Time and Creation

I stated in an earlier post that it may be that young-earth creationism (YEC) and evolutionary time-lines for the age of the earth and the universe are not incompatible. YEC states that both the earth and the universe as a whole were formed about 10,000 years ago whereas the consensus scientific view is that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and the universe itself is about 14 billion years old. How then could these two views both be correct?

It depends on your view of what time is. If, as people from George Berkeley to Immanuel Kant to modern quantum physicists have suggested, the world, or in Kant's case, time, is a function of being apprehended by a conscious mind then talk about the lapse of time before there were minds to experience it is meaningless. It's like talking about what color the sky would be if there were no such thing as color vision or what color radio waves or x-rays are. They are no color at all because the proper apparatus to convert their energy into color doesn't exist.

Likewise, until there were conscious minds to experience time, perhaps there was no time at all. I wrote about this possibility about a year and a half ago in a post titled On Time and the Age of the World. Here's what I said:

Scientists tell us the universe is some 14 billion years old while young-earth creationists maintain that according to the biblical book of Genesis it's only about 10,000 years old. So which is it? It may be that both sides are correct - it all depends on how we look at time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

Shrinking Hillary's Profile

Dick Morris argues that the Obama team has effectively isolated and marginalized Hillary Clinton by relieving her of most of her important responsibilities and giving them to people who will have greater access to the White House. Doubtless this was not done unintentionally. By taking her out of the limelight enjoyed by previous Secretaries of State it makes it harder for her to mount an effective challenge to Obama in 2012.

By putting her at State the Obama people removed her from the Senate where she was a high-profile figure. Now, if she remains at the State Department, she's too far removed from the action to draw much publicity or to build her résumé, and if she resigns in frustration then she's left with no platform at all upon which to launch a campaign.

Even so, it seems that the safest course for the President would have been to make her an integral part of his team, or at least make it appear that she was. This would have made it much harder for her to generate sympathy among Democrats for a primary challenge against the gracious incumbent. She would have appeared ungrateful and disloyal. As it is, she, and Bill, are probably now more determined than ever to send Mr. Obama back to Chicago in 2012.

RLC

Happy Birthday, Charles

Forget terrorism. Forget the economic crisis. Forget the Chinese and the Russians who still want to bury us. Forget Dick Cheney and George Bush. The Gallup people have uncovered the greatest threat to America's future in a new poll, the results of which have just been released: Less than 40% of Americans say they believe in "the theory of evolution."

For those who think that belief in evolution is the linchpin to achieving secular nirvana this must come as dispiriting news, and on the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, no less.

Twenty five percent of respondents do not believe in the theory and 36% had no opinion. To be sure, the more education the respondent had the more likely they were to accept evolution, but, in fact, the results of the survey strike me as meaningless unless the pollsters actually defined the word evolution. If they didn't, how could the question be answered meaningfully?

Evolution could mean the descent of all life from a single simple primitive cell. Or it could refer to mere variation around a genetic mean. Or it could mean nothing more than that things change. Without explaining what is to be understood by the word "evolution" pretty much any results must be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Even so, the fact that only four in ten Americans accept the theory, however it is defined, suggests that we're likely to hear a lot more invective along the lines of Richard Dawkins' infamous imprecation that anyone who doesn't believe in Darwinian evolution is either "ignorant, stupid or insane."

RLC

Feedback

There are a couple of thoughtful letters on our Feedback Page which you might wish to check out.

RLC

Factually Inaccurate

Ed Morrissey makes a case that President Obama told two brazen lies to the American people at his press conference Monday night and displayed on top of that a distressing lack of historical understanding. I didn't see the conference, but I did hear about his statements and as much as I'd like to think that he was just misinformed or mistaken, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that he deliberately misrepresented the Republican position on the stimulus package. There's simply no excuse for anyone to claim that the Republican position is one of "just doing nothing" about our economic crisis.

I'm less certain that I agree with Morrissey on Obama's second "lie,"which, I think, can be more charitably chalked up to the President's characteristic lack of precision.

Morrissey may well be correct, however, that Obama really doesn't seem to know much history. I thought this in listening to him talk about Roosevelt's response to the Great Depression, and Morrissey points out that President Obama got the economic circumstances in Japan in the 1990s exactly backward - a mistake that has important implications for his "stimulus" package.

Anyway, you should read his column for yourself. It gives insight into the man who will be at the helm for at least the next four years.

RLC

Science Vs. Religion (Pt. II)

We begin Part II (See here for Part I) of our consideration of biologist Jerry Coyne's essay in The New Republic on the incompatibility of science and religion with this passage by Coyne:

True, there are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind. (It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers. )....The real question is whether there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science. Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two institutions must be considered essentially antagonistic?

Science and religion are incompatible, implies Coyne, because science accepts only what can be empirically demonstrated whereas religion admits of truths that are not testable and thus not subject to empirical confirmation. Would that this were true. If it were then there might not be any real conflict since naturalistic scientists would recognize the limits to their domain. As it is, there's conflict for precisely the reason that many scientists wish to extend the realm of science beyond the empirical to encompass all reality and thought, including the metaphysical, while at the same time criticizing religion for making metaphysical claims and being insufficiently scientific. Science serves for many scientists as a kind of Trojan horse that enables them to smuggle into their work and writing a materialistic, atheistic worldview that has no empirical warrant.

A few examples of this overreach may suffice. Scientists, either some or most, hold fast to the following things, none of which are supported by any empirical evidence:

1. The Many Worlds Hypothesis: The idea that ours is just one of a nearly infinite number of universes, all of which are closed off from each other thus defying detection.

2. The Oscillating Universe Hypothesis: The theory that our universe has expanded and collapsed an infinite number of times.

3. String theory: The idea that the fundamental units of material substance are unimaginably tiny vibrating filaments of energy.

4. The existence of other dimensions: The theory that the four dimensions of space-time are only part of physical reality.

5. The Principle of Uniformity: The assumption that the laws and properties of the universe are homogenous and constant everywhere throughout the cosmos.

6. The Assumption of Uniformitarianism: The idea that the same processes and forces at work in the world today have always been at work at essentially the same rates.

7. The Scientific Method: The idea that there is a particular methodology that defines the scientific process and which ought to be followed.

8. The Law of Parsimony: The principle that assumes that the simplest explanation which fits all the facts is the best.

9. The assumption that human reason is trustworthy: The notion that a faculty which has evolved because it made us better fit to survive is also coincidentally a dependable guide to something else, truth, which has no necessary connection to human survival.

10. The assumption that we should value truth: The idea that truth should be esteemed more highly than competing values, like, for instance, personal comfort or group advancement.

11. The assumption that there is objective truth: This is the assumption that there is truth about the world that is independent of our own subjective biases, perceptions, etc.

12. The preference in science for naturalistic explanations: This is a preference based upon an untestable assumption that all knowable truth is found only in the natural realm.

13. Naturalistic abiogenesis: The belief that natural forces are sufficient in themselves to have produced life.

14. The assumption that if something is physically possible and mathematically elegant then, given the age of the universe, it probably happened.

15. The assumption that the cosmos is atelic: I.e. that it has no purpose.

16. The assumption that there's a world external to our own minds.

17. Materialistic reductionism: The conviction that all phenomena, including mental phenomena, can be ultimately explained solely in terms of physics and chemistry.

18. Assumption that the universe arose out of a "vacuum matrix" rather than out of nothing.

19. The appropriateness of making ethical claims regarding the environment, climate change, nuclear power, cloning, or genetic engineering. Ethical judgments lie beyond the scope of science but that doesn't stop scientists, qua scientists, from making them.

20. The Concept of the Meme: According to biologist Richard Dawkins memes are the cultural analog to genes. They are ideas or customs that are believed by Dawkins and others to get passed along according to their survival value rather than their truth value (see #9, above). An example of this, unfortunately, is the concept of the meme itself.

21. The criteria by which we distinguish science from non-science.

All of these transcend the realm of empirical science yet scientists like Coyne doubtless accept most of them. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, it's just that it's a bit disingenuous to claim that scientists confine themselves only to what is testable and empirical, as though scientists were concerned merely with accumulating and compiling facts about nature and not in trying to interpret what those facts mean. As soon as they do try to decipher the meaning of their data, however, they're doing the same thing that religion does, and that's why there's conflict.

There are two competing metanarratives vying for people's allegiance. One claims that nature is all there is and the other claims that nature, by itself, is inadequate to explain all we know about ourselves and the cosmos. Neither metanarrative is scientific, they're both metaphysical. The former seeks to infiltrate the culture under the guise of science, but it goes well beyond the pursuit of empirical knowledge. The naturalist, or materialist, believes that he alone should have the right to determine the meaning of scientific data, but why should he be granted that privilege? Why should an atheistic worldview be awarded supremacy over all competitors?

The role of science is to discover the data, and the role of philosophy is to determine which explanation best conforms to the data we have. Thus the conflict is not between science and religion, but between two disparate philosophical approaches to the data: atheism and theism, naturalism and supernaturalism. In that conflict science, properly understood, is neutral.

RLC

Fathers of the Surge

General Petraeus rightly gets a lot of credit for the ongoing pacification and stabilization of Iraq, but according to Tom Ricks at the Washington Post it was General Raymond Odierno and retired General Jack Keane who initiated the idea of the surge. It was these two men who circumvented the chain of command at the Pentagon and pushed the Bush administration to implement the escalation of forces that was primarily responsible for the present state of affairs.

Anyone interested in the recent history of the Iraq war will find Ricks' article a fascinating read.

RLC

Blowing Themselves Up

Suicide bombing in Afghanistan is in decline, and Strategy Page tells us why. The quick summary is that Afghans are extremely resentful of the tactic, the Taliban lack the technical resources to support suicide bombers, and the coalition forces have been successful in dismantling the few cells which carried out these gruesome acts of terror.

They conclude their piece with this observation:

Suicide bombing is described as a weapon of the weak. What it cannot be described as is a weapon of the victorious. In the last few decades, whoever used suicide bombers not only failed to gain anything, but saw their cause harmed in the process. You can draw your own conclusions, as have most Afghans.

RLC

Who's to Say?

Over the years we have brought to our readers' attention the sublime beauty of Islamic law when instances of it came to our notice. Here's an example we came across thanks to a tip from Hot Air:

A Saudi judge has ordered a woman should be jailed for a year and receive 100 lashes after she was gang-raped, it was claimed last night. The 23-year-old woman, who became pregnant after her ordeal, was reportedly assaulted after accepting a lift from a man.

He took her to a house to the east of the city of Jeddah where she was attacked by him and four of his friends throughout the night. She later discovered she was pregnant and made a desperate attempt to get an abortion at the King Fahd Hospital for Armed Forces.

According to the Saudi Gazette, she eventually 'confessed' to having 'forced intercourse' with her attackers and was brought before a judge at the District Court in Jeddah. He ruled she had committed adultery - despite not even being married - and handed down a year's prison sentence, which she will serve in a prison just outside the city.

She is still pregnant and will be flogged once she has had the child.

The Saudi Arabian legal system practices a strict form of medieval law. Women have very few rights and are not even allowed to drive. They are also banned from going out in public in the company of men other than male relatives.

Some of our readers may be thinking that, well, this sounds pretty bad, but that's their culture and what's right for them is right. After all, who's to say they're wrong? Right and wrong are relative to the time and culture in which people live, are they not?

Suppose, though, that you were visiting Saudi Arabia and this happened to you. Would you still think they were doing the right thing? Is not justice a universal moral obligation? In what sense is what was done to this woman just?

Suppose, further, that a community of Saudi immigrants in the U.S. engaged in this particular practice. Would we say that "that's their culture so if it's right for them then it's right?" It does no good to reply that they are now in our culture and should abide by our values. The fact is they have a foot in two different cultures so which should be morally authoritative? How does one decide that? Does the majority decide what's right? If so, how do we determine the majority? Is it the majority within the subculture or the majority within a nation's boundaries? Aren't these all arbitrary criteria?

And if we agree on which majority should be morally authoritative how do we determine what the majority thinks? And if we could determine what the majority thinks then the minority opinion must be wrong ipso facto. Someone living in Saudi Arabia who thinks that whipping this woman for the crime of getting raped is immoral would himself be holding to a morally wrong position, by definition. He's in the minority so he can't be right.

Islamic law is horrific. Ethical relativism is hopelessly confused. They're both for people who prefer not to think.

RLC

The Guilty Party

Recently we linked to a list of people that the British paper The Guardian deemed culpable for the current financial crisis which began, you'll remember, with the imminent collapse of government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) like lending institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Prominent on that list were Alan Greenspan and George Bush and absent, oddly, were any congressional Democrats.

This video of a Fox News report, however shows that Greenspan and the Bush administration in its first term sought greater oversight and more effective regulation of the GSEs but were resisted by congressional Democrats, particularly Barney Frank and Chuck Schumer. It explains the time-line which reveals that, contrary to the claims of Democrats that the failure of the GSEs was due to GOP unwillingness to regulate them, it was, in fact, the result of the failure of congressional Democrats to support Bush administration proposals to strengthen oversight.

The Democrats didn't want to rein in Fannie and Freddie and tighten their lending practices because they thought that doing so would make it more difficult for low income people to get home mortgages. A Senator at the time, Barack Obama and the black congressional caucus pushed the GSEs to keep their lending practices lenient so that people who were bad risks could still buy houses. Obama, after less than two years in the Senate, was rewared for his efforts by becoming the second highest recipient of cash contributions from Fannie and Freddie - which bespeaks their gratitude to him for helping to keep them unregulated:

After this display of wretched misjudgment on the part of people charged with congressional oversight of the GSEs how can they still be serving in Washington today? Why isn't this dereliction publicized more vigorously? You can be assured that had the fault lain with Republicans we'd be hearing about it every night until the villains were all either in jail or hounded from office. The major media has rightly been vocal in their outrage of corporate golden parachutes awarded to CEOs whose judgment was so bad that the companies they ran crashed and burned. Yet politicians are also being rewarded for abject incompetence. They get elected and re-elected to high office, and the liberal media helps them do it by keeping the people in the dark about the role these people played in bringing us to the brink of financial ruin. The MSM helps put into office to solve the crisis the very people who caused it. What a country.

RLC

Science Vs. Religion (Pt. I)

The recent issue of The New Republic contains an essay by Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne on why he believes there can be no rapprochement between science and "religion." I place the word religion in quotes because it's a slippery term and Coyne never really defines what he means by it. At any rate, over the next several days I'd like to offer a few thoughts on Coyne's column.

He starts off talking about Darwinian evolution, the belief that all life arose through blind, purposeless physical processes:

The ideas that made Darwin's theory so revolutionary are precisely the ones that repel much of religious America, for they imply that, far from having a divinely scripted role in the drama of life, our species is the accidental and contingent result of a purely natural process.

This is an important point, one that's often lost on people. The intellectual conflict today is not between "religion" and evolution. There's no necessary incompatibility between the two, not even between young-earth creationism and evolution (as I hope to point out in a future post). The conflict, rather, is between Darwinian evolution and the belief that an intellect is involved in the creation of the world. Darwinism denies any role for purpose, intention, or mind in the generation and diversification of life and it is this view, which is at bottom a non-scientific, philosophical belief, which many religious people reject.

Coyne goes on to lament that:

[W]hile 74 percent of Americans believe that angels exist, only 25 percent accept that we evolved from apelike ancestors.

Little wonder, actually. Perhaps three out of four people find it easier to believe that angels exist than to believe that a process like the Krebs cycle or the human brain could have evolved by pure, mindless serendipity. How many people have ever studied the question of human evolution - at least subsequent to their high school graduation, at which ceremony their minds are purged of all that they learned over the last couple of years anyway? What reason do most people have at hand for believing that we evolved from apelike ancestors? Should they believe it just because the scientific high priests like Coyne tell them they should? If so, how is that different than the warrant people have for believing, on the authority of their pastors and priests, in angels?

In any event, it's hard to draw any conclusions about the significance of statistics like these. Likewise with this factoid that Coyne serves up:

As Karl Giberson notes in [his book] Saving Darwin, "Most people in America have a neighbor who thinks the Earth is ten thousand years old."

I'm not sure what we should make of this bit of snideness, either. Should we assume that there are a lot of uneducated bumpkins in the world, or are we to conclude that a lot of these young-earthers are so anti-intellectual that they refuse to allow evidence to trump their religion? Probably Coyne intends for us to think both, but refusing to allow evidence to trump one's deepest convictions is not just a fault of the average guy in the neighborhood. There are a lot of educated people who are just as impervious to evidence as Coyne believes young-earthers to be. Among our professoriat, for example, there are many who, despite all the empirical evidence to the contrary, still believe that people are better off under Marxist communism than under any other political-economic system. If we're going to poke fun at beliefs that are at odds with the evidence maybe beliefs for which there is direct empirical refutation should be held in even greater derision than those against which the evidence is more indirect. In any case, Coyne's attempt to discredit American religiosity by associating it with young-earth creationism is no more persuasive than trying to discredit philosophical materialism by associating it with communism.

More tomorrow.

RLC

Proving His Point

Ben Stein is well-known for the documentary Expelled which exposes the academic closed-mindedness and intolerance of the Darwinian establishment. Stein documents in the film how those in the scientific community who question Darwinian orthodoxy often lose their jobs and suffer other forms of professional and social ostracism.

The film elicited a flurry of protests, denials, and other caterwauling from the members of that establishment who objected that Stein was exaggerating, and that there's certainly no persecution of those who question Darwinism nor stifling of speech. None.

Now the University of Vermont has turned around and demonstrated the very intolerance Stein claims pervades the liberal academic establishment by essentially rescinding an invitation to speak at the University's graduation ceremony. Apparently there was so much hostility to having a commencement speaker who challenged Darwinian orthodoxy, and who had the temerity to film some of the big-wig Darwinians - like Richard Dawkins - making themselves look foolish, that the president of the school urged Mr. Stein to cancel his engagement.

Talk about making the other guy's argument for him ...

Meanwhile, a contrite Stein kneels before the shrine of the great man himself seeking absolution for his impertinence. Maybe this will get him back into the good graces of the broad-minded folks at U of V:

RLC

LeConte's Sparrow

This tiny beauty has created quite a stir among Pennsylvania birders. It's a very rare and lovely sparrow found by a gentleman named Al Guarente in a grassy meadow in Darlington Park near Media, PA this winter. Normally the LeConte's stays west of the Mississippi and breeds in the north-central tier states and Canada, but every once in a while one makes its way east during the winter.

The bird is a skulker, staying hidden low in grasses and brush, so it's really quite amazing that it was found at all. I was fortunate enough to view it for about twenty minutes on Saturday. A photo of the actual individual seen at Darlington park can be found here.

RLC

Quantum Enigma

Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner are physicists who've written an excellent book for the layman on some of the perplexing mysteries entailed by quantum theory. The book is titled Quantum Enigma and the phenomena they discuss are certainly enigmatic. Not only do they reveal the world to be almost incomprehensible, especially at the level of the atom, but they have fascinating implications for our view of reality. Here are several of the more perplexing conclusions that quantum theorists have drawn:

1. Microscopic reality - atoms, atomic particles, etc. - is observer-dependent. There is no reality apart from observation. Nothing exists in the sense that we normally think of the word until a conscious being actually interacts with it.

2. Microscopic objects exist in more than one place simultaneously. Consider two boxes into which an atom has been randomly inserted by a machine. Since the atom was observed in the machine (let's assume) we can say that it exists, but we can't know in which box it was inserted. Indeed, until someone actually looks in the box the atom is literally in both of them, it has a dual existence, but once the lid is lifted on one of the boxes and someone peers inside the atom is found either in one or the other. In other words, the observer not only creates the reality (and a past history appropriate to the present reality) but the atom actually existed in two places at once prior to the observation.

3. Microscopic objects are entangled even at vast distances. Suppose two packets of light energy hurtle away from each other at the speed of light for two weeks. Suddenly, an observer somewhere in the galaxy passes one packet through a filter that imposes upon it a certain physical property. Simultaneously, the other particle will display the same property to another observer tracking it, even though there was no way the second particle could "know" what happened to the first. The property was created by the observation of that property in the first particle. Every particle is entangled throughout the cosmos so that what affects one affects them all. Instantly.

4. What is true of the microscopic world is true of the macroscopic world. Since large objects are made of tiny atoms what is true of atoms individually turns out to be true of atoms in the aggregate. Nevertheless, these quantum effects are much more difficult to observe in large objects.

Bishop George Berkeley appears to have been correct when he pronounced some 250 years ago that "To be is to be perceived." If everything is determined by consciousness, if things don't have any existence apart from being observed, if particles at one edge of a galaxy are connected instantaneously to particles across the galaxy then our world is not at all as it seems to us at our scale of perception.

The authors quote physicist Martin Rees who said that the universe "could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years late. The universe exists because we observe it."

It seems totally bizarre that the existence of the world should depend entirely upon our perception of it yet Rosenblum and Kuttner argue persuasively that there's no getting around the fact that it does seem dependent upon consciousness. Perhaps we should consider Berkeley's solution and posit that everything in the world is observed continuously by a universal consciousness. That seems like such a plausible, obvious hypothesis, but in all their speculations Rosenblum and Kuttner never mention it, even though everything in their book leads to the possibility that the world is an idea in the mind of a cosmic consciousness, a God.

Even theists will blanche at the suggestion that the world as we experience it is an illusion, and yet the more one reads about the implications of quantum theory, a theory that is said to be the best tested hypothesis in all of modern physics, a theory that provides the theoretical underpinning for much modern electronic technology - things like MRIs, lasers, transisters all rely upon it - the more one realizes that the world cannot be as we perceive it to be. Could it be that the world of our senses is, like the Matrix, not true reality and that the really real lies elsewhere?

RLC

Squandering America's Trust

Charles Krauthammer at The Washington Post wields his journalistic scalpel to dissect some of the pretensions of the new administration. Here's his warmup:

"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe." -- President Obama, Feb. 4.

Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.

Krauthammer deftly filets Obama's appointment of Tom Daschle who "represented everything Obama said he'd come to Washington to upend," and the stimulus package which is in large part a hog trough for special interests:

It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

President Obama can still recapture the credibility he has forfeited in these last two weeks, but he's going to have to want to do it. Right now he looks just like any other politician - what he does has little relationship to what he says. Krauthammer again:

After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.

Krauthammer's trenchant analysis notwithstanding, most people in the country still want President Obama to succeed. They want to believe him when he promises a new kind of politics and transparency in the White House. He can still be what many hoped he would be, but not this way. He has squandered a lot of credibility and good will in the last two weeks and can't afford to fritter away much more.

RLC

Books for Black History Month

February is Black History Month and National Review Online has asked a number of distinguished thinkers, both black and white, to share their thoughts on their choice for the one book on the black experience in America that everyone should read.

My vote, had they asked for it, would have gone to Roots by Alex Haley for first place, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin for runner-up and W.E.B. DuBois' Souls of Black Folk would have received honorable mention. To my surprise, neither Roots nor Souls were nominated by the NRO reviewers, but several other worthy books were, and you can see what they were at the link.

RLC

Hyperinflation

Bill has forwarded me a link to an interview with Peter Schiff, an economist who foresaw the economic mess we're in today long before it arrived. He argues now that the only thing worse than doing nothing to solve our crisis would be to do what the Democrats are doing:

[N]o government action means a "terrible" recession. But the path of increased government intervention will lead to "unmitigated disaster"

He believes that we should bite the bullet and ride out the recession. Our economy will be much healthier in the long run if we do. Obama's Economic Recovery Act, on the other hand, is, he believes, almost certain to throw us into a hyperinflation depression.

This means that our currency will be so devalued that even basic staples will cost too much to buy. Imagine a loaf of bread, for instance, priced at $12 and a gallon of gas at about the same price. Most people won't be able to buy anything and consequently there will be massive job losses and enormous social disruption and dislocation as even essential services are curtailed.

Watch the video at the link and pray that Schiff is wrong.

RLC

Let Me Explain About the Fifty Ways

Stephen Spruiell and Kevin Williamson at NRO list and explain the 50 most egregious items in the stimulus bill being debated by the Senate. Some of these are actually items I'd like to see get funded, for example $1.7 billion for maintaining national parks, but they don't belong in a bill whose purpose is to create jobs. They should be debated on their own merits in separate legislation.

Of every item in the bill it should be asked how many jobs will this create? If it will not generate jobs, private sector jobs, then it should be taken out of legislation that is being justified on the grounds that we need it to stimulate the economy.

The stimulus package spends a lot of money, $900 billion, much of which will stimulate nothing. Spruiell and Williamson explain why.

RLC

The College Loan Hoax

As you read this, high school seniors across the land are busy figuring out how they'll pay for their college education. Many of them have heard how college graduates earn over the course of their careers $1 million more than their friends who opt not to go to college, and they're anxious to spend the next four years preparing to partake of that pie.

Unfortunately, paying for their education is not easy for many students and therein lies a real hazard according to Kathy Kristoff at Forbes:

Offsetting that million-dollar income discrepancy is the $46,700 four-year cost of tuition, fees, books, room and board at a public school and $99,900 at a private one--even after financial aid, scholarships and grants. Add all this to the equation and college grads don't pull even with high school grads in lifetime income until age 33 on average, the College Board says. Even that doesn't include the $125,000 in pay students forgo over four years.

The risks are hefty. Half of students entering college never earn a degree. Six in ten African-Americans depart without one. "Hundreds of thousands of young people leave our higher education system unsuccessfully, burdened with large student loans that must be repaid, but without the benefit of the wages a college degree provides," warned a 2004 Education Trust study.

One in four college grads takes home considerably less than the top quartile of high school grads, according to a College Board study. Even some people with doctorates earn less than people without so much as an associate degree, it shows.

In other words, students often take on enormous debt to pay for their education in anticipation of securing a job upon graduation that'll enable them to pay off their loans, but that often doesn't happen. The situation, Kristoff says, is roughly parallel to the home mortgage crisis and she tells stories of students who expect to be saddled with their debt burden for the rest of their lives.

Anyone considering borrowing to pay for college should read her essay. The take home message is that college loans can have lots of hidden costs and can take decades to repay.

On the other hand, if the college loan business is indeed structured like the home mortgage business, as Kristoff asserts, maybe students should borrow all they can, even if they don't have to. If enough of them default on their loans the government will come in and pay off their debt, and they'll have gotten an education essentially for free, paid for by the taxpayers, while the chumps who worked and saved so they could pay their way without borrowing will be out $100,000, or so. Is this a great country or what?

RLC

Explain Please

Barack Obama is a Christian theist, i.e. he believes in God. He also supports completely unrestricted access to any and all abortions, even if the intended victim is born alive. So, how do we reconcile those two beliefs with this statement made today, Jim Geraghty tells us, at the National Prayer Breakfast:

"We know there is no God who condones the killing of an innocent human being."

Does this mean that he has changed his mind about either of the two beliefs we attributed to him? If so, which one? If not, then what on earth is he talking about?

RLC

Kudos for the Cap

Barack Obama has received criticism from some conservatives for his decision to limit bailout money to corporations which agree to cap salaries at $500,000. I think the criticism is misguided, and I commend the president for taking this step.

We should be wary of government extending its tentacles into American business, of course, and businesses should, as a rule, be regulated primarily by the market, not by bureaucrats. Even so, and even though the bailout may be a bad idea, given that it's going to happen, it's simply obscene that corporations which are taking huge sums of money from taxpayers are giving it to CEOs in multimillion dollar bonuses - stipends which are often essentially rewards for failure.

If our tax dollars are going to subsidize a corporation, then it's simply prudent to demand that the corporation's CEOs be required to tighten their very ample belts and spend that money on making their business solvent. Those who think otherwise might ask themselves what they would do if a relative came to them for a loan to help them out of a very difficult financial situation, and, having agreed to grant the loan at some cost to themselves, they then learned that the relative decided to use part of the money to go on a Caribbean cruise.

I think they'd probably tell the relative that that's not how they understood the money would be used, but if that is what their relative plans to do with it there won't be any more of it forthcoming. Likewise, neither should the taxpayers be paying for the "Caribbean cruises" of corporate executives.

Kudos to the president for seeing the matter the same way.

RLC

How Many Jobs??

Okay. I've been convinced that we need the unstimulus package, and we need it right now. There's not a moment to lose. I didn't think that, of course, until I heard Speaker Pelosi inform the nation that we're currently losing jobs at a rate of 500 million a month. That's a lot of jobs, as you can probably surmise, especially since our total population is only about 300 million. In the last month alone we've evidently lost 200 million more jobs than we have people. That means that every worker has lost two jobs, and currently every person in the U.S. is unemployed. Or something like that.

Now I see why people are worried that the Democrat stimulus is much too stingy. That package, according to President Obama, will create only three million jobs. Even if those three million were all created in one month we'd still suffer a net loss of 470 million jobs, according to Speaker Pelosi.

Questions are being raised at Hot Air about whether Ms Pelosi's numbers include people in all 57 states or just some of the states:

Don't think too much about what I'm about to say if you're near a loaded weapon or an open window:

These people are running our economy.

RLC

Flight 1549

For those who haven't had quite enough of the story of the US Airways flight which was downed by a flock of geese and made an emergency landing on the Hudson river here's an interesting summary of that amazing event written by Rick Newman.

Unlike a lot of the coverage I've seen and read about the skill of the pilot who landed the plane, Newman spreads the credit around to the entire crew. The pilot deserves a lot of praise but so do the first officer and the three flight attendents, and Newman tells us why.

RLC

Free Pass

Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer have followed Bill Richardson's example and withdrawn their names as appointees to high positions in the Obama administration because they did not pay their taxes. Timothy Geithner did not pay his taxes eithre but refused to withdraw and was confirmed as Secreatry of the Treasury. As such he will head the IRS and make sure that you pay your taxes. Al Franken did not pay his taxes but may nevertheless be elected (sort of) to the Senate, and Charley Rangel still serves as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the committee that writes tax law, even though he didn't pay his taxes either.

Yes, yes. Republicans can be corrupt, too, but here's the point. If these were Republican congressmen or appointees of a Republican president, would there not be serious questions raised, not only about the appointees, but also about that president's competence or his integrity? When is the media going to start to wonder out loud about the connection between these very flawed nominees and the man who is selecting them? Or do the President and his appointees, as well as the tax evading pols, get a pass because they're all liberal Democrats?

Up till now the media has been critical of the appointments, to be sure, and they've even criticized the vetting process which failed to catch the troublesome behavior, but they've been reluctant to take the final step, a step they would've eagerly taken were the President George Bush.

If the media and others are going to overlook the implications of so many ethically challenged selections, if they're going to ignore the fact that the people who will be crafting and voting on legislation that determines how much we have to pay in taxes have themselves dodged paying their own taxes, then how seriously can we take them when they claim to criticize Republicans on the basis of principles and standards that only seem to apply to Republicans?

RLC

Gaza in Microcosm

People sometimes wonder what is the difference between Hamas and Fatah, the two organizations contending for control of the Palestinian people. As far as I can tell the difference is that Hamas wants to kill Israelis now and Fatah wants to hold off until they have a better chance at actually succeeding. This video, taken at a pro-Palestinian rally in Minnesota last month, illustrates why the Palestinian people suffer so. They're cursed with leaders like the people you see here:

May God help the Palestinian people. Their leaders sure won't.

RLC

Another Milestone in Iraq

Of course the situation could deteriorate in the future, but as of now Iraq looks like it's on its way to becoming a stable, vigorous, and prosperous democracy. To almost no media fanfare the Iraqi people went to the polls Saturday to participate in an election that many congressional Democrats predicted would never happen and some did their best to insure wouldn't happen.

The same people who insisted a year or so ago that the war was lost and that we should abandon Iraq forthwith, people like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, are stonily silent now that the war appears to be just about won.

The surge has worked and the Iraqi people, at least for now, are living in relative peace. For that almost miraculous state of affairs much credit must go to President George Bush and General David Petraeus (whom the sophomoric lefties at Move On.org fatuously labeled General Betray Us because he was Bush's point man in bringing peace to the people of Iraq).

The Iraqi election spotlights some historic achievements - a major defeat of al Qaeda, the liberation of 25 million people from tyranny, the success of Bush's philosophy of promoting freedom and democracy, the capability of America to accomplish what no other nation on earth could have succeeded in doing, and the intellectual and moral discrediting of the left which opposed Bush every step of the way - all of which goes to explain, perhaps, why the major news media outlets have had so little to say about it.

RLC

Rogue's Gallery

Bill sends along a link to an article in the Guardian which profiles the twenty-five people most responsible for our current economic woes. At the head of their list is former chairman of the Fed Alan Greenspan.

It's an interesting list, and I'm sure everyone on it deserves to be to one extent or another. My only reservation is that it reflects too much the Guardian's left-wing, anti-free market bias. There are a lot more Democrats who should have made the list, but didn't. Barney Frank and Maxine Waters, for example, should have been given due recognition for their valiant efforts to obstruct closer oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So, too, should the former CEOs of these two lending organizations, Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson. Moreover, groups like ACORN have a legitimate gripe about being denied due recognition on the Guardian's list. These community activists often pressured banks under threat of lawsuits to make loans to "ninjas" (No Income, No Job Applicants). They deserve at least an honorable mention.

Moreover, if the Democrats are successful in saddling our children and grandchildren with another trillion dollars of debt from the current $900 billion unstimulus package we'll be able to add Barack Obama and the entire Democratic Congressional delegation to the list as well.

It's a big tent and everybody who deserves it should be given credit for their efforts.

RLC

Super Bowl Commercial

Okay. So it's become de rigueur to render an opinion on the Super Bowl commercials. For what it's worth here's my favorite:

Everyone of these E-Trade baby spots makes me laugh when I see them. The game itself was pretty good, too.

RLC

Bush and Obama: War Criminals

I'm sure the LA Times has this story wrong. I can't believe that after all the huffing and puffing throughout the campaign about the need for HopeandChange in the way we treat terrorist detainees, after all the assurances that an Obama administration would follow a different, more law-abiding, more human-rights-sensitive course than did the Bush administration, after all the caterwauling by the left over the abuses of detainees' dignity by the CIA, after all the fretting and fuming about torture of said detainees, that the Obama administration is, well, here's the LA Times' headline:

OBAMA PRESERVES RENDITIONS AS COUNTER-TERRORISM TOOL

Rendition, for those who are just tuning in, is the practice of sending captured terrorists back to their country of origin rather than holding them in prison ourselves. The practice began, it is often forgotten, under the Clinton administration as a way of inveigling certain intelligence from terrorists who resisted giving it up when questioned by American agents who were able to do little more to elicit information from recalcitrant killers than look at them sternly. Sending them back to countries like Egypt and Pakistan where the Geneva conventions on torture are printed on their bathroom tissue guaranteed that the information would be forthcoming in short order.

Many thought this was a dastardly move by the Bush forces to circumvent the law against torture. They raised a great hew and cry and insisted that this policy would not stand under a Democrat administration, and certainly not under the aegis of an apostle of Human Rights such as Barack Obama. They want to bring Bush to trial even now for this "war crime."

Well, not only is President Obama continuing the practice, according to the article he's actually going to expand it. In fact, he's left himself little choice. Since he has ordered the closing of Guantanamo our options with prisoners taken in the War on Terrorism are either release, rendition, secret military tribunals, or execution. Guantanamo gave us a fifth option, but the left insisted we close it down, for reasons which to me were never very clear and I doubt were clear to anyone else either.

Well, they're getting their wish so now we're left with rendition or secret trials (or execution, if you're a hard-liner), but the left opposes both.

Anyway, perhaps the most amusing line in the Times article was this one:

The decision to preserve the program did not draw major protests, even among human rights groups. Leaders of such organizations attribute that to a sense that nations need certain tools to combat terrorism.

Funny how what's evil when Bush did it becomes a necessary "tool" when Obama does it. It's nice to know that human rights organizations and advocates are politically and ideologically neutral.

RLC

Bring Back the Untouchables

Evidently, anyone hoping for a high position in the Obama administration would do well to have on his or her r�sum� the fact that one is a tax cheat. The Democratic motto seems to be that paying taxes is for chumps. When you're an RIP (Really Important Person) you need not be bothered with the duties that burden mere citizens.

First it turned out that Timothy Geithner, Obama's selection for Secretary of the Treasury, did not pay his own taxes until he was about to be nominated to be our nation's chief tax collector. Now we read that the President's choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Daschle, also "overlooked" a measly $83,000 of consulting income in 2007. When was the last time you forgot about making $83,000?

Isn't this the sort of thing they sent Al Capone to jail for? Where's Elliot Ness when you need him? Does not the Obama team vet these people, or is it that they just don't care?

RLC

Serenity Under Fire

J.R. Dunn at The American Thinker writes an excellent reprise of the awful treatment George Bush's opponents sought to inflict upon him:

It can be stated without fear of serious argument that no previous president has been treated as brutally, viciously, and unfairly as George W. Bush.

Bush 43 endured a deliberate and planned assault on everything he stood for, everything he was involved in, everything he tried to accomplish. Those who worked with him suffered nearly as much (and some even more -- at least one, Scooter Libby, was convicted on utterly specious charges in what amounts to a show trial).

His detractors were willing to risk the country's safety, its economic health, and the very balance of the democratic system of government in order to get at him. They were out to bring him down at all costs, or at the very least destroy his personal and presidential reputation. At this they have been half successful, at a high price for the country and its government.

Although everyone insists on doing so, it is impossible to judge Bush, his achievements, or his failings, without taking these attacks into account. Before any serious analysis of the Bush presidency can be made, some attempt to encompass the campaign against him must be carried out. I hope no one is holding his breath.

Dunn goes on to discuss the reasons for this treatment, and comes to some interesting conclusions. He argues that a large part of it is ideological. The three most vilified presidents in recent history have been Republicans and, although Dunn doesn't say this, throughout the last two centuries, starting with the communists, indeed with Marx himself, people who gravitated to the far left have often been people who are personally vicious. It seems that a predilection for left-wing politics goes hand in hand, like linked genes, with a predilection for personal invective.

I've known people on the right to be uncivil, to be sure, but it seems to be almost a prerequisite for membership in the secular left. Check your local letters to the editor columns in the paper. The most unkind, churlish writers are almost always people whose politics are both secular and off on the left end of the political spectrum. Conservative writers may be angry, but the ones who are just mean are usually lefties.

For some reason that perhaps a psychologist could explain these folks often delight in the personal misfortunes of their political enemies and not infrequently hope that harm will befall those they oppose. Read Dunn's column. If you're new to the political battleground it'll be an eye-opener.

RLC

Redemption in the Movies

Christianity Today lists their ten most "redemptive" movies of 2008 plus a lot of honorable mentions. Winning top honors is Wall-E. How many of their ten have you seen?

RLC

Prevent Gonorrhea, Stimulate the Economy

Maybe this clip doesn't give Speaker Pelosi's full answer to the question of how $335 million in the unstimulus bill for STD prevention will actually stimulate the economy. At least I hope it doesn't because if it does then this country is in very deep trouble with such as Ms Pelosi at the helm:

I can't help but wonder what she said next. Perhaps it was that with fewer STD victims laid up there'd be more people out in the malls spending money to jumpstart the economy. Now, I take a backseat to no one when it comes to finding awful consequences of the sexual revolution, but it never occurred to me that one might be that it has resulted in a contraction of the marketplace.

There's just so much to learn from our political leaders. It's going to be a very edifying and exciting four years.

RLC

Why the Goose Might Get Cooked

If the people of this nation ever decide to kill the goose (capitalism) that has laid the golden eggs (American prosperity) it will be largely the result of two quite different influences. The first is the righteous anger provoked in people by the sheer greed and opulence flaunted by the modern captains of industry. Maureen Dowd gives voice to this execrable insensitivity in a recent New York Times column:

Despite losing $28.5 billion in the past 15 months and receiving $345 billion in government investments and guarantees the corporate Marie Antoinettes at Citigroup went through with plans to purchase a new $50 million corporate jet.

Real people are losing real jobs at Caterpillar, Home Depot and Sprint Nextel; these and other companies announced on Monday that they would cut more than 75,000 jobs in the U.S. and around the world, as consumer confidence and home prices swan-dived.

The former chief executive of Merrill Lynch, John Thain, handed out over $4 billion in bonuses as the failing firm was bought by Bank of America.

"If you don't pay your best people, you will destroy your franchise," Thain reasoned, "and they'll go elsewhere." So, these guys are rewarded by Thain with billions of dollars of investor's money for losing $15 billion in three months for their clients.

Meanwhile, Thain himself spent $1 million to renovate his office. Big-ticket items included curtains for $28,000, a pair of chairs for $87,000, fabric for a "Roman Shade" for $11,000, Regency chairs for $24,000, six wall sconces for $2,700, a $13,000 chandelier in the private dining room and six dining chairs for $37,000, a "custom coffee table" for $16,000, an antique commode "on legs" for $35,000, and a $1,400 "parchment waste can."

Socializing financial institutions and industries would be a terrible move, but the anger that causes people to no longer resist it is certainly understandable. The goose has brought it upon himself.

The other factor that will lead us to kill the goose is the fact that so many people in this country are the recipients of government largesse, and so few, relatively, provide it. When a large percentage of the population in a democracy really have nothing to lose by socializing the economy and much to gain they will eagerly favor more government largesse. What do they care if the people who have the wealth are squeezed if it means more benefits for themselves? Neither capitalism nor democracy will survive a large lower class comprised of poor, uneducated, unmotivated people living at the expense of those above them on the socio-economic ladder. The lower classes will always vote for those who'll provide more benefits and those who seek their votes will be only too willing to oblige them.

The GOP is looking for a Moses to lead them back to the political Promised Land. What they need is someone who has a plan for teaching the poor that they have a stake in capitalism and freedom and someone who can shame the corporate "Masters of the Universe," to use Tom Wolfe's phrase in Bonfire of the Vanities, into setting an example of frugality and modesty for the rest of the society which has bestowed such good fortune upon them.

RLC

Rush's Plan

Rush Limbaugh has a serious, and very interesting, plan to restart the American economy, and to underscore his seriousness he presents it in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. It's not only a genuine bipartisan compromise it's also a great empirical test of two conflicting philosophies on how best to deal with recessions. I suspect that it's going to attract a lot of attention from both the right and center left. A lot of honest people, not just among Republicans but also in the Democrat party, are dismayed by what they see as a welfare/pork barrel bill masquerading as an economic stimulus measure.

Here's the heart of Limbaugh's proposal:

Fifty-three percent of American voters voted for Barack Obama; 46% voted for John McCain, and 1% voted for wackos. Give that 1% to President Obama. Let's say the vote was 54% to 46%. As a way to bring the country together and at the same time determine the most effective way to deal with recessions, under the Obama-Limbaugh Stimulus Plan of 2009: 54% of the $900 billion -- $486 billion -- will be spent on infrastructure and pork as defined by Mr. Obama and the Democrats; 46% -- $414 billion -- will be directed toward tax cuts, as determined by me.

Then we compare. We see which stimulus actually works. This is bipartisanship! It would satisfy the American people's wishes, as polls currently note; and it would also serve as a measurable test as to which approach best stimulates job growth.

I say, cut the U.S. corporate tax rate -- at 35%, among the highest of all industrialized nations -- in half. Suspend the capital gains tax for a year to incentivize new investment, after which it would be reimposed at 10%. Then get out of the way! Once Wall Street starts ticking up 500 points a day, the rest of the private sector will follow. There's no reason to tell the American people their future is bleak. There's no reason, as the administration is doing, to depress their hopes. There's no reason to insist that recovery can't happen quickly, because it can.

In this new era of responsibility, let's use both Keynesians and supply-siders to responsibly determine which theory best stimulates our economy -- and if elements of both work, so much the better. The American people are made up of Republicans, Democrats, independents and moderates, but our economy doesn't know the difference. This is about jobs now.

I'd prefer we cut the pork and transfer payments out of the bill altogether, but that's not going to happen with the Democrats in control of everything. So, why not give Rush's plan a go and settle the question for the next three generations of whether it's better to inflate the currency and throw money around like we're frantically bailing water out of a sinking boat or to cut tax rates and let businesses and private citizens kickstart the economy by creating more wealth.

RLC

Winter Irruption

This winter has seen a major irruption of several boreal species of birds into the northeastern United States. One such species that's being seen at backyard bird feeders everywhere this winter is the pine siskin:

The yellow on the wing is distinctive and helps to distinguish the siskin from a lot of other brown birds with streaked breasts. The siskin feeds primarily on nyjer seed.

Another more unusual bird that has been seen almost everywhere there are stands of spruce trees with healthy cone crops is the White-winged crossbill. The mandibles of this unusual bird are crossed rather than parallel. This allows it to peel away the hard bracts of conifer cones to extract the seeds that lie at their base. A crossbill will eat up to 3000 seeds a day, which requires an awful lot of work.

I was lucky enough to see about a half-dozen of these lovely creatures yesterday morning in some spruces along the Susquehanna river in York County, Pennsylvania.

RLC

Wars Without End

Our question for today, class, is a little complex so listen carefully: With which of the following conflicts are you most acquainted: The war in the Congo? The war in Sudan? The conflict in Somalia? The war in Sri Lanka? You're not really familiar with any of these, you say?

How about the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians? Ah, yes. Now that we've heard a lot about over the years, haven't we? My church denominational office regularly passes resolutions condemning Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians. The media feature it daily and prominently. It's the defining struggle of our times. The most egregious slaughters, one might think, have been spawned by this conflict.

But actually, no. According to an article at Strategy Page the truth is otherwise and the numbers are shocking. Consider these gruesome statistics:

Throughout the last decade over five million people have died in the Congo from the effects of war in the eastern part of that country.

Sudan has produced over 300,000 dead, millions of refugees, and a thriving slave trade.

Somalia has suffered 16,000 dead in the last two years and more than twice that in the last twenty years. The media, however, seem fascinated only with the pirates in the north who kill hardly anyone, except some of the thousands of the refugees they try to smuggle into Yemen when they aren't trying to kidnap passing merchant ships and fishing boats.

Perhaps the distinction of hosting the most ignored war in the world goes to the island nation of Sri Lanka where civil strife has killed over 80,000 in the last 25 years (and about 10,000 in the last year alone). India suffers over 2,000 dead a year from terrorists (mostly tribal and communist). Neighboring Pakistan has suffered 14,000 dead from Islamic terrorism in the past six years, and Afghanistan has lost that number in the last three years.

Let those numbers sink in for a moment. Now reflect upon this: In the last decade there have been about 7000 deaths in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. This is about one one thousandth the toll in the Congo alone. Yet it is this conflict which captures almost the entirety of media attention. In fact, President Obama has named a peace envoy, George Mitchell, to the Middle East, but no such envoy is packing his bags for Africa.

Given the horrific casualty toll in the rest of the world, and the relatively minor toll in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, why is it that the West - its churches, its media, its universities, and its governments are all so fixated on what's happening in Israel? Why does the West so assiduously ferret out every Israeli injustice, real and imagined, that can be trumpeted from the front pages of our newspapers and evening newscasts? Where are the demonstrations in our city streets and university campuses demanding a cessation to the wars and tyrannies besetting the longsuffering African and Sri Lankan people? Why does the West get so exercised about Israel, but can scarcely be bothered with horrific news from the Congo or Zimbabwe? Why do Palestinian Arabs matter more to people in the West than do black Sudanese and Congolese? Why do we hold Israelis to a far higher standard of behavior than we expect of black Africans, Arabs, and Muslims?

Just asking.

RLC

John Galt

A friend passes along what I take to be a fictional memo from an employer to his employees which reads as if it were written by John Galt. Galt, you may recall, was a mysterious character in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged who, worn out by a government that made it impossible for men to achieve their dreams, led a revolt of the nation's producers who collectively chose to just stop working rather than be exploited any longer by a parasitic government:

To my Valued Employees:

There have been some rumblings around the office about the future of this company, and more specifically, your job. As you know, the economy has changed for the worse and presents many challenges. However, the good news is this: The economy doesn't pose a threat to your job. What does threaten your job however, is the changing political landscape in this country.

However, let me tell you some little tidbits of fact which might help you decide what is in your best interests.

First, while it is easy to spew rhetoric that pits employers against employees, you have to understand that for every business owner there is a back story. This back story is often neglected and overshadowed by what you see and hear. Sure, you see me park my Mercedes outside. You've seen my big home at last year's Christmas party. I'm sure all these flashy symbols of luxury conjure up some idealized thoughts about my life.

However, what you don't see is the back story.

I started this company 28 years ago. At that time, I lived in a 300 square foot studio apartment for 3 years. My entire living apartment was converted into an office so I could put forth 100% effort into building a company, which by the way, would eventually employ you.

My diet consisted of Ramen Pride noodles because every dollar I spent went back into this company. I drove a rusty Toyota Corolla with a defective transmission. I didn't have time to date. I usually stayed home on weekends while my friends went out drinking and partying. In fact, I was married to my business -- hard work, discipline, and sacrifice.

Meanwhile, my friends got jobs. They worked 40 hours a week and made a modest $50K a year and spent every dime they earned. They drove flashy cars, lived in expensive homes, and wore fancy designer clothes. Instead of hitting the Nordstrom's for the latest hot fashion item, I was trolling through the discount store extracting any clothing item that didn't look like it was birthed in the 70's. My friends refinanced their mortgages and lived a life of luxury. I, however, did not. I put my time, my money, and my life into a business with a vision that eventually, some day, I, too, will be able to afford these luxuries my friends seemed to have.

So, while you physically arrive at the office at 9am, mentally check in at about noon, and then leave at 5pm, I don't. There is no "off" button for me. When you leave the office you are done, and you have a weekend all to yourself. I, unfortunately, do not have that freedom. I eat and breathe this company every minute of the day. There is no rest. There is no weekend. There is no happy hour. Every day this business is attached to my hip like a 1 year-old special-needs child. You, of course, only see the fruits of that labor - the nice house, the Mercedes, the vacations... you never realize the back story and the sacrifices I've made.

Now the economy is falling apart and I, the guy that made all the right decisions and saved his money, have to bail-out all the people who didn't. The people that overspent their paychecks suddenly feel entitled to the same luxuries that I earned and sacrificed a decade of my life for.

Yes, business ownership has its benefits, but the price I've paid is steep and not without wounds.

Unfortunately, the cost of running this business and employing you is starting to eclipse the threshold of marginal benefit, and let me tell you why:

I am being taxed to death and the government thinks I don't pay enough. I have state taxes, federal taxes, property taxes, sales and use taxes, payroll taxes, workers compensation taxes, unemployment taxes, taxes on taxes. I have to hire a tax man to manage all these taxes and then I have to pay more taxes for employing him. Government mandates and regulations, and all the accounting that goes with them, now occupy most of my time. On Oct 15th, I wrote a check to the U.S. Treasury for $288,000 for quarterly taxes. You know what my "stimulus" check was? Zero. Nada. Zilch.

The question I have is this: Who is stimulating the economy? Me, the guy who has provided 14 people good paying jobs and serves over 2,200,000 people per year with a flourishing business? Or, the single mother sitting at home pregnant with her fourth child waiting for her next welfare check? Obviously, government feels the latter is the economic stimulus of this country.

The fact is, if I deducted (Read: Stole) 50% of your paycheck you'd quit and you wouldn't work here. I mean, why should you? That's nuts. Who wants to get rewarded for only 50% of their hard work? Well, I agree, which is why your job is in jeopardy.

Here's what many of you don't understand ... to stimulate the economy you need to stimulate what runs the economy. Had suddenly government mandated that I didn't need to pay taxes, instead of depositing that $288,000 into the Washington black-hole, I would have spent it, hired more employees, and generated substantial economic growth. My employees would have enjoyed the wealth of that tax cut in the form of promotions and better salaries. But you can forget it now.

When you have a comatose man on the verge of death, you don't defibrillate his thumb thinking that will bring him back to life, do you? You defibrillate his heart. Business is at the heart of America and always has been. To restart it, you must stimulate it, not kill it. Suddenly, the power brokers in Washington believe the poor of America are the essential drivers of the American economic engine. Nothing could be further from the truth.

So where am I going with all this? It's quite simple.

If any new taxes are levied on me, or my company, my reaction will be swift and simple. I will fire you. I will fire your co-workers. You can then plead with the government to pay for your mortgage, your SUV, and your child's future. Frankly, it won't be my problem anymore.

Then, I will close this company down, move to another country, and retire. You see, I'm done. I'm done with a country that penalizes the productive and gives to the unproductive. My motivation to work and to provide jobs will be destroyed, and with it, will be my citizenship.

So, if you lose your job, it won't be at the hands of the economy; it will be at the hands of a political hurricane that swept through this country, steam-rolled the constitution, and changed its landscape forever. If that happens, you can find me sitting on a beach, retired, and with no employees to worry about....

Your boss

A nation that punishes its producers and transfers their wealth to subsidize those who, for whatever reason, do not produce is a nation which will eventually and inevitably look a lot like Bulgaria in the 1950s. Somebody ought to forward this "memo" to President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

RLC

Four Fears

Fred Barnes writes in The Weekly Standard that there are four fears people have about President Obama which, though they might not be justified, are not unreasonable:

Barack Obama is the apostle of hope. But he also arouses the flipside of hope--fear. And while the fear he stirs may turn out to be unfounded, it's not irrational. People don't know who Obama really is or where his ideological center of gravity rests, to the extent it rests anywhere. He was a liberal in the Senate and the campaign, a centrist in the transition, and who knows what he'll be as president. He's elusive.

I count four separate fears. Whether he's a crypto-Marxist is not one of them. Neither is the absurd fear that he's secretly a Muslim, even a closet jihadist. Nor is the groundless claim Obama was actually born outside the United States and isn't really an American citizen. Forget all those. They're nonstarters.

Barnes goes on to discuss the fear that Obama doesn't know what he's talking about, is too much of a pushover, will be too much like Jimmy Carter on foreign policy, and lacks the resolve necessary to make unpopular decisions. Read the article to understand Barnes' reasoning for each of these. It's pretty good.

RLC

What's Hate Got to Do With It?

Mary Eberstadt, the author of that wonderful collection of epistles from a newly-minted atheist to her much admired superiors titled The Loser Letters, addresses herself to the question how someone like her, someone who's quite averse to our modern infatuation with gayness, might respond to charges that she must be a homophobic hater.

She suggests deflecting such allegations by emulating, of all people, vegetarians. Eberstadt offers this hypothetical response to someone who has accused her of being a hater simply because she finds homosexual conduct to be not just distasteful but morally wrong:

A borrowing of the vegetarian's vocabulary might go something like this. "No, of course I don't hate sex/fun/gay people/love - any more than a vegetarian, say, hates people who eat beef/chicken/pork. In fact, let's explore that analogy a little more, because then maybe you'll understand where I'm coming from. And just as vegetarians don't hate meat-eaters, I don't hate people who do things I don't, or things that I think are wrong. But that doesn't mean that the matter ends there or that I'm saying that these things are a matter of taste only. Like the vegetarian, I think there are serious reasons for my aversion to what other people do. These reasons are moral. They also have to do with health. In general, I think it would be a better world if people didn't do these things, again as the vegetarian thinks. But please understand that hatred has nothing to do with it. Reason and information and a desire not to do harm - these things do."

This response, as correct and honest as it is clever, is offered in a larger essay in the current First Things which itself is very much worth reading. Unfortunately, this issue is available only by subscription until April.

RLC

The Unstimulus

The Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank, analyzes the Obama stimulus plan which Congress is voting on today and finds much not to like. In the first place, they tell us, the plan would be incredibly costly to taxpayers.

For instance, after Congress appropriates the 2009 omnibus bill, they will have spent over $1.4 trillion in less than one month. It'll be the largest spending orgy in the history of the country. If the cost of it were spread equally over every family in the U.S. each family would owe $10,520. What's worse, though, is that although the bill is touted as an "economic stimulus" bill, much of it has nothing to do with stimulating the economy and a lot to do with lining the pockets of those who supported the Democrats in the last election.

In addition to the earlier automobile bailout, which was essentially a gift to the UAW, over $142 billion dollars is slated for education, nearly double the total outlays for the Department of Education in 2007, making good on promises made by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and candidate Obama to the NEA. Anyone who thinks that this windfall will actually result in kids learning more math and literature in school is deluding himself. Another $4.19 billion is provided for "neighborhood stabilization activities" which is code for organizations like ACORN which has been charged with widespread voter registration fraud in the last election, but which was instrumental in getting Democrats elected. The Democrats also tried to get several million dollars for birth control into the measure, which would have been a boon to Planned Parenthood, but Nancy Pelosi, apparently non-plussed by questions about exactly what it was she was trying to stimulate, decided to drop it.

In addition to these Blagojevich-like quid pro quos to Democratic constituencies there are a number of other provisions which may cause you to arch an eyebrow:

States that have squandered their own taxpayers' money and now find themselves unable to meet their medicaid obligations to their own citizens will receive from the rest of us an $87 billion dollar check to meet the shortfall. Taxpayers in Pennsylvania will be happy to know that they're paying the medicaid costs for people living in New York. The "stimulus" also gives the Department of Energy $35 billion dollars to work on such dubious projects as "green" alternative energy sources like windmills. The DOE's current annual budget is just under $24 billion. Billions more will be handed out as refundable tax credits to everyone who falls under a specified income level. This will include millions of people who never paid income taxes in the first place, which means it's not a tax refund at all, but a welfare payment, and its purpose is to buy the loyalty of a large number of voters to the Democratic party.

In addition, there are these items crucial, we are to believe, to the health of the national economy: Digital TV coupons ($650 million), government cars ($600 million), the National Endowment for the Arts ($50 million), repairs to National Mall ($200 million). This includes $21 million for sod so that on your next visit to the mall you can loll about in the grass and feel all tingly about how wisely your tax dollars are being spent by your beneficent congressional overlords.

But isn't all this spending going to create jobs, I hear you ask. Not according to House Tax Committee staff. Despite the promise by President Obama and Speaker Pelosi that three to four million new jobs will be created, the Committee has not been able to find even a single job that will be guaranteed to be created. Indeed, most of the money won't even be spent this year, so it's hard to see how this bill is a job generator.

If President Obama and the Democrats were really serious about creating jobs and getting the economy going - instead of just paying off the people who got them elected - they would simply lower as many taxes, both business and personal, as they could. This would immediately stimulate the economy by getting businesses investing and hiring and consumers spending. Unfortunately, the economic stimulus package is all about politics and power and not so much about jobs and prosperity.

Whatever happened to all that hope and change we were promised a couple of months ago?

President Obama has also promised us a transparent administration and Speaker of the House Pelosi has promised us the most ethical Congress ever. If they're serious about their rhetoric they could start to make good on their promises by declining to call this measure "economic stimulus" and calling it instead what it is: Political Payback. It's hard to see the difference between what the Democrats from Barack Obama on down are doing with this "stimulus" bill and what Rod Blagojevich got himself impeached for in Illinois.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has an excellent editorial on the spending bill in which they calculate that only 12 cents of every dollar can be reasonably expected to go to stimulus and job creation. Much of it is just welfare payments to the poor.

RLC

Burying the Tree of Life

Comes word that another one of the pillars of Darwin's theory is being quietly buried by investigators convinced that the evidence is against it. I say "another one" because it was only recently that a conference was held to essentially eulogize the demise of natural selection as a major player in evolutionary change. Now it turns out the whole idea of a progression of development from simple forms to more complex, a progression Darwin illustrated by a "tree of life," is being called into question.

It's beginning to appear that the relationships between living things have the appearance more of a web than of a tree. If this is so, what are the implications for evolutionary theory? Perhaps one is that the concept of distinct species is becoming even more difficult to define than it was previously. Here's an excerpt from the link:

Some researchers are also convinced that hybridisation has been a major driving force in animal evolution and that the process is ongoing. "It is really common," says James Mallet, an evolutionary biologist at University College London. "Ten per cent of all animals regularly hybridise with other species." This is especially true in rapidly evolving lineages with lots of recently diverged species - including our own. There is evidence that early modern humans hybridised with our extinct relatives, such as Homo erectus and the Neanderthals.

If early man could interbreed with H. erectus and Neanderthals then what is the basis for treating these as separate species from H. sapiens? A species just is a population of organisms which can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. H. erectus and Neanderthals may have looked different than H. sapiens, but that doesn't make them different species. The dozens of breeds of dogs all look very different from each other, but they're all the same species.

[I]t is clear that the Darwinian tree is no longer an adequate description of how evolution in general works. "If you don't have a tree of life, what does it mean for evolutionary biology?" asks Bapteste. "At first it's very scary... but in the past couple of years people have begun to free their minds." Both he and Doolittle are at pains to stress that downgrading the tree of life doesn't mean that the theory of evolution is wrong - just that evolution is not as tidy as we would like to believe. Some evolutionary relationships are tree-like; many others are not. "We should relax a bit on this," says Doolittle. "We understand evolution pretty well - it's just that it is more complex than Darwin imagined. The tree isn't the only pattern."

In fact, it's not even the main pattern which means that the grand story of Darwinism - molecules to man progression - a story that had been supported by molecular studies that once showed similarities and thus relationships between the proteins of certain organisms, is now obsolete. More recent studies reveal a more chaotic interplay of genetic relationships. Thus:

Others, however, don't think it is time to relax. Instead, they see the uprooting of the tree of life as the start of something bigger. "It's part of a revolutionary change in biology," says Dupr�. "Our standard model of evolution is under enormous pressure. We're clearly going to see evolution as much more about mergers and collaboration than change within isolated lineages."

Rose goes even further. "The tree of life is being politely buried, we all know that," he says. "What's less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change." Biology is vastly more complex than we thought, he says, and facing up to this complexity will be as scary as the conceptual upheavals physicists had to take on board in the early 20th century.

If he is right, the tree concept could become biology's equivalent of Newtonian mechanics: revolutionary and hugely successful in its time, but ultimately too simplistic to deal with the messy real world. "The tree of life was useful," says Bapteste. "It helped us to understand that evolution was real. But now we know more about evolution, it's time to move on."

This is certainly ironic. Most of the arguments people like Darwin and others made to persuade us that macroevolution (molecules to man evolution)occured are being discarded, replaced by other arguments which may eventually suffer the same fate. Yet the truth of macroevolution is not to be questioned:

Syvanen recently compared 2000 genes that are common to humans, frogs, sea squirts, sea urchins, fruit flies and nematodes. In theory, he should have been able to use the gene sequences to construct an evolutionary tree showing the relationships between the six animals.

He failed. The problem was that different genes told contradictory evolutionary stories. This was especially true of sea-squirt genes.

Conventionally, sea squirts - also known as tunicates - are lumped together with frogs, humans and other vertebrates in the phylum Chordata, but the genes were sending mixed signals. Some genes did indeed cluster within the chordates, but others indicated that tunicates should be placed with sea urchins, which aren't chordates. "Roughly 50 per cent of its genes have one evolutionary history and 50 per cent another," Syvanen says.

In other words, all those studies which showed close relationships between different taxa based on genetic similarities and differences are rendered useless by these findings. The famous comparison of humans to chimps based on so much shared genetic material really means little in terms of actual evolutionary relationships.

If the idea of a tree of life is obsolete then the idea of descent through modification will have to be reassessed as will the idea that some organisms are more "primitive," both in time and in structure, than others. This is why the scientists quoted above talk in terms of a "revolution" in biology. Much that was thought to be true is being turned inside out, and it will almost be as if biologists will have to start all over again to piece together their story of how life got to where it is today.

RLC

Cosmic Sucking Sound

Some NASA scientists studying galactic clusters have come across a very weird phenomenon. The galaxies they're studying appear to be rushing toward a spot in space much like air rushing toward, and out of, a pinhole in a balloon:

Sasha Kashlinsky, a senior staff scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has been studying how rebellious clusters of galaxies move against the backdrop of expanding space. He and colleagues have clocked galaxy clusters racing at up to 1000 kilometres per second - far faster than our best understanding of cosmology allows. Stranger still, every cluster seems to be rushing toward a small patch of sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela.

The implication of this is that these galaxies are pouring out of our universe through some sort of a rent in the cosmic horizon. They appear to be drawn by something beyond our space-time world. Is all the matter in our universe draining out? What, exactly, are these galaxies draining into? What sort of entity lies beyond the boundary of space and time?

No one knows. What we do know, what we seem to be learning anew with every fresh observation, is that the universe is a very strange place.

RLC