has been enjoying a renaissance among contemporary philosophers since the late sixties and his overview of the classical arguments for God's existence will be very helpful to students interested in Christian apologetics.

Perhaps the most interesting part of his essay, however, is the final section where he asks the question, why, in a postmodern age, should we concern ourselves with arguments? He writes:

However all this may be, some might think that the resurgence of natural theology in our time is merely so much labor lost. For don't we live in a postmodern culture in which appeals to such apologetic arguments are no longer effective? Rational arguments for the truth of theism are no longer supposed to work. Some Christians therefore advise that we should simply share our narrative and invite people to participate in it.

This sort of thinking is guilty of a disastrous misdiagnosis of contemporary culture. The idea that we live in a postmodern culture is a myth. In fact, a postmodern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unlivable. People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering, and technology; rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics. But, of course, that's not postmodernism; that's modernism! That's just old-line verificationism, which held that anything you can't prove with your five senses is a matter of personal taste. We live in a culture that remains deeply modernist.

Otherwise, how do we make sense of the popularity of the New Atheism? Dawkins and his ilk are indelibly modernist and even scientistic in their approach. On the postmodernist reading of contemporary culture, their books should have fallen like water on a stone. Instead, people lap them up eagerly, convinced that religious belief is folly.

Seen in this light, tailoring our gospel to a postmodern culture is self-defeating. By laying aside our best apologetic weapons of logic and evidence, we ensure modernism's triumph over us. If the church adopts this course of action, the consequences in the next generation will be catastrophic. Christianity will be reduced to but another voice in a cacophony of competing voices, each sharing its own narrative and none commending itself as the objective truth about reality. Meanwhile, scientific naturalism will continue to shape our culture's view of how the world really is.

A robust natural theology may well be necessary for the gospel to be effectively heard in Western society today. In general, Western culture is deeply post-Christian. It is the product of the Enlightenment, which introduced into European culture the leaven of secularism that has by now permeated Western society. While most of the original Enlightenment thinkers were themselves theists, the majority of Western intellectuals today no longer considers theological knowledge to be possible. The person who follows the pursuit of reason unflinchingly toward its end will be atheistic or, at best, agnostic.

Properly understanding our culture is important because the gospel is never heard in isolation. It is always heard against the background of the current cultural milieu. A person raised in a cultural milieu in which Christianity is still seen as an intellectually viable option will display an openness to the gospel. But you may as well tell the secularist to believe in fairies or leprechauns as in Jesus Christ!

Christians who depreciate natural theology because "no one comes to faith through intellectual arguments" are therefore tragically shortsighted. For the value of natural theology extends far beyond one's immediate evangelistic contacts. It is the broader task of Christian apologetics, including natural theology, to help create and sustain a cultural milieu in which the gospel can be heard as an intellectually viable option for thinking men and women. It thereby gives people the intellectual permission to believe when their hearts are moved.

I appreciate Craig's idea of the myth of a post-modern culture. I think he's right that the anti-theists are attacking theism on modernist assumptions and that most people are still influenced to some degree by argument. Even so, I think it's also true that the most powerful appeals are those which are made to one's heart rather than one's head. One does not fall in love as a consequence of a syllogism or rational analysis.

The value of arguments such as Craig outlines in his article is that they help create a cultural milieu in which the idea of God is recognized as intellectually compelling. This is an important precondition because few will be charmed by the claims of the gospel in an environment in which it is presupposed that the traditional idea of a God is intellectually indefensible. Arguments themselves may not often actually result in conversion, but they create an environment in which personal narrative, fiction, music and art can more powerfully exert their tug on the heart and woo people toward a love affair with Christ.

Christian philosophers like Craig have since the late sixties been forcing atheists to play defense, but now a new generation of young intellectuals is needed to rise and fill the shoes of those who are moving on into retirement. It's a noble calling for a young man or woman of keen intellectual gifts, and I urge students who are unsure about the direction they want their life to to take to give it prayerful consideration.

Speaking of students interested in Christian apologetics, this article in the same issue of CT may be of interest to those who fit the description.

RLC

Super Glue

Geoffrey Simmons, author of Billions of Missing Links: A Rational Look at the Mysteries Evolution Can't Explain, is excerpting his book at Evolution News and Views. His latest excerpt is fascinating quite apart from its implications for the debate about the ability of purposeless processes to bring about any significant evolution:

The adhesive used by barnacles is among the strongest in the world. It is reported that a layer merely 3/10,000 of an inch thick can support a weight of 7000 pounds. This relative of the shrimp and crab glues its head down and keeps its feet up to catch the next meal. Its adhesive sets in water at any temperature and will not dissolve in most acids, bases, and solvents. Fossil records suggest it has been used by barnacles unchanged for 400 million years. Nothing seems to be known about its intermediates before that.

Mussels have a similar glue, which sets underwater and has enormous strength. It takes about five minutes for the mussel to create a "dab" of this glue beneath its foot on a piling or rock. Twenty dabs will do it, and the job can be completed overnight. Imagine the consternation of intermediate species when they secreted what they thought was glue, but kept being washed away by the waves. Or the species that couldn't store their glue and found their bivalves stuck together.

It never fails to astonish me that purposeless forces can produce such prodigies of engineering as a glue as strong as this just by accident, but brilliant chemists have trouble producing an adhesive that can keep the heat-resistant tiles from being shaken off the space shuttle during lift-off.

RLC

The Illusion of Consciousness

Denyse O'Leary takes us back a couple of years to a claim made by Nicholas Humphrey that what we call consciousness is not real, that the phenomena of conscious experience are just an illusion. Here's Humphrey's reasoning:

Our starting assumption as scientists ought to be that on some level consciousness has to be an illusion. The reason is obvious: If nothing in the physical world can have the features that consciousness seems to have, then consciousness cannot exist as a thing in the physical world. So while we should concede that as conscious subjects we do have a valid experience of there being something in our minds that the rules of the physical universe doesn't apply to, this has to be all it is - the experience of something in our minds."

Since real consciousness would be non-physical, Humphreys concludes, it can't really exist because only physical entities exist. But why not draw the inference that since we have conscious experience, and since conscious experience is non-physical, therefore physical reality is not all there is?

In order to deny the existence of a non-physical level of reality Humphreys has to deny what seems obvious to everyone else, i.e. that we have genuine subjective experiences.

And what's he talking about when he says the denial of the reality of consciousness ought to be the starting assumption of science? Good heavens, how did science manage all these years without making that assumption at all, much less making it its fundamental assumption?

The starting assumption of science is, and should be, that our reason and our senses are generally reliable and that the world can be known through them.

The irony of Humphreys' remark is that it seems he has to make a conscious effort to deny the existence of consciousness. That is, he has an intention, based upon desires, based upon a belief, all of which cause him to will the statement that none of these things really exists except as chemical reactions in the brain. How, though, does a chemical reaction translate into an intention or a belief? What is the precise chemical formula which expresses a desire? Humphreys has no idea, of course. He just knows that there must be one.

RLC

Indecent Exposure

Rick Moran at American Thinker has a piece which illustrates why the liberal media are held in such low esteem by so many in this country:

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times published an exciting story about how the CIA broke 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaik Mohammed. The hero of the story was a nondescript CIA interrogator who astonished his CIA colleagues by eliciting enormous amounts of valuable information from KSM, all by using psychological ploys and developing a rapport with the terrorist rather than the tactics used by the "knuckledraggers" as the interrogator's colleagues called the CIA paramilitary types, who were using waterboarding and other methods of torture.

In the story, the Times saw fit to give the real name of the interrogator - despite pleas from him and the CIA that doing so would place he and his family in danger.

Moran goes on to give the Times' justification for using the interrogator's name and to explain why that justification holds no water.

The point is the Times didn't have to use the man's name, the public didn't have to know the man's name, and the Times was asked not to use the man's name, but they did anyway. Why? What purpose did it serve? And this from a paper whose editorial writers for the last three decades have made a living urging us to be more "sensitive" to the needs and feelings of others.

We drew some flak at Viewpoint for claiming in a post last month that too many in the mainstream media seem to feel it's their job to destroy lives, but what is this if not an example of exactly that? How much peace of mind will this interrogator have for the rest of his life knowing that every would-be jihadi in the U.S. knows who he is and where he and his family live?

The Times' editors are either incredibly obtuse, indifferent to the anxiety they cause others, or malicious. What other conclusion is left for us?

RLC

Ten Books Before You Die

AOL has a list of Ten Books to Read Before You Die. I don't know how they came up with the list but here it is:

1. Gone With the Wind
   
2. Lord of the Rings (that's actually three books)
   
3. Harry Potter (that's actually seven books)
   
4. The Stand (a 1978 Stephen King novel)
   
5. The DaVinci Code (!?)
   
6. To Kill a Mockingbird
   
7. Angels and Demons (!?)
   
8. Atlas Shrugged
   
9. Catcher in the Rye (Count me as one who never could see what all the swooning was about over this book)
   
10. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    

I never read The Stand nor The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy so I have no comment about them. I mostly enjoyed Dan Brown's two books (#5 and 7), despite having to swallow a character parachuting safely out of a plane with an umbrella or something, but I would hardly say they're books one should read before they die.

I do tell my students from time to time that there are three books they should read before they graduate, however:

1. Les Miserables (unabridged, of course)
   
2. The Brothers Karamazov
   
3. Tale of Two Cities
   

How any of these could be left off the above list is beyond me unless the authors of the list just think they're too hard for the average reader.

RLC

Cosmopolitans and Populists

Byron sends along a link to a talk by Michael Lindsey at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in which he explores contemporary evangelical Christianity and its discontents. It's a fascinating lecture and the response by David Kirkpatrick is equally interesting. There is also a panel of questioners comprised of some jounalistic heavyweights who ask some great questions. If you're interested in the sociology of modern protestant Christianity you'll find this transcript riveting. Here are some highlights from Lindsey's talk:

The difference between evangelicals and fundamentalists is how they respond to secular society. A fundamentalist comes into contact with secular society and his or her natural inclination is to pull back, to withdraw, to maintain the integrity of his or her faith. It's something that's borne out of religious conviction. Evangelicals, on the other hand, encounter secular society and their natural inclination is to engage it because they're wanting to win it over.

[T]he real divide, in my opinion, in evangelicalism is not between the left and the right; it's not between the young and the old. It is between a group that I call the "cosmopolitan" evangelicals and "populist" evangelicals. And these are very, very significant divisions.

You see, populist evangelicals are what we often think [of as] evangelicals. These are the folks who are culture warriors, who say that they want to take back the country for their faith. They see themselves as embattled against secular society. They are very much concerned that they are in a minority position, and they've got to somehow use very strong-arm tactics to win the day.

So populist evangelicalism is alive and strong, especially in the evangelical subculture: the music, the publishing, the entertainment segment of the evangelical subculture. But there is a whole other segment. The people who I interviewed, by and large, fit more this cosmopolitan outlook. They are less interested in taking back the country for their faith. They really are more interested in their faith being seen as authentic, reasonable, and winsome. So they still have an evangelistic impulse, but their whole modus operandi looks quite different. Because of that they have different ultimate goals of what they are actually trying to achieve. They want to have a seat at the table. They want to be seen as legitimate. They are concerned about what The New York Times or TIME magazine thinks about evangelicals because they [the cosmopolitan evangelicals] are concerned about cultural elites. They want legitimacy. Legitimacy is actually more important to them than necessarily taking back the country. And so that cosmopolitan-populist divide I find to be quite significant.

Here's an interesting tidbit: Twenty years ago, the Campus Crusade for Christ chapter at Yale University, one of the leading evangelical campus ministries, was 100 percent white. Today it's 90 percent Asian-American.

Francis Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, is an outspoken theistic evolutionist. And that's significant because the close identification of evangelicals with either traditional creationism or intelligent design is actually going to be giving way, I think, to a whole new generation of theistic evolutionists.

Note: I think he's mistaken here as well. Theistic evolution is coming to be seen more and more as theologically and philosophically incoherent. The future of this issue, in my opinion, lies with a form of intelligent design known as "front-loading." (See The Design Matrix).

[I]n the United States, cultural capital is revealed by having an omnivorous approach to cultural artifacts. You have to be cultural omnivores. So you not only have to like the opera and the symphony; you also have to like jazz and hip hop. You have to be omnivorous in your cultural tastes. And you think about it; that's exactly the case for political figures. You have to be able to have a very interesting conversation with nuclear physicists at 12 o'clock and at 2 o'clock be bowling with the folks down the street. You have to be able to walk in these two arenas, and [Mike]Huckabee actually can do that. So in the very moment that he's talking about how he believes in creationism about science, he also says, the book I'm reading right now that's very interesting on religion and science is Francis Collins' book, The Language of God.

I think there are some issues that people assume will be huge elements that I think are going to go away: same-sex unions, for example. I think the train has left the station. I don't think evangelicals 20 years from now will be raising concerns about it. I think same-sex unions will be across the country in 20 years. And I don't think evangelicals will raise a very big stink because this is one of the issues where you do see very significant generational divides. Older evangelicals are very opposed to it; younger evangelicals are not. And in this way, it mirrors the rest of the country.

Note: I hope Lindsey's wrong about this. Marriage has for two thousand years been seen as a union of one man and one woman. If we decide that the gender of the individuals entering into marriage no longer matters then there will be no logical impediment to concluding that the number of individuals no longer matters either. Once we've crossed this Rubicon there will be no basis other than the arbitrary preference of judges and legislators for restricting marital rights on any grounds whatsoever. There will be no logical reason for imposing any restrictions on kinship, or even the species, of the participants and marriage and family will have ceased to be a sacred committment and will have collapsed into a farcical carnival.

There are some theologically literate cosmopolitan evangelicals, people who are able to articulate how their faith matters and drives them to particular positions, but the interesting thing about that is that almost all of them come from the Reformed tradition. The rise of Presbyterian theology has been very interesting to observe. Abraham Kuyper has been one of the figures that is oftentimes cited among the people I interviewed. But on the whole, most of the evangelical leaders that I interviewed -- most of the folks who are in powerful positions who are evangelicals, they are like most of their fellow churchgoers. They are like most Americans: they don't know what they believe or why. They cannot articulate basic theological ideas. There have been a number of folks who have written books about how America is becoming a theocracy as evangelicals have come into powerful positions. One of the interesting notes they talk about is how evangelical ideas about the apocalypse or eschatology are driving American foreign policy. You know, that would be interesting, except most of the people I interviewed do not know the difference between premillenialist and postmillenialist theology. They can't articulate that.

There's much more from Lindsey and the other participants at the link. It's interesting stuff.

RLC

The Fat Lady's Singing

Marie Colvin of the Times Online writes that it's all but over for al Qaeda in Iraq:

American and Iraqi forces are driving Al-Qaeda in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror.

After being forced from its strongholds in the west and centre of Iraq in the past two years, Al-Qaeda's dwindling band of fighters has made a defiant "last stand" in the northern city of Mosul.

A huge operation to crush the 1,200 fighters who remained from a terrorist force once estimated at more than 12,000 began on May 10.

Operation Lion's Roar, in which the Iraqi army combined forces with the Americans' 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, has already resulted in the death of Abu Khalaf, the Al-Qaeda leader, and the capture of more than 1,000 suspects.

The group has been reduced to hit-and-run attacks, including one that killed two off-duty policemen yesterday, and sporadic bombings aimed at killing large numbers of officials and civilians.

Last Friday I joined the 2nd Iraqi Division as it supported local police in a house-to-house search for one such bomb after intelligence pointed to a large explosion today.

American and Iraqi leaders believe that while it would be premature to write off Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni group has lost control of its last urban base in Mosul and its remnants have been largely driven into the countryside to the south.

Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's prime minister, who has also led a crackdown on the Shi'ite Mahdi Army in Basra and Baghdad in recent months, claimed yesterday that his government had "defeated" terrorism.

If Iraq is off the table by November what issue will dominate the election? And why haven't we been hearing about this development in Iraq from our own media? Or is that a silly question?

HT: Eric Allie

RLC

<i>The God Delusion</i> Posts

My brother Bill, who handles all the technical duties here at Viewpoint, has collated the series on The God Delusion and put them in the Hall of Fame on the left of this page. That'll make the posts much more accessible for those who might want to refer to them in the future.

RLC

Re-enlisting

Here's a video of our troops, over a thousand of them, massing in one of Saddam's former palaces in Baghdad to re-enlist on the 4th of July:

Contrary to what the media have been telling us, they don't seem to be suffering overmuch from low morale nor do they appear particularly dispirited, but then perhaps the camera is too far removed to tell. Reports from the ceremony tell us that neither Alex nor his mommy made it to the event.

RLC

Jesse Helms

National Review Online has a couple of articles on former Senator Jesse Helms who passed away on Friday at the age of 86. Helms was much maligned by the left (even in death), and much misunderstood by them as well, but he was a powerful voice for freedom in the United States Senate.

This interview from a couple of years ago is helpful in illuminating the man's thought and personality, and John Fund writes a warts-and-all appraisal of Helms at Wall Street Journal.

RLC

Shifting Sand

Political context is important in understanding Senator Obama's position on Iraq. The speech (see video below) in September was delivered when he was in quest of the Democratic nomination for President and vying with Senator Clinton for the anti-war vote by declaring that he would end the war as soon as logistically possible. The impression he gave in this speech was that he would begin as soon as he was in office to bring the troops home. He later gave a deadline of 16 months to have all combat troops out of Iraq. His anti-war supporters clearly thought that Obama would end the war in Iraq regardless of the consequences for the Iraqi people and that's the main reason for his enthusiastic support from the left.

Now he has the nomination and he seems to have abandoned the idea that the troops will come home ASAP. Instead he will refine his position depending upon what the military commanders in Iraq tell him, i.e. if they think the troops should stay there for five more years well, then, they very well might stay there five more years.

Link: sevenload.com

I imagine that the anti-war left is feeling a certain degree of betrayal right now. Perhaps they'll continue to support the Senator because they assume he's just saying what he has to say in order to get elected. In other words, they'll support him if they think he's lying, which presumably they're willing to tolerate as long as he's lying to centrist voters and not to them.

Exit Question: What is the difference between Obama's "refined" position on Iraq and McCain's position? Will anyone in the media ask him?

HT: Hot Air.

RLC

Drill Here, Drill Now

If you think we should be extracting oil from domestic supplies to reduce dependence on foreign oil you might wish to sign a petition to that effect at Newt Gingrich's American Solutions.

Although I strongly favor increasing our domestic production there are some caveats and we need to consider and some concessions from the oil companies we need to demand:

• It will take some time to get the wells and rigs built to access the oil. The benefit from drilling will not necessarily be immediate.
• The amount of oil we can bring to market will still be limited by our refinery capacity.
• Part of the price the oil companies must be expected to pay is that domestic oil be sold on domestic markets. To open up ANWR so that Exxon can sell oil to India makes no sense.
• Domestic oil must be seen as a stopgap, not a long term solution.
• Oil companies should be required to purchase a negotiated number of square miles to our national park or wildlife refuge system for every square mile of public land they use for drilling.

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 10

In the concluding chapter of The God Delusion Richard Dawkins ventures an explanation for how religions came to be. The short of it is that he thinks they may be an outgrowth of the childhood trait of having an invisible friend. He has no evidence of this to offer us, of course, so he moves on to other matters on which he can favor us with his silly speculations.

For example he castigates people who believe in eternal life for what he sees as the inconsistency of grieving at the death of a loved one. If religious people really believed in heaven why shouldn't they rejoice at the loved one's good fortune, he asks? Aside from the fact that grief is an emotion we feel because we are suffering a loss, not because our loved one is experiencing gain, Dawkins doesn't seem to realize that he has just spent pages deploring Islamists for acting completely consistently with their belief in eternal life when they sacrifice themselves in their suicide bombings. He is appalled that people believe in an eternal reward and act in accord with that belief and then we turn the page to find him scoffing at people who believe in an eternal reward and act in ways he thinks to be at odds with that belief. Dawkins' greatest consistency in TGD is his inconsistency.

He rules out miracles because they are so highly improbable, and then in the very next paragraph he tells us that evolution, which seems highly improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time. But if time and the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable why doesn't that work for miracles as well? To apply Dawkinsian reasoning, in all the zillions of universes of the Many Worlds landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens. Why should the Many worlds Hypotheisis be able to explain the fine-tuning of the cosmos and the origin of life but not a man rising from the dead?

He argues that the fact that there is no afterlife should make this life all the more precious, but what it really does is make this life utterly meaningless. Death is the big eraser. It negates everything we've ever done. It renders everything pointless and absurd. Dawkins avers that his life is meaningful because he fills it with a "systematic endeavor to find out the truth about the real world," but for what end? When he dies whatever knowledge he has acquired will do him no good. He is like a man on his death bed trying to master a new language. It gives him something to do, like working crossword puzzles, but what does it really matter?

The Christian, on the other hand, views death from this side of it as a tragedy, a terrible evil, but from the other side as little more than an unpleasant interruption of one's ongoing life. All that we do in this life matters forever. There's a purpose in learning the language even late in one's life because it'll be something which will be useful and give one pleasure on the other side of death. There's a purpose in scientific study because what we learn here and now will be useful in eternity. But if death is the end then there's no purpose in anything and all that matters now is avoiding pain and experiencing pleasure.

The terrible irony is that Dawkins could be doing the science he loves and to which he is devoted, or something like it, forever. Tragically, though, he chooses to empty his love of real significance by despising the God which is the only ground of the truth and knowledge he longs to attain.

The God Delusion has been acclaimed by atheists around the world, but in fact they should be hoping to see the book pass quickly into oblivion. It will do more to set back their cause among intelligent readers than anything Christians could do. If this is the best that the atheist can muster as an argument against God, the seeker might rightly reason, then perhaps the case against God is not nearly as strong as he had thought. Indeed, TGD is a book which might be read and discussed by every Christian who wrestles with doubt. A thoughtful reading will allay the doubts and persuade the doubter that the case against God is, at bottom, pretty anemic.

RLC

Oops

Clarice Feldman at The American Thinker notes that a blogger has found a serious error in Anthony Kennedy's opinion in (Patrick) Kennedy vs. Louisiana. This was the decision handed down last week that negated a Louisiana law that made raping a child punishable by death. A 5-4 majority ruled that, in Justice Kennedy's words, capital punishment in cases where no one dies violates our society's "evolving standards."

This is factually and demonstrably incorrect, according to Feldman. In 2006 Congress, the voice of the people, voted to make rape of a child committed by military personnel a capital offense. Apparently no one on the Court was aware of this fact, and it completely undermines the rationale for Kennedy's opinion.

Feldman argues that there are now grounds for Louisiana to request that SCOTUS reconsider their decision. They have until July 21st to file for a rehearing.

Justice Kennedy is going to look pretty foolish if the decision is allowed to stand. How can he argue that capital punishment is in conflict with society's "evolving standards" when the body that is constitutionally established to reflect the will of the people declared just two years ago that the death penalty in child rape cases is appropriate?

RLC

Loser Letter #7

Mary Eberstadt's seventh Loser Letter offers some much needed advice to the Brights about how to deal with the issue of abortion, an issue they don't handle well at all.

RLC

Fourth of July Meditation

Today we celebrate our independence as a nation. Two hundred and thirty two years ago enough people in the leadership of the thirteen colonies believed that freedom to control one's own life and destiny was a sufficiently high value that it was worth risking their lives and patrimony to obtain. Not everyone agreed that we needed to be free from English oppression and one of the saddest stories of the American revolution is how it divided communities and turned family members against each other.

Today our freedom is still not secure. As in 1776 the challenge comes from both within our community and without our borders. The external threat, from totalitarian atheism and totalitarian Islamism, is perhaps more evident to some than the internal threat. Nevertheless the internal threat may be the most acute. From within our midst we face the challenge of those who believe that individual freedom is on balance a bad thing because people use freedom in ways that may be harmful to the purposes of the larger society.

The challenge of government has always been to find the proper balance between individual freedom and our wider obligation to our fellow citizens. Indeed it is this quest for balance that has sparked the political conflicts which rage in our daily newspapers and even from time to time on Viewpoint.

Some there are who say that individual freedom must be maximized as long as it harms no one else. These are the Libertarians. Others say that individual freedom must be eliminated in favor of our obligation to improve society. These are the left-wing totalitarian fascists. Most people are somewhere in between, but despite the fact that the majority does not lie at either extreme, there is a very real concern today that those who would hack away at personal liberty are in the ascendant.

There are those, for example, who wish to censor any criticism of any view which they themselves hold. One who is skeptical of global warming, Darwinian materialism, gay marriage, and the good will of resident Muslims may find himself out of work and/or in court not just in Europe or Canada but also in the United States of America. "Bad thought" can itself become criminal which is the basic premise behind "hate crime" legislation.

There are those, primarily on the left, who would take away the freedom to voice whatever opinions one wishes in public, they would take away the freedom to express and practice religious beliefs that have been extant in this country for two hundred years, they would take away the right to keep and bear arms, and the right to run your business the way you wish, to pay employees what you wish, to hire whom you please and fire whom you please and to require your employees to dress in ways you deem appropriate. The left holds that individuals should not be free to create their own business or industry but that these enterprises should be owned, or at least controlled, by the state.

The left believes that law and policy should be made by the courts, not the Congress, because Congress is beholden to the people and the people just don't know what's in their best interest. Thus lawmaking becomes an exercise in futility when the left is in power because a law which the people want but of which the left disapproves will be snuffed out by the courts which are frequently sympathetic to the leftist point of view. Congress in the hands of the left becomes little more than a tool for preventing the wrong people from getting on the bench and for making the lives of executive branch officials of whom they disapprove miserable. For the left the Bill of Rights is not a wonderful guarantor of our freedoms and a bulwark against an oppressive state, rather it's only value is as a tool to be used to undermine the traditions and will of the majority. Otherwise, it's an impediment to creating their vision of an ideal society.

To be sure, the right would curtail certain freedoms as well. In their view, the right of free speech should not give people a right to use obscenity in public and publish pornography. They think the right to do with one's body what one wishes ends where the welfare of others begins. They believe that the right to do in one's home what one pleases doesn't confer a right to let a dog bark all night or to play the stereo at full volume. They believe that a criminal's rights to due process do not outweigh the rights of citizens to be safe on their streets, and they don't believe freedom of religion applies to just anything someone wants to call his religion.

So where is the fulcrum along this spectrum of views? On this day when we celebrate the unique American experiment in liberty we might do well to reflect on what principles help guide us in deciding how we balance liberty and responsibility. Where do we place the pivot between individual freedom and our obligation to society, and why do we put it just there? Do we lean toward freedom or do we lean toward statism?

RLC

Obamisms

Ed Morrissey argues that Obama has abandoned the one position that is responsible for his having attained the Democratic nomination - his promise to pull out of Iraq within 16 months of taking office. Morrissey makes a good, if subtle, case that Obama has executed a deft switcheroo, but his argument isn't likely to resonate with many voters except those who are actually paying attention.

Then comes word via Drudge that Obama has renounced one of the most important precepts in the pro-choice catechism, the right to an abortion on the basis of a risk to the mental health of the mother. No one has hewn to all the pro-choice tenets more reliably than has Senator Obama over the short course of his career, but that was then and this is now:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says "mental distress" should not qualify as a health exception for late term-abortions, a key distinction not embraced by many supporters of abortion rights.

In an interview this week with "Relevant," a Christian magazine, Obama said prohibitions on late-term abortions must contain "a strict, well defined exception for the health of the mother."

Obama then added: "Now, I don't think that 'mental distress' qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term."

Can this man be trusted to stand by any position he took before he was a candidate for the presidency? Can he be counted upon to mean anything he says or are we back to the days of the Clintons after all? Perhaps we were premature to think that Clintonian confabulation and obfuscation were behind us once Hillary was out of the race.

Perhaps others have made the suggestion, but, if not, Viewpoint suggests that henceforth a political flip-flop, prevarication, or taking two mutually exclusive positions at the same time be called after the man who seems to do it all so effortlessly. We shall call it an Obamism.

RLC

What's Clark Doing?

By now everyone has probably heard of Wesley Clark's dismissal of John McCain's war record as a qualification for the presidency. In case you missed it, however, here's what the retired general and military advisor to Barack Obama said on Sunday's Face the Nation:

"[McCain] has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn't held executive responsibility," Clark said.

When asked by host Bob Schieffer how he came to describe McCain as "untested and untried," Clark said it was "because in the matters of national security policy-making, it's a matter of understanding risk. It's a matter of gauging your opponents and it's a matter of being held accountable. John McCain's never done any of that in his official positions," adding, "He hasn't made the calls."

When Schieffer noted that Obama has not had wartime experiences, Clark said: "Well, I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president."

Of course, Clark knows McCain's appeal is not that he was a fighter pilot but that he courageously withstood Vietnamese torture and refused to accept their offer of release unless all the other prisoners had been released as well. Clark knows that Obama has nothing comparable in his biography, so he utters a shameless inanity about how being shot down isn't a qualification for the presidency.

Others have pointed out that even though Obama has called the remarks "inartful" (a term that has found frequent employment of late in his campaign) he doesn't actually repudiate them. It's also been pointed out that people representing any campaign are thoroughly briefed by high-ranking staff before appearing on the Sunday shows so it would be surprising if Clark's remarks came as a surprise to the Obama camp. The campaign at least appears to be trying to discredit McCain on the one point on which he has a huge advantage over Obama, but they can't afford to have Obama do it himself.

All this has been much discussed in the last couple of days, but I think there's something else here that I haven't heard mentioned. Clark knows that his comments make no sense if he's comparing McCain to Obama who has no experience of any kind that qualifies him for the presidency. Even if he's right that being a pilot does not qualify one for the oval office (although he thought John Kerry's service as a swift boat pilot qualified him), this was not really about McCain and Obama. This was about Wesley Clark and his qualifications to be president. Clark was trying, in not so subtle accents, to plant in the minds of the CBS audience that, compared to his own military accomplishments, McCain's are minimal. Clark, I suspect, was trying to shine the spotlight on his own experience as head of NATO which he believes makes him eminently suited to serve, if not as president, then as Obama's running mate.

It was clumsy and distasteful, and it blew up in his face, but that's the only explanation that makes sense to me of what he said on Sunday.

Consider his comments last March when he was still backing Hillary:

"Everybody admires John McCain's service as a fighter pilot, his courage as a prisoner of war. There's no issue there. He's a great man and an honorable man. But having served as a fighter pilot - and I know my experience as a company commander in Vietnam - that doesn't prepare you to be commander in chief in terms of dealing with the national strategic issues that are involved. It may give you a feeling for what the troops are going through in the process, but it doesn't give you the experience first hand of the national strategic issues."

But being a commander in Vietnam and of NATO forces in Europe does, or at least that's the between-the-lines message Clark wants to drive home.

Sadly, the more Clark tries to promote himself the more he makes himself look self-serving and small.

RLC

Taking a Bite Out of Crime

A customer at a Miami area Subway Sandwich Shop shot and killed an armed thug and shot his accomplice in the chest as they tried to push him into a restroom while robbing the store. The wounded thug's grandmother (no mention of any parents) said that the man was wrong to have shot her grandson and that he had no business taking the law into his own hands.

Well, I don't want to be hard on a grandmother, but really. Does she think that the young men (ages 22 and 21) were pushing the customer into a restroom at gunpoint because he looked to them like he needed to relieve himself? Does she think the man should have requested timeout while he called the police?

The fact is that it's tragic that a boy lost his life and that his friend may die also, but if you're going to rob a store at gunpoint you have to be willing to assume a certain amount of risk.

The man's name is John Lovell, he's a 71 year-old retired U.S. Marine, and we need more like him.

RLC

Co-opting the Religious Right

One of the many efforts for which President Bush received a lot of criticism from his opponents was his faith-based initiative which was set up to provide the same funding to religious groups involved in social work as was available to secular organizations. Bush's effort drew a lot of flak from the left and a lot of indifference from the right, including people in the White House, according to several of the Christians who were originally involved in the implementation of the program.

Now Jason sends me an article that is going to place both conservative supporters of federal funding for faith-based organizations and liberal opponents in a quandary. It turns out that Barack Obama wants to expand the program and elevate it to a position of prominence that it never achieved under the current administration:

Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans that would expand President Bush's program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and - in a move sure to cause controversy - support their ability to hire and fire based on faith.

Obama was unveiling his approach to getting religious charities more involved in government anti-poverty programs during a tour and remarks Tuesday at Eastside Community Ministry in Zanesville, Ohio. The arm of Central Presbyterian Church operates a food bank, provides clothes, has a youth ministry and provides other services in its impoverished community.

"The challenges we face today, from putting people back to work to improving our schools, from saving our planet to combating HIV/AIDS to ending genocide, are simply too big for government to solve alone," Obama was to say, according to a prepared text of his remarks obtained by The Associated Press. "We need all hands on deck."

How sincere an Obama administration, loaded down with lefty secularists, would be in implementing his vision is open to question, but think of all the problems Obama's plan causes for many of his supporters who will be very reluctant to criticize him for it even as they grind their teeth in dismay. Think, too, of how this throws sand in the shorts of Evangelicals who oppose Obama for a host of reasons but who now sounds as much like one of them as they do:

"In time, I came to see faith as being both a personal commitment to Christ and a commitment to my community; that while I could sit in church and pray all I want, I wouldn't be fulfilling God's will unless I went out and did the Lord's work," Obama says in a speech to be given this week.

As for me, even if this is not just a political ploy to make Obama more attractive to the religious right(and given his penchant for saying whatever his audience wants to hear, who knows?), I'm a little skeptical that he'll be able to bring those Democrats who vigorously opposed Bush's plan on board. I think David Kuo, a conservative Christian who was deputy director of Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives until 2003 and later became a critic of Bush's commitment to the cause, has it right:

"It would be a very, very, very interesting thing," said Kuo, who is not an Obama adviser or supporter but was contacted by the campaign to review the new plan. Kuo called Obama's approach smart, impressive and well thought-out but took a wait-and-see attitude about whether it would deliver.

"When it comes to promises to help the poor, promises are easy," said Kuo, who wrote a 2006 book describing his frustration at what he called Bush's lackluster enthusiasm for the program. "The question is commitment."

How committed will be the Democrats, who tenaciously fought Bush on faith-based funding, to making it succeed under Obama? Even so, it's a brilliant political move for the Senator to endorse such program, and also one that, if he's not just blowing smoke in their faces, Christians should welcome.

RLC

Learning Language

The study of language acquisition, how we learn languages, must be a fascinating pursuit. Among the many questions researchers are probing are questions about bilingual acquisition: How do babies realize they're in a bilingual environment? What clues aid them in discovering this? How is discrimination between languages produced in infants?

If you're interested in this topic you might go to this article at Science Daily where you'll find a number of links to stories that address research in language acquisition and how children in bilingual homes recognize that they're hearing two different languages.

Whatever researchers eventually discover about these questions it's important to remember that it's all a result of random mutations in our DNA that somehow produced this astonishing capability in our brains. Having read my Dawkins I am assured that if I put on a blindfold and randomly struck keys on the keyboard in front of me I could, if I did it long enough, wind up converting these very words you're reading into Longfellow's Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.

It's logically possible, no matter how improbable, that a series of accidental gene mutations just by chance produced the ability to learn multiple languages simultaneously. And since it's possible, the Darwinian logic goes, therefore it happened.

Now recite that to yourself as long as it takes to get yourself to believe it.

RLC