Natural Wonders

Yet another part of George W. Bush's legacy is his admittedly controversial environmental record. Like much else about the Bush presidency the record seems mixed, but here's one very significant part of it that you may not learn about from the six o'clock news:

In the largest marine conservation effort in history, President George W. Bush on Tuesday designated what he called "three beautiful and biologically diverse areas of the Pacific Ocean" as national marine monuments.

Bush cited moves by his administration to impose the strictest air quality standards in U.S. history and regulations on power plant and diesel fuel emissions; protect millions of acres of wetlands, habitats on farmland and federal forests; clean ocean debris; raise standards on fuel efficiency, lighting and appliances; invest billions in the development of alternative energy sources; and switch the global approach on climate change to one that includes developing economies like China and India.

"We have charted the way toward a more promising era in environmental stewardship," he said. "While there's a lot more work to be done, we have done our part to leave behind a cleaner and healthier and better world for those who follow us on this Earth."

It was be the second time Bush has used the law to protect marine resources. Two years ago, the president made a huge swath of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands a national monument, barring fishing, oil and gas extraction and tourism from its waters and coral reefs. At the time, that area was the largest conservation area in the world. The three new areas are larger.

This is an astonishing contribution to conservation, and I urge readers to take a time out from throwing shoes at his picture to read the article about the biological and natural history wonders that Bush has preserved.

RLC

Bush Derangement Syndrome

No matter how old they get some people just never reach maturity. How childish, hateful, and mentally unstable do people have to be to derive pleasure from throwing shoes at a picture, or to be willing to take the time and trouble to set up such an event in the first place?

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Just War (II)

Yesterday I outlined some of the commonly accepted criteria of Just War theory. They included circumstances which must be satisfied before going to war (jus ad bellum) and principles that should govern how the war is actually fought (jus in bello). In any conflict it must be asked whether either party was justified in entering into the conflict, and if so, are they fighting it with due consideration to the requirements of Just War theory.

These are often difficult questions to answer, of course, because it's so hard to know what's going on both on the battlefield and behind the scenes in the offices of the leaders of the combatant parties. Even so, based on news reports we have of the current Israeli/Hamas conflict, I think the case can be made that, as far as we're able to tell, Israel is making a genuine effort to abide by the principles of Just War.

The first question which must be answered is whether the Israelis were justified in attacking Hamas. Did they have just cause?

Hamas has two objectives: To destroy Israel and to establish a hard-line Islamic state in its place. Since Israel left Gaza in 2005 Hamas has launched over 5000 rockets into Israeli cities and countryside killing dozens and terrorizing thousands. They've launched 3000 rockets in just the past year. Given these facts it certainly seems that Israel is acting in legitimate self-defense.

Meanwhile, as many observers have pointed out, Hamas is committing three distinct war crimes. They're deliberately targeting Israeli civilians, they're using their own civilians as human shields, and they seek the destruction of a member state of the United Nations.

The second question is whether the Israelis had just intention in entering into war. Their stated purpose is to remove the existential threat to their citizens which is a valid justification under Just War theory. Moreover the the war was declared by a legitimate authority - a freely elected government.

Next, is there a reasonable prospect of success? This is difficult to assess from this vantage, of course, but it certainly is the case that doing nothing would not have stopped the attacks. Israel will have been successful if it destroys Hamas' ability to make war, and if the world community is persuaded to take a more active role in monitoring the flow of weapons into Gaza.

Finally, is the Israeli offensive a last resort? Israel has been trying through negotiations since at least 2005, when they withdrew from Gaza and gave the territory to the Palestinians, to get them to stop their terror attacks. Nothing has worked. Not walls, not blockades, not talks. The most recent rocket barrage came as Israel was delivering relief supplies to Palestinians. When the border crossing was opened to allow the trucks into Gaza the Israelis cautioned Hamas that should they continue to attack Israel they would incur grave consequences. Hamas continued to fire rockets at Israeli targets anyway even as the trucks were delivering relief to the Palestinian people.

According to Reuters Israel reopened border crossings with the Gaza Strip on Friday, a day after Prime Minister Olmert warned militants there to stop firing rockets or they would pay a heavy price. Despite the movement of relief supplies, militants fired about a dozen rockets and mortar shafts from Gaza at Israel on Friday. One accidentally struck a house in Gaza, killing two Palestinian sisters, ages 5 and 13. Palestinian workers at the crossings said fuel had arrived for Gaza's main power plant and about a hundred trucks loaded with grain, humanitarian aid and other goods were expected during the day.

It's hard to imagine what more Israel could do that would placate Hamas, short of simply leaving the region like they left Gaza. Some have argued that the Israelis have established a naval blockade of the country which is causing hardship and that they should lift it, but the blockade was necessitated by the fact that Hamas was using shipping to import rockets and missiles with which to threaten Israel. To lift the blockade without having some way of supervising what flows into Gaza would be folly.

Few critics of Israel argue that they had no justification for initiating an attack on Hamas, but many have argued that the war does not meet the jus in bello principles of discrimination and proportionality.

The principle of discrimination forbids doing intentional harm to civilians. Indeed, in my mind this principle calls into grave question the decision to carpet bomb German and Japanese cities in WWII. Those who think that Israel is recklessly killing civilians, however, just aren't thinking. Every dead civilian is a propaganda coup for Hamas. Why would the Israelis hand them such a gift if it could be avoided? The fact is what evidence we have shows that they're not recklessly killing civilians, and to get a sense of the lengths to which Israel is going to avoid civilian casualties consider this story from Strategy Page:

The Israelis have been using both leaflet drops and the phone system to avoid civilian casualties. For example, the bombing campaign after the initial attack was directed mostly at the thousands of rockets Hamas had stockpiled. Most of these were stored in civilian housing, a technique pioneered by Hezbollah in Lebanon. When a cache is found the Israelis will phone the home just before the attack and tell the civilians they have a few minutes to get out before the place is bombed. In at least one case, the civilians were defiant, and went to the roof, believing that the Israelis would not bomb with women and children in plain sight. In response, the Israeli fighter came in low and fired some 20mm cannon shells right next to the building. The panicked civilians fled the building and the place was then bombed shortly thereafter.

It's interesting to note that the Hamas tactic would not have worked against any but a moral attacking force. No one would have even thought to try it against the Russians in Chechnya or Afghanistan where civilians were slaughtered willy-nilly. Nor would such a tactic have been employed against their fellow Arabs who recognize no such distinction between civilians and combatants. The Hamas tactic of using women and children as human shields works only against a moral enemy who cares deeply about minimizing civilian casualties and Hamas knows it.

The most voluble complaints against the Israelis, however, have to do with what is claimed to be their disproportionate response to the provocation. A few dozen Israelis were killed by Hamas rockets, the reasoning goes, so an attack that takes the lives of hundreds is wildly disproportionate to the offense. This, however, misconstrues the principle of proportionality.

If the purpose of the principle were to establish a tit for tat retaliation protocol then Israel would be justified in killing one Palestinian civilian, and only one, for every Israeli civilian fatality. But this is absurd. Hamas would gladly sacrifice millions of civilian Palestinians if they could kill millions of Israelis.

Nor has proportionality ever been understood to be correlated with the deaths of combatants. It has to do with matching ends and means. Proportionality means that the steps taken to bring about a legitimate end must be the least destructive steps available which do not place one's own troops at significantly increased risk. It would have been disproportionate, for example, had U.S. troops leveled an entire neighborhood in Iraq in order to silence a single sniper.

If the terror attacks on Israel will not stop as long as Hamas controls Gaza then it's legitimate to degrade Hamas to the point where they can no longer cling to power, whether it takes the deaths of 100 Hamas fighters or 10,000. The deaths of Palestinian civilians are tragic, but as long as Israel has just cause to fight and is doing its best to honor the principle of discrimination, the ratio of dead Palestinian civilians to dead Israeli civilians is irrelevant to whether the war is being justly fought.

Many of the dead civilians, moreover, were killed because Hamas uses them as human shields. Nizar Rayan was a Hamas leader who sent his own son on a suicide bomb mission that killed two Israeli civilians and who had repeatedly swore to destroy Israel. Rayan was stockpiling weapons in his home, and the IDF called to warn the family to get out because they were going to destroy the weapons. Either the family (four wives and nine children) chose not to leave or Rayan wouldn't let them leave. In any event, they all died when the home was bombed. Given that Israel had a right to destroy the weapons, and urged the family to evacuate, who is responsible for the deaths of the innocent children?

In fact, Hamas has killed almost as many of their fellow Palestinians as the Israelis have. As of this writing some 40-80 Palestinian civilians have died from Israeli fire. Fearing that their rival political faction, Fatah, will use the chaos created by the war to topple Hamas, Hamas is killing or crippling whatever Fatah personnel they can find. So far, they've murdered about 35 and shot some 75 others in the legs. These civilian casualties are all no doubt attributed to Israeli aggression, but their deaths are the work of Hamas (See here for more on the murderous brutality of Hamas toward their own people).

Israel has adopted the Christian Just War standard in their fight against an enemy for whom there are no standards. It puts them at a serious disadvantage but one which they believe is worth assuming in order to avoid lapsing into the barbarism of their enemies. The shame is that so many in the West are so reluctant to give them the credit they deserve for trying to defend themselves in the most honorable way possible and are so quick to believe the worst reports about Israeli conduct in the war zone.

RLC

Sit Down and Shut Up, Comrade

According to this Human Events story Congressional Democrats, under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi, are trying to turn the U.S. into a one-party state by effectively making it impossible for Republicans to have any input on legislation before the House:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to re-write House rules today to ensure that the Republican minority is unable to have any influence on legislation. Pelosi's proposals are so draconian, and will so polarize the Capitol, that any thought President-elect Obama has of bipartisan cooperation will be rendered impossible before he even takes office.

Pelosi's rule changes -- which may be voted on today -- will reverse the fairness rules that were written around Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America."

After decades of Democrat control of the House of Representatives, gross abuses to the legislative process and several high-profile scandals contributed to an overwhelming Republican House Congressional landslide victory in 1994. Reforms to the House Rules as part of the Contract with America were designed to open up to public scrutiny what had become under this decades-long Democrat majority a dangerously secretive House legislative process. The Republican reform of the way the House did business included opening committee meetings to the public and media, making Congress actually subject to federal law, term limits for committee chairmen ending decades-long committee fiefdoms, truth in budgeting, elimination of the committee proxy vote, authorization of a House audit, specific requirements for blanket rules waivers, and guarantees to the then-Democrat minority party to offer amendments to pieces of legislation.

Pelosi's proposed repeal of decades-long House accountability reforms exposes a tyrannical Democrat leadership poised to assemble legislation in secret, then goose-step it through Congress by the elimination of debate and amendment procedures as part of America's governing legislative process.

And the Democrats used to complain that George Bush was a "divisive" president.

RLC

Uncle Jay Delivers the News

Uncle Jay, still in the Christmas spirit, recaps some of the major news stories of 2008:

Thanks to Jeanne for passing this along.

RLC

Just War (I)

Byron has suggested that it might be helpful to look at the current Israeli/Hamas conflict in terms of what philosophers and theologians call Just War theory. This is a fine suggestion so I'd like to devote a couple of posts to exploring what we know about the current conflict in the context of Just War thinking. First, though, some background.

From the time of Augustine (c.400 a.d.) many Christian philosophers and theologians have thought about the question of the demands and restrictions the Gospel imposes on the use of force. One result of that thinking has been a list of criteria that must be satisfied in any situation in which force, particularly military force, is contemplated. This is called jus ad bellum (justice in going to war). These criteria generally include the following:

1. Just cause. Examples of a just cause for the use of force include: Defense against an unjust invader; Protection of family, home, or other innocent victims from direct harm; Recovery of goods unjustly taken; Protection of constitutional rights and liberties from government encroachment; Defense of allies who have been unjustly attacked, etc.

2. Just intent. The purpose of the war must be to establish peace or to protect the innocent. Hatred, economic gain, or the exercise of power are all illicit reasons for using force against another.

3. Legitimate authority. The war must be declared/waged by a legitimate government authority. A war declared by a terrorist organization like al Qaeda is by definition unjust.

4. Reasonable prospect of success. Deliberately protracted wars or wars initiated with no reasonable hope of success are unjust.

5. Last resort. When it's clear that no measure short of the application of force will avail, or that an attack upon one's nation is imminent, war is justified provided the other criteria are met. This requirement is problematic in that it is always possible to imagine yet another set of peace talks, etc. that could be embarked upon and which would delay war indefinitely. Thus, governments have to exercise reasonable judgment in determining whether they have actually exhausted all practical options and have been left with no realistic alternative to war.

Just War theory also requires that wars not only be warranted by stringent criteria (jus ad bellum) but that when fought they be conducted according to certain guidelines (jus in bello: justice in war). The two chief criteria of jus in bello are:

1. Discrimination. Civilians should never be deliberately targeted. This follows from the Christian imperative to be compassionate and merciful. It entails that prisoners not be mistreated and that property and livelihoods not be unduly or unnecessarily damaged.

2. Proportionality. The means employed must be no more brutal or violent than what is necessary to secure victory. It would be unjust to slaughter defeated and retreating enemy soldiers if they no longer pose a threat. It would be a disproportionate response, and therefore unjust, to respond to a cross-border raid with nuclear weapons.

As is no doubt obvious, the heat and stress of war and incipient war may create a lot of gray areas for those seeking to hold to the criteria of Just War, and there's often much room for differences in interpretation. Nevertheless, those who wish to wage war justly will strive to hew as closely to these principles as the exigencies of war permit.

Tomorrow I'll try to explain why I think Israel is conducting itself quite in accord with the requirements of Just War theory. For now, though, I close by observing that whatever the case with the Israelis, it's certainly clear that Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their Iranian masters care nothing at all about these requirements, but then, of course, Islam has no just war tradition to speak of.

It is also the case that secularists who condemn Israel for the war in Gaza have absolutely no basis for so doing. The secularist must piggy-back on the Christian understanding of morality in order to make their condemnations, but that understanding rests on belief in God. If there is no God then howling about alleged Israeli transgressions against moral behavior is foolish nonsense. The secularist simply has no grounds whatsoever for condemning anyone or any nation. All they can do is insist that they don't like that Israel is killing Hamas fighters and destroying buildings.

RLC

Giving Peace a Chance

A recent Rasmussen poll shows that:

Sixty-two percent (62%) of Republicans back Israel's decision to take military action against the Palestinians, but only half as many Democrats (31%) agree. A majority of Democrats (55%) say Israel should have tried to find a diplomatic solution first, a view shared by just 27% of Republicans.

This is hard for me to understand. What do the people who think that Israel should have tried "a diplomatic solution first" think has been going on in that region for the last thirty years? How much effort must be expended in seeking a diplomatic solution while a nation's citizens are being daily terrorized by rocket attacks before the nation is justified in resorting to military measures to stop the terror?

It would have been helpful, I think, if Rasmussen had asked it's respondents to explain who Hamas is and where Gaza is. The answers the pollsters got to those questions might go a long way to explaining that 55%.

RLC

The Test of Loyalty

Think what you will about George W. Bush's policies, he has, in my view, set a standard for character that every president will henceforth be measured against. Despite being the object of continuous and reprehensible insults President Bush never once responded publicly in kind to any of his detractors. He has never shown the slightest animosity or desire to retaliate against his political foes. He ran a decorous White House which, despite the best efforts of his opponents to uncover some scandal, never really got embroiled in anything that in a less crassly partisan era would be thought to be trivial.

Notwithstanding enormous pressure to cave on Iraq, Bush refused to yield to the temptation to try to salvage his popularity and cast about instead, like Lincoln, for a general that would win the war for him, and he found one. He performed many acts of compassion both at home and abroad, especially in Africa, to little fanfare because he didn't want to be seen as exploiting the suffering of others for his own political aggrandizement. Unlike his predecessor's staff, which trashed the White House upon leaving it, the Bush/Obama transition has been handled, like everything the Bushes did, with class and courtesy. He always, as far as I could tell, did what he thought was right and not what was politically expedient, even though he would invariably get pummelled for it in the press.

He's a good man who is nearly universally loved by those who worked for him and who knew him best. Byron York at National Review writes a piece about just this affection and loyalty that almost everyone feels for him. It's a remarkable thing, maybe the crucial test of a man's character, and it speaks louder than any carping left-wing blog or sour New York Times editorial ever could of the man's inherent integrity and strength.

One reason so many hate him, perhaps, is that lesser people are often driven to rage when their own flaws are illumined by the light of a better person's virtue. Their weaknesses and paltriness are indicted by the superior man's opposite qualities, and their jealousy at having the dark places of their souls exposed by the comparison throws them into fits of irrational hostility. They're not infrequently overcome by an irresistible urge to deride and scorn the man in whose presence they themselves seem so puny and base.

George W. Bush didn't always make me happy, but I admire and respect the standard he set as an American and as a man. I hope Barack Obama follows his example.

RLC

Growth and Prosperity

A week or so ago I recommended a series of short lessons on economics by Chris Martenson. I was listening to one of them the other day in which Martenson said something I wish every township supervisor and county commissioner would take to heart: Growth does not equal prosperity. He was talking about economic growth, but what he said got me to thinking about the belief that land "development" is good for the economic well-being of a region.

I could never understand the argument that erecting more housing developments, more shopping malls, more apartment complexes, etc. makes a community more prosperous. In fact, I never could see how it doesn't have exactly the opposite effect. The more people who crowd into an area the more services - police, fire, schools, highway maintenance, etc. - that are needed to support them. This not only requires higher taxes, but it also results in an inevitable erosion of the quality of life that comes with more traffic, more crime, and fewer open spaces.

The rejoinder is, of course, that the more businesses there are in an area the more jobs it creates for the residents, but how is this so? If job opportunities increase, the expanded opportunities will simply draw people looking for work who will move in from elsewhere to fill the openings, and that just results in a demand for even more housing, more traffic, more services, higher taxes, etc. Yes, we are told, but with more people in an an area the businesses do better, but if a business profits it isn't long before more of the same type of businesses start up and the profit just gets distributed over more competitors.

Growth is often a wash, a treadmill. Whatever advantages accrue from having more people living and working more closely together are cancelled out by the higher costs they impose. The more growth there is in an area the more there is of everything else that diminishes those qualities which made a community a great place to live in the first place. This is, in my opinion, true of the county in which I live, York Co. in Pennsylvania, and I suspect it's true everywhere. Some people have benefited from the development of York Co. over the last thirty years, to be sure, but I don't see how the county as a whole is a better place to live today than it was, say, in 1970.

RLC

Ground War

DEBKAfile outlines Hamas' strategy against an Israeli ground invasion and occupation of Gaza. They hope to wear the Israelis down by inflicting steadily mounting casualties until Israel can no longer muster the political support to maintain its occupation and are forced to withdraw. Read how they hope to accomplish this at the link.

Israeli sources claim that Hamas' apparent eagerness to engage an Israeli ground assault is bluster intended to boost morale and that, in fact, Palestinian forces are scared and ill-prepared to face a modern armored attack.

The Times Online is reporting that the ground invasion is expected tonight.

There's lots of interesting information on this conflict at all of the above links.

RLC

Pre-emption

Hamas militants are videotaped loading rockets onto a truck to transfer them to launch sites where they would be used in an attempt to kill Israeli women and children. Fortunately for the intended victims, but unfortunately for these particular terrorists, the taping was being done by a missile-armed UAV. Things end badly for the terrorists.

RLC

Protest Roundup

Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs has a roundup of many of the protest demonstrations launched in the wake of the Israeli attacks on the terrorists in Gaza. It's disturbing to see how much irrational antipathy there is among American Muslims and left-wing anti-war people for Christians, Jews, and America in general, and these were demonstrations held in American cities. Evidently (read some of the comments at the link), it's far worse in Europe where Arab populations are greater and anti-semitic hatreds are once again becoming fashionable.

What is particularly disturbing is the prevalence of the view that it's a shame, essentially, that one person keeps shooting bullets into his neighbor's house, but that if his neighbor, frustrated that no one makes the shooter stop, chooses finally to fight back, he's guilty of an atrocity.

Given the failure of the rest of the world to do anything effective to stop Hamas from terrorizing Israelis, and given Hamas' obvious goal of killing as many Israelis as they can until they have destroyed the Jewish nation, Israel has no recourse but to destroy Hamas or to commit national suicide. Much of the rest of the world, apparently, wishes they would opt for suicide, and they despise Israel for not going along.

RLC

The Difference Between Them

Hamas has, according to some reports, prevented many Palestinians in Gaza from fleeing to Egypt for medical care, but the hospitals in Gaza are already overfull from the Israeli bombing, so where are injured and sick Palestinians going for care? Israel. One wonders how many Israelis would ever be treated in a Palestinian hospital.

RLC

My 2008 Netflix Queue

Moviewise, 2008 was a year for old favorites and first time delights. The old films enjoyed again, some for the third or fourth time, were:

• Leap of Faith
• The Mission
• Driving Miss Daisy
• Amadeus
• Life Is Beautiful
• Crash
• Being There
• The Third Man

There were also a number of older films I had never seen before, but which I finally got around to watching:

Innocent Voices

Lonesome Dove

The Silence

Through a Glass Darkly

Persona

Saraband

End of the Spear

Saints and Soldiers

The Nativity Story

The Butterfly

The Long Walk Home

Jane Eyre: BBC Version

Gone Baby Gone

And then there were newer films that I managed to squeeze in. Among the best of these were:

The Kite Runner

Bella

Dark Knight

Charlie Wilson's War

Vantage Point

Babel

Most

No Country for Old Men

Kung Fu Panda

Facing the Giants

All of the above were, in my opinion, good to very good films, and I'd recommend them all with the caveat that some are R-rated.

Movies that ranged all the way from "okay" to "painful to watch" were:

Au Revoir Les Enfants

The Great Debaters

Night on Earth

8 1/2

Inside Man

The Brave One

Deja Vu

Man on Fire

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

There are many more good films out there, of course, and if anyone has any recommendations please don't be reticent about passing them along.

From Bill and I best wishes for a great 2009.

RLC

Good for the Gander

Gary Varvel offers us cartoon commentary on recent developments in the news. The opinions expressed in the text are ours:

It is perplexing, don't you think, that the Israelis simply fail to understand that if the Hamas terrorists want to kill them it's not very civilized of them to do anything substantive about it.

If Mr. Madoff goes to jail for his Ponzi scheme which defrauded thousands of people of their life savings, and he should, then so, too, should every person in congress who resists social security reform and/or who obstructed serious investigation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and/or who used their legislative influence to force banks to make high risk home mortgage loans.

RLC

Spend Less, Pay More

Jason shares with us an article in the Albany Democrat-Herald which informs us of a clever idea hatched in the fertile mind of Governor Ted Kulongoski:

"As Oregonians drive less and demand more fuel-efficient vehicles, it is increasingly important that the state find a new way, other than the gas tax, to finance our transportation system."

According to the policies he has outlined online, Kulongoski proposes to continue the work of the special task force that came up with and tested the idea of a mileage tax to replace the gas tax.

The governor wants the task force "to partner with auto manufacturers to refine technology that would enable Oregonians to pay for the transportation system based on how many miles they drive."

The task force's final report came out in November 2007. It was based largely on a field test in which about 300 motorists in the Portland area and two service stations took part over 10 months, ending in March 2007.

A GPS-based system kept track of the in-state mileage driven by the volunteers. When they bought fuel, a device in their vehicles was read, and they paid 1.2 cents a mile and got a refund of the state gas tax of 24 cents a gallon.

The residents of Oregon get fleeced coming and going. The more they cut back on fuel consumption to save both gas and money, the less revenue their voracious government rakes in. But voracious government can never be expected to cut their spending. Oh, no. Elected public servants cannot be asked to forego their great retirement and medical insurance programs, or any of the other entitlements and emoluments of their esteemed office. Better it is to compensate for revenue shortfalls by taxing the mileage driven by the poor saps who purchased fuel-efficient cars.

Perhaps we should look at this, though, not from the standpoint of the lowly taxpayer, but from the point of view of a politician. Why should they simply raise the gas tax, if revenues have fallen, when they can create a whole new parasitic bureaucracy affording rich opportunities to descend yet again upon the long-suffering public like a horde of hungry paper-pushing wood ticks? And, of course, once the mileage tax is enacted, the gas tax can be raised anyway. If only a way could be found to tax the air we breathe surely our political leaders would rejoice and levy the tariff forthwith.

Exit question: Can you guess the party affiliation of the governor of Oregon whose brainchild this is? Here's a hint: He has a letter to the citizens of his state on his website .... from his dog. Oregon's voters have no one to blame but themselves.

RLC

End of the Year Book List

The end of the year is always a good time for reflection on movies watched and books read. As I look over the books I managed to finish this year I notice a distressing lack of classic fiction, a lack I hope to remedy in 2009. What fiction I did read was mostly unremarkable. I confess to having read and, dare I admit it, even mildly enjoyed, a couple of high testosterone Vince Flynn thrillers. I also endured Stephen King's logorrheic and highly overrated The Stand. William Young's very popular The Shack was a nice enough story despite its implausibility, and The Fossil Hunters by John Olson was an intermittently entertaining tale of the competition between teams of paleontologists and the dangers inherent in doing field work in hostile countries. That's pretty much the extent of the year's fiction.

There were some other forgettable books which I have duly forgotten, but here are twenty five others (including some of the novels mentioned above) which I've rated on a scale of one to four stars (*poor, **fair, ***good, ****outstanding). A caveat: The rating reflects only my interest in, and enjoyment of, the book and my opinion of its importance. A book on science or philosophy that I rank with 4 stars might seem a complete waste to someone who cares nothing for those subjects:

1. Life's Ultimate Questions, Ronald Nash ***: A good introductory text in philosophy geared to students at a Christian college. Its only drawbacks are Nash's treatment of the early Greeks, which is a bit tedious, and his dismissive treatment of views with which he disagrees.

2. Intelligent Design, Dembski and Ruse ***: Arguments by various scholars pro et contra intelligent design.

3. Theory and Reality, Peter Godfrey-Smith***: A fine survey of the last one hundred years of argument about the nature of science.

4. The Design Matrix - A Consilience of Clues, Mike Gene ****: An explication of the concept of "front-loaded" evolution. In my opinion, Gene has made an important contribution to the debate about intelligent design.

5. Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg ****: Perhaps the most important book I read this year, it makes a compelling case that fascism is a phenomenon of the political left, not, as most people assume, the right.

6. Jesus for President, Shane Claiborne **: Claiborne gets good grades for enthusiasm and for sincerely trying to live up to his understanding of the gospel, but receives low marks for the quality of his reasoning.

7. The Life of the Mind, Clifford Williams ***: This little book would make a nice gift for an academically-oriented student heading off to college.

8. Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright ***: A condensation of his much more voluminous Resurrection of the Son of God.

9. A Primer on Postmodernism, Stanley Grenz ****: An excellent and very readable overview of the major figures and ideas associated with postmodern thought.

10. Moral Choices, Scott Rae ***: A good introductory text on ethics from a Christian perspective.

11. The Case for Civility, Os Guinness **: Os makes a plea for greater civility in our politics while diminishing his case by taking jabs at the Bush administration whenever the opportunity presents itself.

12. Devil's Delusion, David Berlinski ***: An amusing critique of modern anti-theism written by an agnostic mathematician.

13. Fossil Hunters, John Olson **: A sometimes interesting but uneven story of a paleontological hunt for a prehistoric fossil in an Islamic country.

14. The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins **: Perhaps the most overrated book of the decade. Dawkins gives us a polemic against God that seems to attack everything but its intended target.

15. The Reason for God, Tim Keller ***: The pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City seeks to answer questions about Christianity posed by seekers among his congregants.

16. God and Other Minds, Alvin Plantinga ***: In one of the most important and influential books in philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century, Plantinga shows that we know of God's existence in the same way we know that other minds exist. Not for the beginner.

17. The Nature of True Virtue, Jonathan Edwards **: Edwards brings his logical skills to bear in this 18th century discussion of what it means to be virtuous. The book is written in a dense style that makes it less accessible to modern readers than one might wish.

18. The Shack, William Young ***: Young has written an enormously popular tale of a man who manages to overcome terrible grief through a weekend spent with the Trinity.

19. Last Lecture, Randy Pausch **: A book of advice written by a terminally ill computer prof for his children who will grow up without him. Poignant, wise, and funny.

20. The Stand, Stephen King *: Don't bother.

21. Getting it Right, William F. Buckley ***: WFB puts the internecine struggles of the nascent conservative movement in the 1950s and 60s into a charming novel. Ayn Rand fans will be dismayed.

22. Who Walk Alone, Percy Burgess **: Burgess recounts the life of an American soldier who contracts leprosy while fighting in the Philippines during WWI. The reader of this book will learn a lot about the disease and what life was like for people who suffered from it.

23. Abraham Kuyper - God's Renaissance Man, James McGoldrick **: A straightforward biography of a fascinating character in the history of reformed Christianity. Kuyper was a pastor, a theologian, a parliamentarian and eventually the president of the Netherlands.

24. The Language of God, Francis Collins **: Collins was the scientist who headed the team which elucidated the sequence of nucleotides that comprise the human genome. In the book he talks about his journey from atheism to faith and also lays out his blueprint for harmonizing faith and science.

25. Why the Universe Is the Way it Is, Hugh Ross ***: The first part of this book relates some astonishing facts about the fine-tuning of the universe. The second part is more theological and speculative.

RLC

Re; Personal Generosity

In a recent post titled Personal Generosity, we discussed a NYT op-ed in which Nicholas Kristoff wrote about studies by Arthur Brooks which reveal that conservatives are much more generous than liberals. Kristoff quoted a remark made by a critic of Brooks' findings to the effect that it may be true that conservatives give more than do liberals but that most conservatives are religious and their giving goes to build church buildings and not to help people. The comment demonstrated a complete unfamiliarity with what churches do, and a reader named Andrew writes to illustrate why the remark belies an unfortunate ignorance on the part of the critic who made it:

I go to a "mega church" here in Lancaster. I've grown up there actually. My family has been attending since there were only 200 members. Anyway, I've often wondered myself why we spend so much on the building, or flat screens for the youth rooms, or the light systems for the services. I used to wonder... wouldn't that money be better spent helping someone needy?

[But] this year members at my church supported over 2200 children in an area of Kenya called Securu. Our 5th and 6th graders raised $165,000 for a charity called Hoops of Hope to go to that same area of Africa to drill deep bore hole wells. Earlier this year we raised around $30,000 to open a few rehabilitation clinics in Vietnam for a vet who attends our church. Our members prepared over 2500 shoeboxes full of essentials to send away to children in need and bought hundreds of presents for needy families in our own area. These are just the things I can remember, and all this on top of the other ministries we run and the time we volunteer.

Yes, maybe some of the money conservatives give goes to build big fancy churches, [but] better a big building where people come to care, and serve, and give than an empty art museum.

In other words, the money that's spent by Andrew's church on physical structure is an investment that ultimately empowers them to do more to meet human need around the globe. Meanwhile, as Kristoff pointed out, much of what secular liberals donate goes to fund art museums, theaters, concert halls, and museums - nice things to have in one's community, to be sure, but hardly institutions likely to do much to help the poor and downtrodden. Indeed, this sort of "charitable giving" is simply a means for the well-off to make their own comfortable lives even more enjoyable.

RLC

Ken Miller's Straw Man

I don't know how many of our readers are really into biology, especially as it relates to the Intelligent Design/ Darwinism debate, but if you are there's a must read on the subject by Casey Luskin at Evolution News and Notes.

Biochemist Michael Behe made an argument in his book Darwin's Black Box that a portion of the human blood clotting cascade was irreducibly complex. Biologist Kenneth Miller claims to have refuted Behe's argument to the satisfaction of presiding judge John Jones at the Kitzmiller trial two years ago. Now it's true that Miller satisfied Jones, who was eager to be satisfied by the plaintiffs, but it's not true that he refuted Behe, and Luskin explains why.

This is important because Miller and others are going around the country claiming that Behe has been refuted, and thus ID has been discredited, when in fact neither he, nor it, has been. As Luskin points out, Miller did not address Behe's argument at all, but rather mischaracterized it and then critiqued the mischaracterization. This is called a straw man argument, and Miller's skill in the use of it does him no credit.

RLC

Apocalypse

Hot Air links to this video of a computer simulation of an asteroid collision with the earth. It's best watched full screen with the captions on. The asteroid in the sim is about 300 miles in diameter (about as wide as Pennsylvania is long):

The video notes that this is believed to have happened about six times in the earth's history. One such collision, which struck more of a glancing blow to the earth, is believed to have ejected enough molten rock from the earth's crust to have formed the moon. Another impact, smaller than the one depicted, is believed to have wiped out the big dinosaurs.

Such collisions would be even more frequent were it not for the fact that the earth orbits the sun in the same plane as the large outer planets, Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus. These, as well as our large moon, act as cosmic vacuum sweepers whose powerful gravity sucks debris into themselves preventing it from striking the earth. This is one of the many facts about life on earth that often gets overlooked in discussions of the possibility of finding life in other solar systems. Any planet which would give rise to life has to meet an extraordinary number of conditions, among which is that it has to be shielded from impacts such as this one by larger planets in the same solar system.

Few, if any, other planets in the galaxy, or even in the entire universe, meet all the criteria necessary to sustain life which is why scientists Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee titled their book on the subject Rare Earth.

Until just a decade or so ago, scientists pretty much accepted the principle of mediocrity which held that the earth was an unexceptional planet of an unexceptional star situated in an unexceptional galaxy. It was believed that such characteristics must be common in the universe and that therefore life, too, must be common. With the dawning realization, however, that the earth is anything but ordinary and that living things require hundreds if not thousands of specific conditions unlikely to be found together in any one place anywhere else in the cosmos, scientists have of late had to change their thinking, and the principle of mediocrity is being silently laid to rest.

The earth is an extraordinary place. One might almost think, if he didn't know better, that it was all intentionally set up that way.

RLC

What Africa Needs

Matthew Parris at The Times Online is an atheist which makes this article rather remarkable. He writes, surprisingly but correctly, that the best hope for Africa is Christianity. Here's part of his essay:

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

After discussing how Africans are enchained to a kind of group think that reveres the strongman and how the typical African resigns himself to his wretchedness and adopts a stultifying passivity toward life and its challenges, Parris says:

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the know-how that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

Of course, Christians have been saying for two thousand years that Christianity provides a liberating worldview that nothing else, certainly not materialistic atheism or tribal polytheism or animism, does. It's good that some non-believers are finally seeing for themselves and telling others that it is indeed so, but it reminds me of the closing line of Robert Jastrow's God and the Astronomers when Jastrow, talking about the arduous trail of scientific discovery that led finally to the conclusion that the universe exploded into being ex nihilo just as Christian thinkers have been saying for two thousand years, says:

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

For "scientists" substitute "secular liberals" and you have the situation in Africa that Parris describes.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Hacker Wars

If anyone thinks that if Israel would just be reasonable and give the Palestinian Arabs all they want, i.e. put a gun to their collective head and pull the trigger, there'd finally be peace on earth and good will toward men they should read this. If it weren't so serious it'd be funny, especially the last sentence:

The war that worries most people in the Middle East is the one going on between Shia Iran and Arab Sunnis. This conflict ultimately takes over every other conflict. For example, Iran has been trying to get a Cyber War going against Israel. Prizes were offered for the most daring attacks on Israeli web sites by Moslem hackers. But the effort went sideways last year when some of the Shia hackers began attacking Sunni websites in retaliation for some Sunni attacks on Shia sites. For the Shia, this was also payback for the increasingly anti-Shia tone of Sunni mass media. This, in turn, was in response to Iran's nuclear weapons program, and increasingly belligerent Iranian claims that it should be the leader of the Islamic world.

For the last three months, Shia and Sunni radicals have escalated their attacks on each other's web sites. What really got things going was a Shia attack on the two main web sites for Sunni radical religious propaganda (including al Qaeda) on September 11, 2008. Sunni hackers retaliated shortly thereafter by defacing 300 web sites belonging to Shia clergy and religious organizations. Shia hackers then came back with more attacks on Sunni clergy, media and religious sites. The two main Sunni radical propaganda sites, Al-Ekhlaas.net and Alhesbah.net, have been down most of the time since September 11. Since some 80 percent of Moslems are Sunni (versus about ten percent Shia), the Shia soon began taking more damage than they were dishing out, by a margin of more than two to one.

At first Arab media and religious leaders pleaded for the hackers to stop. Some chastised the hackers for fighting fellow Moslems, rather than going after infidels (particularly Israel.) But Moslem hackers don't like tangling with the Israelis, who have a much deeper bench in the hacking department.

Meanwhile, Iran has been trying to get Moslem hackers united against Israel. For two years now, the Hamas office in the capital of Iran, has sponsored a hacking contest. Whoever makes the most spectacular attack on the most important Israeli web sites (belonging to a government agency or one of the major political parties), wins a prize of $2,000. Not that a lot of Moslem hackers need much encouragement for this sort of thing. But the Islamic radical groups have noticed that they are not getting the best hacking talent, and the Israelis typically respond much more forcefully. It has been found, however, that a prize, and a formal competition, tends to bring in the more skilled, if less religiously radical, Moslem hackers.

It was hoped that this contest would defuse the Internet based war between Sunni and Shia Moslems. Although most Hamas members are Sunni, Shia Iran is a major backer of Hamas. So it makes sense for Hamas to come up with something to stop the Internet war between Shia and Sunni Moslems, and unite everyone against Israel. It hasn't worked, and Israeli and Western counter-intelligence agencies appear to have joined in, making attacks on Shia and Sunni sites, and letting paranoia take its course.

Far be it from me, who can scarcely boot up a computer let alone hack into someone else's, to laugh at this kerfuffle, but the thought of Israeli and other Western operatives provoking the two sides to war against each other is kind of funny.

RLC

Getting the War They Wanted

Hamas wants war with Israel, and the world should let them have it. The status quo is untenable. Hamas has launched 300 rocket and mortar attacks against Israeli civilians in the last week and 3000 in the past year while the world stood by and did nothing. Imagine if Mexico or Cuba were launching such strikes into the U.S. How long would the American people tolerate it? How many American children would have to die before the people demanded that the government do something to stop the killing and the terror?

Israel has finally run out of patience. Since the Israelis handed Gaza over to the Palestinians in 2005 the Palestinians have expressed their appreciation by launching over 5000 missiles at Israel. The Israelis have suffered through a recent six-month "cease-fire" that was no cease-fire at all. They've seen their children terrorized, maimed and killed by thousands of Palestinian rockets and mortars in just the past year.

Now, finally, they've had enough, and today they've launched airstrikes at Hamas security stations in Gaza, but not before signaling Palestinian civilians to clear out of houses where weapons are stashed or Hamas fighters might be hiding. This is one major difference between the Israelis and the Palestinians: The Israelis will try to minimize civilian casualties, Hamas, like Muslim terrorists everywhere, tries their best to inflict them. Indeed, the latest barrage of missiles and mortars rained down on Israel after they had sent 90 trucks laden with food and medicine into Gaza to bring relief to the Palestinian people.

It's not known how long this current offensive will last but Israel should be done with half measures. Hamas is a cancer that threatens Israel and oppresses its own people. Israel should take out not only Hamas' military but the leadership as well.

DEBKAfile offers this analysis of what they think is next:

While Israel's air attack is counted a success, its war chiefs are taking care not to be trapped by an early achievement into the sort of blunders which led to the Lebanon war's unsatisfactory conclusion in 2006. That campaign was commanded by a former airman, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, who saw no point in a ground operation after Hizballah's command center was razed by air - until it was too late.

The first objective of a ground force in the coming hours will be to destroy "Lower Gaza," the underground city designed by an Iranian general and spread under most of the enclave's area. This subterranean sanctuary kept the bulk of the Hamas army, 15,000 men, their officers and leaders, out of harm's way during the Israeli air offensive Saturday. Their resistance must be broken before Hamas can be brought to surrender. Until then they will fight on.

The second Israeli objective must be to sever the Gaza Strip from Egypt by recapturing the Philadelphi border strip.

Hezbollah will not sit by and let Hamas take this punishment so the Israelis expect reprisals out of Lebanon to the north. Such attacks should be answered with an all-out attempt to destroy Hezbollah which is another festering boil on the rump of civilization.

It'll be interesting to see how Barack Obama, who campaigned as a friend of the Palestinians, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who once kissed the wife of uber-terrorist Yasser Arafat, will respond to Israel's action.

RLC

Mass Density

We wrote the other day about how the dark energy of the universe is fine-tuned to a value of 1 part in 10(120) and exclaimed about the incomprehensible precision of such a value. Yet dark energy is not the only quantity in the cosmos whose value must be unimaginably precise in order for the universe to be a place capable of sustaining life. There are dozens of additional parameters, forces, and circumstances that must be set just right in order for life to arise and survive somewhere in the vastness of the cosmos.

For example, there is a huge amount of mass in the universe, but there cannot be just any amount if the universe is going to be suitable for life. The amount has to be precisely what it is. If it were off by 1 part in 10(60) at its inception the universe would have been rendered unfit for life. This is, astonishingly, an amount of mass equal to just one dime.

If a dime's worth of mass (actually mass-energy) had been added or subtracted from the total at the initial creation event it would, among other things, have caused the universe to either expand too fast (if the mass were less) or cause all stars to be too big (if the mass were greater). In either case life could never have arisen.

As we've pointed out before, skeptics have only one way to avoid the conclusion that this universe is not an accident - that it's the product of purpose and brilliant design - and that is to assume, without any evidence whatsoever, that there are an infinite number of worlds with an infinite variety to them. If that were so then one of them would have to have the properties our world does, no matter how astronomically improbable that may seem, and we just happen to be in it.

In other words, the skeptic scoffs at believers for thinking there's a Creator who designed the universe while they, in their desperation to avoid that conclusion themselves, embrace the theory that there's an infinity of universes for which the only real evidence is the fact that if there isn't this "multiverse" then there must be a Cosmic Designer. Pretty funny.

RLC

Crash Course

Bill passes along a link to a course on global economics given by Chris Martenson. The course consists of twenty sessions, each a few minutes long, in which Martenson takes the viewer through the basics of economics and along the way teaches some very important lessons about the peril we find ourselves in in today's global environment.

Readers who wish to develop a better grasp of economics but who are unable or unwilling to take a class or read a book on it, will find Martenson's short, punchy explanations a welcome and helpful tool.

The first two chapters are each less than two minutes long. The third one, which may literally stun you, is about six minutes. Check them out.

RLC

Good Year in Iraq

Strategy Page summarizes the last year in Iraq and assesses the current situation. Problems remain, but Iraq is a far better place than it was a year ago and Barack Obama's opposition to the surge, his pronouncements of it's failure, and his early promise to end the war on his first day in office all make him look myopic, naive, and foolish.

He has already backed away from his promise to end the war immediately, and I expect that by the time he takes office he'll have had a Damascus Road experience that will result in his prosecution of the fight against Islamic terrorism being pretty much indistinguishable from that of George Bush. It'll be great fun to read the excuses the liberal media will conjure for his change of heart and to listen to the yawping of the far left which will certainly feel betrayed by the man whose election they made possible.

RLC

Dark Energy

Ever since the discovery of a mysterious property of the universe called "dark energy" scientists have feared that the fabric of the universe was, in time, going to rip apart, but Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at the University of Arizona, allays our fears in this story.

Dark energy is very weird stuff. For the first 5 to 7 billion years after the Big Bang the universe expanded at ever-decreasing rates as gravity acted as a brake on the exploding sphere of space-time, but then about 7 billion years ago the expansion began to accelerate, as if someone pushed the gas pedal all the way to the floor.

It turns out that the universe acts like a rubber band in reverse. As a rubber band is stretched the elasticity decreases and acts as a drag on further stretching. The "elasticity" of the universe, however, actually increases the more it stretches.

Imagine the universe as an inflating balloon with everything that we can observe resting on the surface of the balloon. The balloon is inflating faster and faster and although it doesn't appear that it will burst as it was originally feared, it does appear that the expansion rate will continue to accelerate until everything on the universe's surface is speeding away from everything else at close to or even more than the speed of light.

This, by the way, is why theories of an oscillating universe are no longer accepted. Once the universe expands to a certain point, it cannot collapse and thus cannot oscillate.

This means that eventually, billions of years from now, earth-bound observers would be able to see no other objects in the sky because they'd all be moving away at speeds so fast that the light from them would never reach us. Since the sun is one of those objects from which we would receive no light then, of course, there'd actually no longer be any earth-bound observers.

At any rate, here's the most fascinating thing about this. Scientists have determined that the amount of dark energy present in the universe cannot vary from the actual value by more than one part in 10(120). That's a one with 120 zeroes after it. If it did deviate from its actual value by more than this amount life would not be able to exist in the universe that would result. That is an unimaginably precise setting. It's the equivalent of the mass of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of the mass of a single electron.

What an amazing thing that this dark energy is calibrated to just the right value to allow life to survive. What an extraordinary amount of blind faith it takes to think that it's just a lucky accident.

RLC

Refuting Ayers

I think anyone who's willing to give domestic terrorist Bill Ayers the benefit of the doubt after his New York Times op-ed piece, or who still doesn't know what to make of Ayers, should read this piece at Pajamas Media.

The first part of the post is an introduction by Bob Owens to an op-ed written by an FBI informant named Larry Grathwohl who infiltrated the Weather Underground during its heyday. Grathwohl submitted his op-ed to the NYT but they refused to run it. We're left to speculate as to their reasons, but it certainly doesn't make them look like a paper interested in getting at the truth.

RLC

Nepotism

A letter writer to the New York Times observes that:

"It's amusing that Andrew M. Cuomo, who owes his whole career to his dad, may not get the senate seat of Hillary Rodham Clinton (who owes her whole career to her husband) because David A. Paterson (who owes his whole career to his dad) may give it to Caroline Kennedy (who owes her whole career to her dad). You would think that a state as large as New York could find someone who deserves something on his or her own."

You would think that, I suppose, but probably there are thousands of well-qualified inhabitants of that state who don't want anything to do with politics, and who can blame them? To be a politician means that to earn your way into office you not only have to compromise your principles along the way, but you also have to subject yourself to the indignity of a prolonged media strip search in which every cavity, no matter how irrelevant, is publicly probed and exposed. How many people would be willing to undergo what Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin, and George Bush have been put through?

No one is more adamant than I that our candidates need to be scrutinized, but the scrutiny needs to be fair, relevant and dignified. The combination of our obsession with titillation and gossip and a media that loves to feed it to us all but guarantees that a lot of decent, well-qualified people will avoid politics like picnickers backing away from a skunk. Thus, too often, we get what we deserve: a celebrity rather than competent, qualified public servant.

RLC

Christmas Wishes

On behalf of my partner and brother Bill, I want to wish each of our readers a wonderful Christmas. If you're interested in reading what Christmas means to us you might find this story that we've run before helpful:

A man named Michael, a father of a teenage daughter named Jennifer, had been a member of a top-secret anti-terrorism task force in the military and his duties drew him away from home much of the time Jen was growing up. He was serving his country in a critically important, very dangerous capacity that required his absence and a great deal of personal sacrifice. As a result, his daughter grew from childhood to young adulthood pretty much without him. Indeed, his wife Judy had left him a couple of years previous and took the girl with her. But there was not a day that went by when he did not think of them and wish that he could be with them.

Finally, after several years abroad, Mike was able to return home. He longed to hold his princess in his arms and to spend every possible moment with her to try to make up for lost time, but when he knocked on the door of his ex-wife's house the girl who greeted him was almost unrecognizable. Jen had grown up physically and along the way she had rejected everything Michael valued. Her appearance shocked him and her words cut him like a razor. She told him coldly and bluntly that she really didn't want to see him, that he wasn't a father as far as she was concerned, that he had not been a part of her life before and wouldn't be in the future.

Michael, a man who had faced numerous hazards and threats in the course of his work and had been secretly cited for great heroism by the government, was staggered by her words. The loathing in her voice and in her eyes crushed his heart. He started to speak but the door was slammed in his face. Heartbroken and devastated he wandered the streets of the city wondering how, or if, he could ever regain the love his little girl once had for him.

Weeks went by during which he tried to contact both his ex-wife and his daughter, but they refused to return his calls. Then one night his cell phone rang. It was Judith and from her voice Mike could tell something was very wrong. Apparently, Jennifer had run off with some unsavory characters several days before and hadn't been heard from since. Judy had called the police, but she felt Mike should know, too. She told him that she thought the guys Jen had gone out with that night were heavily into drugs and she was worried sick about her.

She had good reason to be. Jen thought when she left the house that she was just going for a joy ride, but that's not what her "friends" had in mind. Once they had Jen back at their apartment they tied her to a bed, abused her, filmed the whole thing, and when she resisted they beat her until she submitted. She overheard them debating whether they should sell her to a man whom they knew sold girls into slavery in South America or whether they should just kill her now and dump her body in the bay. For three days her life was a living hell. She cried herself to sleep late every night after being forced to submit to almost unimaginable degradation.

Finally, her abductors sold her to a street gang in exchange for drugs. Bound and gagged, she was raped repeatedly and beaten savagely. For the first time in her life she prayed that God would help her, and for the first time in her life she missed her father. But as the days wore on she began to think she'd rather be dead than be forced to endure what she was being put through.

Mike knew some of the officers in the police force and was able to get a couple of leads from them as to who the guys who she originally left with might be. He set out not knowing Jennifer's peril, but determined to find her no matter what the cost. His search led him to another city and took days - days in which he scarcely ate or slept. Each day that passed Jennifer's condition grew worse and her danger more severe. She was by now in a cocaine-induced haze in which she hardly knew what was happening to her.

Somehow, Michael, weary and weak from his lack of sleep and food, managed to find the seedy, run down tenement building where Jennifer was imprisoned. Breaking through a flimsy door he saw his daughter lying on the filthy bed surrounded by three startled kidnappers. Enraged by the scene before his eyes he launched himself at them with a terrible, vengeful fury. Two of the thugs went down quickly, but the third escaped. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Mike unfastened the bonds that held Jen's wrists to the bed posts. She was alert enough to comprehend what was happening and as Michael helped her to her feet and led her to the doorway she realized that her father really had come for her.

As she passed into the hall a step ahead of Michael the third abductor appeared in front of her with a gun. Michael quickly stepped between them and told Jennifer to run back into the apartment and out the fire escape. The assailant tried to shoot her as she stumbled through the room, but Michael shielded her from the bullet, taking the round in his side. The thug fired twice more into Michael's body, but Mike was able to seize the gun and turn it on the shooter.

Finally, it was all over, finished.

Slumped against the wall, her father lay bleeding and bruised, the life draining out of him. Jennifer saw from the fire escape landing what had happened and ran back to her father. Cradling him in her arms she wept and told him over and over that she loved him and that she was so sorry for what she had said to him and for what she had done.

With the last bit of life left in him he gazed up at her, pursed his lips in a kiss, smiled and died. Jennifer wept hysterically. How could she ever forgive herself for how she had acted? How could she ever overcome the guilt and the loss she felt? How could she ever repay the tremendous love and sacrifice of her father?

Years passed. Jennifer eventually had a family of her own. She raised her children to revere the memory of Michael even though they had never known him. She resolved to live her own life in such a way that Michael, if he knew, would be enormously proud of her. Everything she did, she did out of gratitude to him for what he had done for her, and every year on the anniversary of his birthday she went to the cemetery alone and sat for a couple of hours at his graveside, talking to him and sharing her love and her life with him. Her father had given everything for her despite the cruel way she had treated him. He had given his life to save hers. His love for her, his sacrifice, had changed her life.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

RLC

Personal Generosity

All Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times wants for Christmas is for liberals, of which he is one, to be as generous with their own money as conservatives are with theirs. Kristoff has read Arthur Brooks' Who Really Cares and has seemingly had his world shaken. As we've pointed out in our own discussion (see here and here) of Brooks' research, conservatives, who the liberal media delights in portraying as a bunch of cheapskates and tightwads, are in fact far more generous in giving to charity than are those who belong to the "party of compassion."

The difference is not just financial. Conservatives are much more generous with things like blood donations. For example, did you know that if liberals gave blood at the same rates as do conservatives our blood supply would increase by almost half?

Kristoff also dismisses the objection that conservatives are generally religious and religious people give a lot to churches which just use the money to build more impressive buildings:

According to Google's figures, if donations to all religious organizations are excluded, liberals give slightly more to charity than conservatives do. But Mr. Brooks says that if measuring by the percentage of income given, conservatives are more generous than liberals even to secular causes.

In any case, if conservative donations often end up building extravagant churches, liberal donations frequently sustain art museums, symphonies, schools and universities that cater to the well-off. (It's great to support the arts and education, but they're not the same as charity for the needy. And some research suggests that donations to education actually increase inequality because they go mostly to elite institutions attended by the wealthy.)

Kristoff might also have pointed out that much of the money given to churches is actually redirected to charities of one sort or another. Most of the charities in our local communities are sustained by contributions from churches.

At any rate, Kristoff provides a public service in disabusing the readership of the Times of the notion that to be liberal is to be more compassionate and generous than conservatives. The myth may make liberals feel good about themselves, but there's no empirical substance to it.

RLC

Compatibilism

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent offers a succinct rebuttal of compatibilism, i.e. the view that our choices are fully determined and yet at the same time free. As Arrington points out, this certainly sounds like a contradiction.

The compatibilist defines freedom, however, as the lack of coercion, so as long as nothing or no one is compelling your behavior it's completely free even though at the moment you make your decision there's in fact only one possible choice you could make. Your choice is determined by the influence of your past experiences, your environment and your genetic make-up. The feeling you have that you could have chosen something other than what you did choose is simply an illusion, a trick played on us by our brains.

Compatibilism, however, doesn't solve the controversy between determinism and libertarianism (the belief we have free-will). It simply uses a philosophical sleight-of-hand to define it away. As long as it is the case that at any given moment there's just one possible future then our choices are determined by factors beyond our control, and if they're determined it's very difficult to see how we could be responsible for them. Whether we are being coerced by external forces to make a particular choice or not, we are still being coerced by internal factors that make our choice inevitable.

The temptation would be for the materialist to simply accept determinism, but not opnly does this view strip us of any moral responsibility, it seems to be based on a circularity: The determinist says that our choices are the inevitable products of our strongest motives, but if questioned about how we can know what our strongest motives are he would invite us to examine the choices we make. Our actions reveal our strongest motives and our strongest motives are whichever ones we act upon. But, if so, the claim that we always act upon our strongest motives reduces to the tautology that we always act upon the motives we act upon. This is certainly true, but it's not very edifying.

On the other hand, it's also difficult to pin down exactly what a free choice is. It can't be a choice that's completely uncaused because if it wouldn't be a consequence of our character and in what sense would we be responsible for it? But if the choice is a product of our character, and our character is the result of our past experiences, environment, and our genetic make-up, then ultimately our choice is determined by factors over which we have no control and we're back to determinism.

It seems to me that if materialism is true and all we are is a material, physical being, and all of our choices are simply the product of chemical reactions occurring in the brain, then determinism must be true as well, and moral responsibility and human dignity are illusions, and no punishment or reward could ever be justified on grounds of desert.

This all seems completely counter-intuitive. So most people want to hold on to libertarianism, but they can only do so by giving up materialism. It's only if we have a non-physical, immaterial mind that somehow allows for human volition can there be free will and thus moral responsibility and human dignity.

RLC

Materialism and Intentionality

In the course of his ongoing debate with Dr. Stephen Novella on the topic of dualism vs materialism, Michael Egnor elaborates on the concept of "intentionality." There are different ways to think of intentionality, but basically it's the aboutness or meaning we attach to things. Egnor argues that meaning is a property of mind, not of matter and that the fact that we experience intentionality is strong evidence that there's more to our cognitive apparatus than just our material brain.

Materialist Paul Churchland sums up the materialist view that there is no immaterial component to us, no mind, this way:

The important point about the standard evolutionary story is that the human species and all of its features are the wholly physical outcome of a purely physical process...there seems no need, nor room, to fit any nonphysical substances of properties into our theoretical accounting of ourselves. We are creatures of matter. And we should learn to live with that fact.

For materialists of Churchland's stripe mind is only a word used to describe what matter (the brain) does. It's a word that describes the brain's function, like the word "photosynthesis" is a word that describes what green plants do. You won't find in a plant any photosynthesis (PHS), you'll only see chemical reactions occurring which we label PHS.

We are merely brains, Churchland believes, and our beliefs, hopes, and experiences (which comprise our intentionality) don't really exist at all except as chemical reactions in the brain. Your belief that you are reading this is simply a product of certain combinations of atoms, like the light given off when you strike a match, and if you had a different chemical reaction when you read these words you'd have a different belief.

Egnor says that the problem with this kind of materialism (called eliminative materialism) is that it's essentially self-refuting. How, he asks, can one believe that there are no beliefs?

If eliminative materialism is true, then a discussion about eliminative materialism is merely changing chemical gradients in the interlocutors' brains. Some materialists are willing to eliminate the mind in order to deal with intentionality. For these philosophers the brain is just a computational device, like a very special kind of computer.

But meaning is not a quality possessed by calculating devices like computers. Computers don't reflect upon what their computation is about. Egnor invites us to...

Consider a simple electronic calculator. It computes, in the sense that I can enter 2...+...3...= and I get ...5. It's amazingly accurate, fast, and reliable. The reason for its accuracy is that it employs a causal string of electronic events such that pushing the '2...+...3...=' buttons causes the event '5' on the little screen. Integrated circuits, all that stuff. Of course, the calculator doesn't think (really quick) "hmmm...two plus three is....hmmm...five!" There's no thinking at all. There isn't even any 'arithmetic' going on in the little calculator. There's just causal events, electrons bumping electrons and going through gates on a circuit, structured by the program to cause 5 on the little screen when 2...+...3...= is pushed. What's going on in the calculator is a mechanism, a series of causally effective material events.

Note that the actual meaning of the numbers and arithmetic operations doesn't really matter. My toddler can push 2...+...3...=, and still get 5, without any meaning to the computation at all. 5 comes up just because it is caused materially by the physical events. My cat could push 2...+...3...=, and still get 5....the computation is completely independent of meaning.

To illustrate the lack of intentionality or meaning in a computer John Searle constructed the problem which came to be known as the "Chinese Room." Searle's illustration is as effective answer to the idea that our mental processes are just computational events such as a computer performs:

Imagine that you go to China, and get a job there. You speak only English, and don't know a word of Chinese. You work in an information booth, in which Chinese people can write questions on a piece of paper and pass the question through a slot to you inside the booth. You of course have no idea what the question is, because you can't read Chinese. However, the Chinese guys that hired you have given you a book that has written, all in Chinese, any question that could be asked, and along with it, the answer corresponding to each question. You take the question written on the paper and search through the book, until you match the Chinese characters exactly. Then you copy the Chinese answer, and return to through the slot.

The Chinese person who asked you the question believes, quite understandably, that you understand Chinese, understood the question, and were smart enough to figure out the answer. And of course, that is true of the Chinese guys who wrote the book. But it most certainly is not true of you. You don't know Chinese, you don't know what question was asked, and you don't know what the answer was.

A Chinese person outside the booth would have believed that he was interacting with a person who understood his questions and provided good answers. But what you have done is, precisely, a computation. You have mechanically matched input to output, just as a computer program does, but you have added no meaning. You understand nothing. Only the minds of the guys who wrote the Chinese book have intrinsic intentionality. Computation-by-itself does not give rise to intentionality.

Egnor concludes:

Meaning is not inherent to computation, no matter how complex the computation. Material causation - silicon-based computation in an electronic calculator, or tedious illiterate computation in a booth in Beijing, or carbon-based computation in a living brain - does not give rise to intentionality. Matter ... does not give rise to intentionality. Intentionality - meaning - is the mark of the mind.

If there is something immaterial about us, like a mind, that fact raises a host of additional questions. Where does it come from? What's its relation to the physical brain? What laws does it obey? What happens to it when the body dies? Etc. No one knows the answers to these questions, indeed it's hard to imagine how they would even be investigated. At this point, however, it's enough of a task to determine whether there are good reasons to believe that such an immaterial substance, one that plays a role in human consciousness and cognition, actually exists.

RLC

Renewal in London

Christianity is experiencing a renascence of sorts in London, long regarded as one of the most secular places in all of Britain. The focus of this renewal is an Anglican church in the upscale Kensington district called Holy Trinity Brompton which boasts a membership of 4000 and whose congregation is comprised of some of the wealthiest and best educated among London's citizens. These folks are coming to Brompton because they've realized that money and learning don't and can't provide the answers to life's deepest questions.

TIME has the story here.

RLC

Sudden Concern Over Qualifications

Couldn't Congressman Ackerman have said almost everything he says about Caroline Kennedy's lack of qualifications for a Senate seat about Barack Obama's qualifications to be president? Why do those who enthusiastically supported a blank sheet like Obama in his quest for the presidency suddenly wax all principled and punctilious about qualifications when Caroline Kennedy expresses an interest in being appointed to a vacant position? Just wondering.

RLC

Penn Jillette

Magician Penn Jillette is an atheist who has not been shy over the years in announcing his unbelief which makes this video on Breitbart quite remarkable. There is much in these few minutes that Christians and atheists would both do well to heed, especially starting at about the three minute mark:

RLC

Have Happy Friends

A brief article at Edge by two researchers named Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler claims that our happiness is not only influenced by those around us but also by those who reside at up to three degrees of separation from us:

We recently published a paper in the British Medical Journal that addressed these questions. We studied 4,739 people followed from 1983 to 2003 as part of the famous Framingham Heart Study. These individuals were embedded in a larger network of 12,067 people; they had an average of 11 connections to others in the social network (including to friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors); and their happiness was assessed every few years using a standard measure.

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person's happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends' friends, and their friends' friends' friends-that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%. For comparison, having an extra $5,000 in income (in 1984 dollars) increased the probability of being happy by about 2%.

Happiness, in short, is not merely a function of personal experience, but also is a property of groups. Emotions are a collective phenomenon.

If this is true then our happiness must also affect the happiness of thousands of people we don't even know. It's a phenomenon that ripples across entire societies.

RLC

Legal Anachronisms

Critics of the current administration have faulted the President for disregarding international law as it pertains to the treatment of captured enemy combatants and terrorists, but Clifford May, citing a National Review article by Andrew McCarthy (only available by subscription), argues that the Geneva Conventions were designed for a world that no longer exists. He maintains that modern terrorism makes the Geneva accords, at least as they are applied to modern terrorists, obsolete and irrelevant.

Here's the heart of May's column:

Andrew C. McCarthy - director of the Center for Law and Counterterrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies - writes what may be the definitive rebuttal of the now dominant narrative that the Bush administration violated international law and fundamental morality by not giving captured terrorists "the privileges the Geneva Conventions grant to honorable combatants."

He notes that what we short-handedly call the war on terrorism is complicated by the fact that the existing system of laws and treaties were designed with conventional conflicts in mind. "The animating idea of the Geneva Conventions, adopted in 1949 after the carnage of two world wars, was to civilize warfare," he writes. "Belligerents opted into the system by conduct" - that is, by obeying the laws of armed conflict.

But members of such groups as al-Qaeda (including al-Qaeda in Iraq), Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Taliban, Hezbollah, and Hamas routinely and egregiously violate the laws of war - for example, by targeting civilians, hiding among civilians, not wearing uniforms, and not carrying their weapons openly.

McCarthy, a former U.S. government terrorist prosecutor, also notes that before Bush became president, both the Washington Post and the New York Times editorialized against giving such "unlawful combatants" the status of POWs. Both approved President Ronald Reagan's 1987 decision not to sign "Protocol I," an addendum to Geneva specifically designed to extend to terrorists the Conventions' prohibition against coercive interrogations.

The Geneva Conventions are treaties, and treaties apply only to states that have signed them. You can't conclude they were meant to benefit non-state terrorist organizations unless you also believe there is no meaningful distinction between al-Qaeda and the French Resistance (as some critics of the Bush administration do indeed insist).

McCarthy elaborates: "[T]errorists cannot opt into Geneva. They fall outside because, by definition, they reject its minimum humanitarian requirements. Affording them Geneva's benefits rewards their savagery and undermines the system's civilizing objectives."

It is absurd to suggest that America can prevail in a war against terrorists by prosecuting them after they carry out attacks in which they intend to die. A rational government, conscious of its duty to protect the population, must attempt to prevent and pre-empt terrorists from completing their missions. That requires gathering solid, actionable intelligence.

"The best source of such intelligence is the interrogation of captured terrorists," McCarthy writes. "Applying the steep Geneva interrogation restrictions reserved for honorable combatants would be suicidal: Life-saving intelligence would be lost and no reciprocal benefit achieved for captured Americans, whom terrorists would torture and kill in any event."

What I find most regrettable about much of the criticism of the Bush administration's handling of detainees is the self-righteous denunciations of the use of waterboarding, which causes no lasting harm to the subject, in order to extract information that might save American lives. I think every person who criticizes even the limited use of what are euphemistically referred to as "harsh measures" ought to be asked whether they would prohibit waterboarding if they had a son or daughter whose life would be saved if the technique were employed but lost if it weren't. I wonder how many of the critics would still maintain that it's use is "deeply immoral." How many of them would be willing to tell their loved ones that they would rather they be dead than that their lives be saved by the use of technique from which a terrorist would walk away none the worse for the experience?

RLC