The End of McCain-Feingold?

For those who follow such things there's a chance that the Supreme Court will do the right thing this summer and nullify McCain-Feingold. At least the editors at National Review are hopeful:

From its conception, the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law was an assault on the First Amendment. Signing that unconstitutional bill into law, knowing it to be unconstitutional, was one of the worst moments of George W. Bush's presidency. Yet this malignancy lurks in the legal code, widely accepted, even celebrated. Now Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart has gone before the Supreme Court arguing that McCain-Feingold gives the government the right to ban books and films. He's right, it does. And for that reason, McCain-Feingold should be nullified.

At issue is a film called Hillary: The Movie, a documentary produced by the nonprofit group Citizens United, which did not wish to see Senator Clinton elected president. Because McCain-Feingold prohibits so much as mentioning a candidate's name in pre-election communications paid for by certain disfavored groups - unions and "corporations" - the filmmakers were informed by a federal judge that showing their work would constitute a crime. The filmmakers sued, and the case is Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Mr. Stewart is defending the government's ban on this film; the same rules that apply to a campaign commercial apply to a documentary film, his reasoning goes.

Justice Alito alertly pressed Mr. Stewart on that issue: If commercials and films are covered, how about books? How about campaign biographies? Yes, Mr. Stewart answered, the U.S. government is prepared to ban books, under certain circumstances, and is legally empowered by McCain-Feingold to do so. Jaws dropped, black robes fluttered.

There is in politics a principle referred to as the law of unintended consequences which states that meddling with things will almost invariably produce completely unforeseen and completely unwanted outcomes. McCain-Feingold was a well-intentioned attempt to limit the impact of big money on elections by banning political ads within 60 days of an election.

President Obama's Federal Election Commission lawyers argue, however, that the law must be interpreted as also covering films and books and that, if so, this interpetation gives the administration the right to censor films and ban books that mention a candidate and are in circulation 60 days prior to elections. National Review Online agrees that logic compels that the law be interpreted as covering films and books but argues that this is sufficient reason to overturn a law whose implications are so clearly at odds with the First Amendment.

NRO is right. The Court is expected to hand down its decision by the end of June.

RLC

For Tanya, a Reprise

Last Christmas we did a post based on a remark made by a woman named Tanya on another blog. I thought that as we approach Good Friday it might be worth running the post again slightly edited.

An atheist at Dizzying Intellect had issued a mild rebuke of his fellow non-believers for their attempts to use the occasion of Christmas to deride Christian belief and, in so doing, he exemplified the sort of attitude toward those with whom he disagrees one might wish all people, atheists and Christians alike, would adopt. Unfortunately, a commenter named Tanya spoiled the mellow mood by displaying a petulant asperity toward, and an unfortunate ignorance of, the orthodox Christian understanding of the atonement.

Tanya wrote:

I've lived my life in a more holy way than most Christians I know. If it turns out I'm wrong, and some pissy little whiner god wants to send me away just because I didn't worship him, even though I lived a clean, decent life, he can bite me. I wouldn't want to live in that kind of "heaven" anyway. So sorry.

Tanya evidently thinks that "heaven" is, or should be, all about living a "clean, decent life." Perhaps the following tale will illustrate the sophomoric callowness of her misconception:

Once upon a time there was a handsome prince who was deeply in love with a young woman. We'll call her Tanya. The prince wanted Tanya to come and live with him in the formidable city his father, the king, had built, but Tanya wasn't interested in either the prince or the city. The city was beautiful and wondrous, to be sure, but the inhabitants weren't particularly fun to be around, and she wanted to stay out in the countryside where the wild things grow. Even though the prince wooed Tanya with every gift he could think of, it was to no avail. She wasn't smitten at all by the "pissy little whiner" prince. She obeyed the laws of the kingdom and paid her taxes and was convinced that that was good enough.

Out beyond the countryside, however, dwelt dreadful, awful orc-like creatures who hated the king and wanted nothing more than to kill him and his heirs. One day they learned of the prince's love for Tanya and set upon a plan. They kidnapped her and sent a note to the king telling him that they would be willing to exchange Tanya for the prince, but if their offer was refused they would torture Tanya until she was dead.

The king, distraught beyond words, told the prince of the horrible news. The prince, all the rejections he had experienced from Tanya notwithstanding, still loved her deeply, and his heart was broken at the thought of her peril. With tears he resolved to his father that he would do the exchange. The father wept bitterly because the prince was his only son, but he knew that his love for Tanya would not allow him to let her suffer the torment to which the ugly people would surely subject her. The prince asked only that the father try his best to persuade Tanya to live in the beautiful city once she was ransomed.

And so the day came for the exchange, and the prince rode atop his horse out of the beautiful city to meet the ugly creatures. As he crossed an expansive meadow toward his enemy he stopped to make sure they released Tanya. He waited until she had fled, oblivious in her near-panic that it was the prince himself she ran past as she hurried to the safety of the city walls. He could easily turn back now that Tanya was safe, but he had given his word that he would do the exchange and the ugly people knew he would never go back on his word.

The prince continued stoically and resolutely into their midst, giving himself for Tanya as he had promised. Surrounding his steed they set upon him, stripped him of his princely raiment, and tortured him for three days in the most excruciating manner. Not once did any sound louder than a moan pass his lips. His courage and determination to endure whatever they subjected him to were fortified by the assurance that he was doing it for Tanya and that because of his sacrifice she was safe. Finally, wearying of their sport, they cut off his head and threw his body into a pool of offal.

Meanwhile, the grief-stricken king, his heart melting like ice within his breast, called Tanya into his court. He told her nothing of what his son had done, his pride in the prince not permitting him to use his heroic sacrifice as a bribe. Even so, he pleaded with Tanya, as he had promised the prince he would, to remain within the walls of the wondrous and beautiful city where she'd be safe forevermore. Tanya considered the offer, but she decided that she liked life on the outside far too much, even if it was risky, and she didn't really want to be too close to the prince, and, by the way, where is that pissy little whiner anyway?

We wish Tanya and all of our readers a meaningful Good Friday, and a very happy Easter.

RLC

Your Lying Eyes

It's bad enough that the President of the United States abased himself before a foreign dictator, but now the White House is compounding the embarrassment by denying that the President actually did it. This is an astonishing bit of chutzpah considering that videos of the event leave no doubt that the President, contrary to protocol, bowed deeply before the Saudi king.

Come on, fellas. The President's credibility is sinking low enough without the staff at the White House performing a variation of "Who are you going to believe: me, or your lying eyes?"

Here's the video that apparently no one at the White House has seen:

Next they'll be trying to convince us that the President suffered a back spasm just as he shook the royal hand.

RLC

Campus Porn

McLatchey offers this sad report on the popularity of a pornographic movie that's currently being shown on college campuses across the nation:

The movie - reportedly the most expensive porn film ever made - combines computer-generated images with hardcore sex scenes.

Digital Playground's 2005 film "Pirates" became a surprise hit on campuses from Yale to Tulane, said spokesman Christopher Ruth. Student groups contacted Digital Playground for permission to show that movie, he said.

From that experience, Ruth said the idea arose to market the 2008 sequel to university audiences by offering it free.

Student groups at a half-dozen universities - including UCLA and Carnegie Mellon University - accepted the offer. Hundreds of students lined up at each show.

The University of Maryland will screen the movie this weekend, the firm said.

The unfortunate aspect of this is not just the availability of the film, kids have unlimited access to pornography today. Nor is it just that universities across the country are facilitating the showing of the thing. Universities long ago abrogated their responsibility to responsibly shepherd young people through their late-teens years into adulthood. The most unfortunate part of the article, perhaps, is found in the last couple of lines:

The screenings generate publicity and sell a few copies of the movie, Ruth said. But the larger point is to get young people accustomed to seeing adult movies as mainstream entertainment.

"It's not anything you should be ashamed of," he said. "Sexuality never is."

This statement transcends stupid. Whether people should be ashamed of "sexuality" is hardly what's at issue. The issue is what we're doing to the hearts and minds of young people by immersing them in a pornographic culture. What effect does it have on a young man's view of women to see them graphically portrayed as sex toys? What does it do to the self-image of women when their objectification is glamorized and sensualized? What happens to our sense of human dignity when we watch for a couple of hours people copulating on screen? What are the expectations a young couple have for each other in a marriage when sexual athleticism is held up as an ideal? What does it do to sex itself when the act is emptied of all its mystery, intimacy, commitment and love and reduced to a mere expression of sheer lust?

Parents who pay their child's activity fee when they send them off to college probably never suspect that one of the activities they're paying for is the screening of movies that encourage young men to think of young women as little more than a means to their gratification. It's all very sad.

RLC

The Angry Vet

Penn State puts out a series of short videos to illustrate for instructors how they might deal with troublesome students. One of these depicts a veteran who's portrayed as unreasonable and angry. Why PSU chose to portray a veteran as "worrisome" is unclear except that possibly Penn State faculty are finding that young men coming back from the war are less docile, pliable and vulnerable to professorial political proselytizing than are their non-vet classmates.

In the last few years I've had a number of students in class who were combat veterans, and their behavior has been exemplary. They do sometimes seem a little amused by some of the views expressed by classmates who haven't experienced much of the world's ugliness, but they've always been polite and conscientious.

Perhaps this hasn't been the experience of Penn State instructors, however. Perhaps there've been numerous cases on the PSU campus of veterans threatening or intimidating teachers. Or, on the other hand, perhaps the makers of the video are simply displaying their own prejudices by drawing on the stereotypes common among people of the left of what veterans are like.

I think one of these explanations is more probable than the other, but I'll let you decide which one you think it is.

Thanks to Hot Air for the video.

RLC

Unilateral Disarmament

President Obama has indicated that we are about to reduce our arsenal of nuclear weapons and suspend our program to develop a system that would enable us to intercept nuclear-armed ICBMs fired at us. Mr. Obama believes, apparently, that the only way to get the rest of the world to give up its nukes is to set an example for them to follow.

But what if, having reduced our preparedness and capability to minimal levels it becomes clear that other countries are not going along, which, of course, they won't. We can't even persuade a fourth-rate power like North Korea to stop its march toward nuclear arms much less cajole a third-rate power like Iran to do so. How are we going to convince China and Russia to give up the weapons that make them both world powers? What incentive could we possibly offer them? Economic aid?

If the President follows through on his proposal to unilaterally disarm he'll place both the U.S. and much of the rest of the world in enormous jeopardy. The bad guys will continue to develop nukes even while pretending to negotiate them away. Gun-rights folks like to say that when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns. The same holds true for any weapon. When nukes are outlawed only rogue nations will have them, and they'll be much more inclined to use them if no one else is in a position to retaliate. The people who gave us 9/11 would hardly scruple at the detonation of a nuclear device.

Imagine a world in which no western country has nuclear weapons but Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, China, and say, Venezuela, do. Will that be a safer world? If Israel were to give up its nuclear arsenal how long would it remain in existence? If India were to rid itself of these weapons how long would it be before it succumbed to Pakistani blackmail? What would happen to Taiwan if we could no longer trump the Chinese military with superior power? How long would South Korea remain free of North Korean aggression if the Norks had nukes and the South didn't?

Let's be serious about this. If these countries could get the West to disarm by promising to do likewise, they'll promise until their faces turn blue, but they'll give up neither their weapons nor their ambitions. It would be incredible folly to think they would. Experience has taught us that they'd hem and haw, obfuscate and dilate, and effectively confound any attempt to inspect their facilities until it was too late. The only countries that would be honest and open would be Western nations. The rest of the world would do exactly what Iran and North Korea are doing now.

The President insists that he's not naive, but if he thinks that these states are going to forego the opportunity to possess nuclear weapons and the power they confer just because he wants them to, he's worse than naive. He's delusional.

RLC

Another Uninformed Critic

David Harsanyi has a column at the Denver Post that is remarkable for its serendipity. He gets almost everything wrong regarding the recent controversy in Texas about teaching both sides of the debate over evolution and intelligent design and still winds up drawing the correct conclusion.

Harsanyi, like so many commenters before him, confuses ID with creationism, and then blasts creationism, fooling himself into thinking that his criticisms are relevant to ID. He also states, like so many others before him, that IDers are anti-evolution. This is simply false. IDers are anti-Darwinian evolution. They're anti-materialism, not anti-evolution, and indeed many of them are evolutionists of one sort or another themselves.

Despite what critics allege and the popular press thinks, the current controversy is not between ID proponents and evolutionists, it's not between science and religion nor science and faith. It's between advocates of two conflicting metaphysical worldviews. On the one side, deceptively draping itself in the mantle of science, are proponents of materialistic naturalism - the view that only natural, physical causes have operated in the creation of the universe and of life. Those on the other side hold to a version of metaphysical dualism and are convinced that the evidence discovered by science reveals signs of purpose and intelligence behind what we perceive. IDers take no position on how this mind operated, how long ago it designed the world, or whether the mind is that of the God of the Bible or of an inhabitant of some other universe. It simply claims that however the world and life came about in this universe, it wasn't by physical, natural processes and forces alone.

Mr. Harsanyi hasn't yet gotten to the point where he has discovered the significance of this distinction and finds it easier and more polemically effective to just conflate ID and creationism. Nevertheless, he admirably comes out in his essay on the side of teaching students both sides of the controversy, a view Darwinians find abhorrent, and for good reason. They know that once students start learning about the incredibly precise calibration of the cosmic forces and parameters and once they start seeing videos like these, very few of them are going to conclude that this world is just the result of a cosmic belch by blind forces and matter.

Perhaps if Mr. Harsanyi viewed some of this evidence himself he wouldn't make the sorts of uniformed claims that tarnish his column.

RLC

Hitchens Makes His Case

After his book god [sic] Is Not Great was released atheist author Christopher Hitchens urged his literary agent to line him up with opportunities to debate Christian apologists. Perhaps Mr. Hitchens thought that by so-doing he would be facing local televangelists or members of the church's ladies auxillary, but that's not exactly what has happened. He has instead found himself crossing swords with some very bright people, most recently William Lane Craig.

Craig is an accomplished presenter and a premier philosopher and theologian. On April 4th Craig and Hitchens debated the question of whether God exists in front of over four thousand people at Biola University. Reading the live-blog of their exchange was like watching the Harlem Globe Trotters play the hapless Washington Generals. I almost felt sorry for Hitchens who on other matters, like the Iraq war and the Islamic threat, I think is an adept polemicist.

On March 21st Mr. Hitchens had joined several Christian apologists, including Dr. Craig, for a panel discussion at the Christian Book Expo in Texas. In his closing remarks Dr. Craig cautioned Mr. Hitchens that he would need to be better prepared for their up-coming April 4th debate than he was that evening. Apparently Mr. Hitchens declined the advice. The panel discussion, by the way, can be viewed here.

The story is similar whenever anti-theistic writers venture out into an arena where they must defend the claims they make in their books. They find that it's a lot easier to write an attack against theism when no one is defending it than to make a coherent case when an able advocate is present to offer a rebuttal. Their books often generate a great-deal of excitement in the skeptical community, but by the time people have had a chance to examine the arguments they often wonder what it is about them that readers found so compelling (Our critique of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion can be read on our Hall of Fame on the left of this page).

Hitchens wished to advance the claim in the debate last Saturday that God does not exist. Craig defended theism by arguing that there are no good arguments against the assertion that God exists and lots of reasons to think it true. In this debate, in my opinion, Craig's was much the better case, an opinion shared, by the way, even by many of Hitchens' supporters.

UPDATE: Common Sense Atheism to whom the last link directs you, has taken down their post on the debate.

RLC

Bowing and Scraping

You just have to laugh at the major media. Their hypocrisy is so egregious it's humorous. In 1994, according to Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, the New York Times chastised then president Clinton for making a slight suggestion of a bow to the Japanese emperor. Now President Obama does a full jackknife in front of a Saudi Arabian dictator, and the Times finds its attention suddenly diverted elsewhere.

This video compares the measure of respect given by our president to the Queen of England, our closest ally, to the deft toe-touch granted a man who would just as soon see all infidels dead if it didn't mean that he'd have no one to buy his oil and protect him from his fellow Arab cutthroats:

A little obsequious, don't you think? I don't know why the President of the United States should bow to a dictator of a country whose only accomplishment is to be situated atop an ocean of oil. I suppose we should be glad he didn't kiss his ring.

RLC

Ten Myths about America

It's not uncommon to hear or read that the United States was founded on an attempt to eradicate Native Americans or that our Founders intended the U.S. to be a secular nation or that the U.S. is the biggest threat to world peace on the world scene today, etc. Often the claims are made with little or no evidence to support them, but if the person making them seems credible, they're often allowed to go unchallenged.

President Obama's recent claim that America has too often treated Europe with disdain and contempt and failed to recognize European leadership abroad are an example of the sorts of unsubstantiated calumnies that the left often levels at this nation. It's easy to make the accusation, but if it's not backed up with historical evidence then it's little more than empty rhetoric.

At any rate, Michael Medved has decided that some of these claims need to be challenged and he does so in a very useful book entitled Ten Big Lies about America: Combating Destructive Distortions about Our Nation. In the book he tackles ten common myths about the United States that have currency in the academy and leftist media, and shows that each is either false or at best unwarranted.

The ten "lies" are these:

• That America was founded on genocide against native Americans.
• That the U.S. is uniquely guilty for the crime of slavery and based its wealth on stolen African labor.
• That the Founders intended the U.S. to be a secular rather than a Christian nation.
• That America has always been a multicultural society and that it has been strengthened by its diversity.
• That the power of big business hurts the country and oppresses its people.
• That government programs are the answer for poverty and economic downturns.
• That America is an imperialist nation and a constant threat to world peace.
• That we need a third political party.
• That there is a war on the American middle class which is causing many to fall back into poverty.
• That America is in the midst of an irreversible moral decline.

I should mention that Medved's treatment of these claims (I think it's a stretch to call some of them "lies." They might better be called errors or myths) is uneven. The chapter on third parties, for example, takes on a decidedly more unpleasant tone than was employed throughout the rest of the book, as if he was personally offended by people who, quixotically perhaps, wanted to offer the country another political alternative. The subsequent chapter on the middle class offers a lot of facts and figures which cause the mind to wander, and is perhaps the least interesting of the ten.

Having said that, though, his treatment of the other myths is well-worth the price of the book. The first chapter, for example, examines the history of the interaction of the white settlers with the Indians and shows how the accounts of deliberate genocide and white atrocities are either unfounded or greatly exaggerated. There is much fascinating history to be learned here.

Exaggeration also seems to be the rhetorical tool of choice when it comes to the American involvement with slavery. Medved argues that as bad as chattel slavery is it's simply false to think that the United States was somehow the key villain in the story. Of all the slaves sold (by fellow Africans, it should be noted) to the western hemisphere, only 3% were shipped to North America. Yet we never hear denunciations of the Central or South American countries for their history of slavery which was far uglier than what took place in this land until ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865. Moreover, as Alexis de Tocqueville points out in his masterful work Democracy in America, so far from being the economic engine that drove American prosperity, slavery played only a minor role in building the American economy and in fact retarded economic progress rather than advance it. Slavery is indeed a great evil, but America should be respected for the tremendous sacrifice our forefathers made to end it. No country in the history of the world has ever done anything like what we did in our Civil War in order to bring an end to the injustice of human bondage.

Aside from the caveats mentioned above, I highly recommend this book to anyone who wishes to know more about the country in which they live. It'll be an education and a good antidote to the deprecations and denunciations of this country by many of our leftist academics and political leaders.

RLC

Talkers

Talk radio guy Hugh Hewitt explains the value of the medium to America, why the "legacy" media is dying, and also makes a surprisingly good case that conservative talk radio is actually good for President Obama.

There's not much to disagree with in his essay - except his admiration for Sean Hannity whose popularity I simply cannot understand - and it's a piece that should be read by those on both left and right.

RLC

The Blessings of Obesity

According to this article in New Scientist the musical genius of George Friedrich Handel was due to .... obesity and lead poisoning. That's what some Handel experts think anyway.

RLC

Sharing the Wealth

President Obama and Congressional Democrats have embarked upon a policy to tax the rich in order to fund programs that all of us can benefit from. A reader sends me this anecdote, perhaps apocryphal but no matter, that illustrates the problem with Obamanomics:

An economics professor had a class of students who adamantly insisted that the best society was one in which the government taxed the wealthy and gave the money to the poor. The best society was one in which all people were roughly equal in terms of their worldly goods. The professor decided to conduct an experiment with the class to teach them why such schemes always fail.

All grades in the class would henceforth be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A. After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied little. The second test average, predictably enough, was a D. No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the motivation to succeed is great; but when government takes all the reward away; no one has an incentive to try, or even want, to succeed.

Maybe we should forward this to the White House.

RLC

Falling into a Black Hole

Ever wonder what it would be like if by some odd set of circumstances you just happened to fall into a black hole? Of course you have. Everyone has. Well, go here and have it explained to you. Meanwhile, here's a quick simulation of the event:

Looks like a wild ride. I'm surprised amusement parks don't have one of these.

RLC

What's a Promise Worth?

What's the value of a politician's word? Breitbart gives us a clue in this report on President Obama's recent tobacco tax hike:

"I can make a firm pledge," [candidate Obama] said in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12. "Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."

He repeatedly vowed "you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime."

Now in office, Obama, who stopped smoking but has admitted he slips now and then, signed a law raising the tobacco tax nearly 62 cents on a pack of cigarettes, to $1.01. Other tobacco products saw similarly steep increases.

This is one tax that disproportionately affects the poor, who are more likely to smoke than the rich.

"Listen now," he said in his widely watched nomination acceptance speech, "I will cut taxes-cut taxes-for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class."

An unequivocal "any tax" pledge also was heard in the vice presidential debate, another prominent forum.

"No one making less than $250,000 under Barack Obama's plan will see one single penny of their tax raised," Joe Biden said, "whether it's their capital gains tax, their income tax, investment tax, any tax."

Okay, you say. So the Democrats broke their promise, nothing new about that, but people don't have to pay the tax. After all, no one has to smoke. Yes, but suppose everyone stops smoking, or at least many do. The revenue this tax is supposed to raise is to be used to expand medical care coverage for uninsured children. If people stop smoking where will the funding for this program come from?

Those of you making less than $250,000 may be the first to hazard a guess.

RLC

Hitchens Underwater

Christopher Hitchens wades into the Darwinism/Intelligent Design controversy and almost immediately finds himself in philosophical waters quite over his head. Referring to the Texas School Board debate over whether to teach the strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory to school children Hitch writes this:

So by all means let's "be honest with the kids," as Dr. Don McLeroy, the chairman of the Texas education board, wants us to be. The problem is that he is urging that the argument be taught, not in a history or in a civics class, but in a biology class. ... But it would also set a precedent for the sharing of the astronomy period with the teaching of astrology, or indeed of equal time as between chemistry and alchemy. Less boring perhaps, but also much less scientific and less educational.

Well, yes. Much of the debate is over how to interpret biological evidence. Why shouldn't a discussion about biological evidence occur in a biology class?

It's not just that the overwhelming majority of scientists are now convinced that evolution is inscribed in the fossil record and in the lineaments of molecular biology. It is more that evolutionists will say in advance which evidence, if found, would refute them and force them to reconsider. ("Rabbit fossils in the pre-Cambrian layer" was, I seem to remember, the response of Prof. J.B.S. Haldane.) Try asking an "intelligent design" advocate to stipulate upfront what would constitute refutation of his world view and you will easily see the difference between the scientific method and the pseudoscientific one.

This is simply not so. I can think of several things that would give pause to most IDers. One would be if procedures similar to the Urey/Miller experiments produced living cells or even just self-replicating molecules. Another would be if plausible pathways (as opposed to nomologically possible pathways) could be adduced to explain how seemingly irreducibly complex structures could have been constructed in a step-by-step fashion with no intelligent input.

At any rate, in the end Hitch comes up with a proposal that almost no Darwinian wants to see adopted:

I certainly do not want it said that my side denies a hearing to the opposing one. In the spirit of compromise, then, I propose the following. First, let the school debating societies restage the wonderful set-piece real-life dramas of Oxford and Dayton, Tenn. Let time also be set aside, in our increasingly multiethnic and multicultural school system, for children to be taught the huge variety of creation stories, from the Hindu to the Muslim to the Australian Aboriginal. This is always interesting (and it can't be, can it, that the Texas board holdouts think that only Genesis ought to be so honored?).

Set aside the fact that Mr. Hitchens, like so many other ID critics, still hasn't comprehended that the issue is not about teaching Genesis. Intelligent Design is not creationism. The real problem here is that Hitchens inexcusably perpetuates another myth about this whole debate: This is not a controversy between rival creation stories. It's silly to suggest that if we teach one creation story we have to teach them all. The debate is about this question: Are blind purposeless processes and forces adequate by themselves to account for the fine-tuning of the cosmos and the existence of information-rich living organisms or do the exquisitely precise values of the cosmic parameters and the existence of astonishingly complex biological machines and algorithms point to the need for intelligent input and/or guidance.

That's the question at issue and Mr. Hitchens misses it entirely.

He finishes with a second proposal which I'd love to see adopted:

Second, we can surely demand that the principle of "strengths and weaknesses" will be applied evenly. If any church in Texas receives a tax exemption, or if any religious institution is the beneficiary of any subvention from the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, we must be assured that it will devote a portion of its time to laying bare the "strengths and weaknesses" of the religious world view, and also to teaching the works of Voltaire, David Hume, Benedict de Spinoza, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. This is America. Let a hundred flowers bloom, and a thousand schools of thought contend. We may one day have cause to be grateful to the Texas Board of Education for lighting a candle that cannot be put out.

This proposal for teaching the arguments for and against the existence of a cosmic designer in all state and tax-exempt institutions is one that most IDers would love - and every Darwinian would be horrified - to see implemented. It would be great if both churches and public schools did what Hitchens suggests, but surely Darwinians blanch at the prospect. The works of Voltaire, Hume, Paine, et al. do nothing to challenge the view that the cosmos and life are intelligently designed, and, indeed, several of these worthies themselves believed that there was a designer of the world.

Hitchens seems to think that just because these writers were critical of classical Christianity that they therefore were opposed to the idea of a designer. They were not. Even uber-atheist Richard Dawkins acknowledges, albeit somewhat unguardedly, in the documentary Expelled that there's a case to be made that life on earth is designed by an intelligent agent.

It would be wonderful for students to be exposed to writers on both sides of the debate and allowed to make up their own minds without being indoctrinated by a philosophical school of thought which doesn't suffer any other position to be heard.

RLC

Uh Oh

Those of you who have money in the stock market might be celebrating the recent run that has seen the Dow rise 20.4 percent over the last month. Lest we get carried away, however, the AP's business writer Sarah Lepro, perhaps inadvertently, throws a little cold water on our exuberance.

She notes that the Dow's rise over the last four weeks is "its biggest percentage gain in a four-week period since the spring of 1933." That date sounds ominous. The depression lasted for about another decade after 1933.

RLC

Life among the Lefties

In the manner of the late intrepid Australian naturalist Steve Irwin, Jason Mattera wades out into the fever swamps of left-wingdom to bring back exotic specimens of the lefty fauna endemic to Washington and to show us how these strange creatures think, or don't think:

What's even more frightening than lefties talking about torturing conservatives or forming a military to fight against the bourgoisie or signing petitions to abolish greed is to think that these people probably all vote. I wonder how many of them voted for John McCain.

Anyway, Mattera is hilarious. More of his work can be found by typing in his name on our Search function.

Thanks to Hot Air for posting the videos.

RLC

The Last Thing We Can Tolerate

With the economy dominating all the talk we haven't heard much lately about what is perhaps the greatest challenge Barack Obama faces. Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic reminds us that the problem hasn't gone away and in fact is closer to the boiling point now than ever before. That problem is what to do about Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Israel's new Prime Minister has given President Obama a choice: either we stop Iran or they will, and the deadline is not years in the future but months:

Netanyahu gave his fullest public explication yet of why he believes President Obama must consider Iran's nuclear ambitions to be his preeminent overseas challenge. "Why is this a hinge of history? Several bad results would emanate from this single development. First, Iran's militant proxies would be able to fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella. This raises the stakes of any confrontation that they'd force on Israel. Instead of being a local event, however painful, it becomes a global one. Second, this development would embolden Islamic militants far and wide, on many continents, who would believe that this is a providential sign, that this fanaticism is on the ultimate road to triumph.

"Third, they would be able to pose a real and credible threat to the supply of oil, to the overwhelming part of the world's oil supply. Fourth, they may threaten to use these weapons or to give them to terrorist proxies of their own, or fabricate terror proxies. Finally, you'd create a great sea change in the balance of power in our area-nearly all the Arab regimes are dead-set opposed to Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons. They fervently hope, even if they don't say it, that the U.S. will act to prevent this, that it will use its political, economic, and, if necessary, military power to prevent this from happening."

If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, Netanyahu asserted, Washington's Arab allies would drift into Iran's orbit.

Not only would many of them, including Iraq, cozy up to Iran, but those which could afford it would seek to purchase their own nuclear weapons to counter the Iranian threat.

The last thing the world can tolerate is a nuclear Iran. The question is what will President Obama do to prevent it from happening.

RLC

How Much Power?

A little humor from Michael Ramirez to cap off the month:

I wonder how far President Obama is going to go with this exercise of his power. Is everyone who manages an institution which takes federal money going to be subject to being fired by the White House? What about schools and colleges? Are their administrators under Obama's thumb? What about employees of towns and cities that are recipients of federal largesse?

How much power will the President arrogate to himself before the people stand up and say "that's enough?"

RLC

The Basic Difference

Here's a quick quiz: How would you describe the fundamental difference between modern liberals (progressives) and modern conservatives?

Perhaps one way to answer this is to note how each group would answer another question:

Should government be empowered to regulate our lives to maximize the common good or should it be limited to protecting citizens from encroachments upon their basic freedoms?

Which of these two views did you think our Founders had in mind?

Progressives believe the role of government is to use its power to ensure that the greatest good is done for the greatest number of people. They hold that the greatest benefit is realized when everyone has a roughly equal share of the world's resources and that it is the role of government to bring this about, even if that means taking from those who have and giving to those who don't. To progressives, opposition to this view is a sign of greed and selfishness.

Conservatives maintain that that is not at all what our Founders intended. The men who established this nation, and most of those who followed them, believed that the purpose of the government they established was to guarantee the freedoms articulated in the Declaration of Independence and especially the Bill of Rights, and to protect these from the encroachments of all who would take them away, both foreign and domestic. The progressive view, most conservatives would argue, leads ultimately to tyranny.

Chances are if you hold to the first view you're a Democrat and if you hold to the second you're a Republican.

Right now, the first view is prevailing.

RLC

One in Ten Chinese

The British TimesOnline has a story about the amazing struggle and growth of the Chinese church:

A murmur of "Amen" echoes softly down a corridor in a luxury Beijing hotel. Dozens of young Chinese are gathered in a beige-carpeted conference room to listen to the word of God. After helping themselves to hot water or tea at the back of the room, they find a seat and chatter with friends. They tuck Louis Vuitton and Prada handbags under their seats, switch their mobile phones to silent and turn to listen to a young woman who takes the microphone to ask for silence and recite a prayer.

A casually dressed, grey-haired Chinese man takes to the podium. "Let us begin with a look at the Gospel of Saint John." There is a rustling of pages as converts and curious open their Bibles. Almost everyone in the room is scarcely a day over 30. Most look as if they are in their early twenties. They are fashionably dressed - girls with high-heeled boots, men sporting trendy knitted hats. This is Friday night Bible class in Beijing. And it is a weekend venue of choice for growing numbers of well-off middle-class city sophisticates.

The fact that this class is technically illegal, run by pastors lacking approval from the state-sanctioned Protestant church, is not the attraction. These are not young people seeking a frisson of excitement from some underground activity. They are at the forefront of a movement sweeping China - the search for spiritual satisfaction now that Marx is démodé.

No attempt is made to conceal what is, in effect, an underground religious gathering. A sign in Chinese outside the conference room reads: "Hill of Golgotha Church meeting". A board outside the hotel lift directs visitors to Hall 5. There is not a nod towards secrecy or even discretion. There is no sense of anxiety, let alone fear, that officials could burst in to break up this illegal assembly even though police do still frequently raid house churches run by underground Protestant pastors.

In fact, across China religion is undergoing a defiant and extraordinary revival. Millions of Chinese are turning to familiar traditional faiths such as Buddhism and Taoism - a mystical belief with about 400 million adherents that is China's only indigenous creed. Taoist believers, like Buddhists, visit temples across the country to burn incense, present offerings and request readings from fortune tellers. Others are finding comfort in Confucius, but it is Christianity that is leading the battle for China's 1.3 billion souls.

Recent surveys calculate the number of Christians worshipping independently of the State churches in China to be as high as 100 million. That means that almost one in every ten Chinese may now be a Christian, making Christianity bigger than the 74 million-member Communist Party.

These one in ten are not, presumably, tepid about their faith like, say, many mainline protestants and Catholics in America. These are people who realize they could very well pay a terrible price for attending a worship service. Yet they come.

There's an interesting irony in this. While Christianity seems to be flickering out in those regions of the globe where it held sway for almost 2000 years and where there's been no real social or political cost for affiliating with a church, it's exploding in places like China, where the faithful could be imprisoned, beaten, or otherwise sanctioned. It's also burgeoning in Africa and elsewhere in the third world countries that girdle the southern hemisphere.

Such news doubtless moves people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins to reach for the Maalox.

RLC

Re: Presidential Trends, Etc.

Jeff writes to add some insights of his own to the post titled Presidential Trends. Here's part of what he says:

...two candidates that fit all of these characteristics better than both Jeb Bush and Bobby Jindal are Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty (both of which are younger than Jeb Bush anyway). Both of these men served as Governors and both are very open about being Evangelical Christians. Both are down to earth and were popular in each of their bluish states (Arkansas and Minnesota). Both reached out to those outside of their own party and worked together to find positive solutions to problems and got a lot accomplished despite the opposing party in their states' legislatures. I think that a candidate such as Huckabee or Pawlenty would be a fresh new face for the GOP and could attract voters outside of the far right and rather than focusing on negativity and what the other party is doing wrong, they would focus on coming up with solutions and making progress.

The rest of Jeff's e-mail can be read on the Feedback Page.

Another reader wrote to take issue with the tone of an article by Keith Pavlischek that we discussed a few weeks ago. That letter is also on the Feedback Page.

RLC

The Problem of the Self

A.C. Grayling at New Scientist discusses a little of the history of an interesting metaphysical problem. The problem lies in trying to ascertain exactly what it is we are referring to when we talk about the self. What is the self? Who is the I or me to which I refer when I use these words? If it's just the body, as materialists believe, then what is it about us that perdures through time and makes us the same self from one point in time to the next?

Grayling writes:

After John Locke published his Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690, he sent copies to various savants of his acquaintance, asking for comments and in particular for advice on whether he had left out anything essential - for if so, he could add it to a second edition. His correspondent William Molyneaux of Dublin replied that Locke needed to say something about personal identity: that is, what makes a person the same person throughout their life.

Belief in the idea of a substantial soul - a "you" that is separate from your body - was waning. In the absence of this metaphysical entity as a convenience for underpinning personal identity, what, asked Molyneaux, makes the retired general continuous with the eager subaltern of 40 years before, and he with the red-cheeked baby in his nurse's arms 20 years before that? In response, Locke added a chapter to his second edition which instantly caused a storm of controversy and has been famous ever since in the annals of philosophy.

In that chapter Locke argued that a person's identity over time resides in their consciousness (he coined this term, and here introduced it to the English language) of being the same self at a later time as at an earlier, and that the mechanism that makes this possible is memory. Whereas a stone is the same stone over time because it is the very same lump of matter - or almost, allowing for erosion - and an oak tree is identical with its originating acorn because it is the same continuous organisation of matter, a person is only the same through time if he or she is self-aware of being so. Memory loss interrupts identity, and complete loss of memory is therefore loss of the self.

The divines, represented by Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, took umbrage and attacked Locke for ignoring the immortal soul. In 1712 The Spectator magazine ran a front-cover demand that "the wits of Kingdom" should get together in conference to settle the matter of personal identity and selfhood, because the controversy was getting out of control. In 1739, when David Hume published the first volume of his Treatise on Human Nature, he stated that there is no such thing as the self, for if one conducts the empirical inquiry of introspecting - looking within oneself - to see what there is apart from current sensations, feelings, desires and thoughts, one does not find an extra something, a "self", over and above these things, which owns them and endures beyond them.

Thus in 50 years the unreflective idea that each individual has an immortal soul as the basis of their selfhood had changed utterly. For millennia before Locke, no one had so much as raised the question. But it was no surprise that the question should suddenly become urgent as the Enlightenment dawned, with its central idea of the autonomous individual who is a bearer of rights and responsible for his or her own moral outlook; such an idea needs a robust idea of selfhood, and the philosophers eagerly tried to make sense of it.

Hume's sceptical view did not prevail. Kant argued that logic requires a concept-imposing self to make experience possible, and the Romantics made the self the centre of each individual's universe: "I am that which began," wrote Swinburne in Hertha, "Out of me the years roll, out of me God and Man." Without a deep idea of the self there could be no Freud or psychoanalysis.

So fundamental is the idea of the self to modern human consciousness that one would expect developments in neuroscience to have a direct bearing on it. And ... that is exactly what is happening - with surprising and often disconcerting results.

The disconcerting results consist primarily in the inability of materialist philosophers to identify anything other than the physical body that would constitute a self. If we have a mind or a soul then presumably it is that, or could be that, which comprises the essential "me," but for modern materialists who have no room in their ontological cupboard for immaterial substances, nothing remains but to conclude that we are simply a mobile pile of carbon and a few other elements. These chemicals are in constant flux so the self is constantly shifting and changing. There's nothing upon which to base a belief that I am the same person I remember being ten years ago.

T.S. Eliot put it this way: "What we know of other people is just our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then....At every meeting we are meeting a stranger."

If this is the case several awkward conclusions follow. In the first place there's no sense in which I can be held responsible for what was done by an individual who had my name and social security number ten years ago. It wasn't me. I cannot be held responsible for promises, contracts, crimes, or anything, for that matter, any more than I could be held responsible to keep a promise made by you.

Another thing that follows from the materialist view of man is that if there really is no self then there's no intrinsic human worth, no dignity, no significance to the individual, or indeed to humanity as a whole. We're simply a couple of scoops of gooey organic molecules, and there's not much value to goo.

Of course, once society comes to recognize and accept this unfortunate idea it will be no time at all before holocausts start looming right around every corner.

Ideas, especially metaphysical ideas, have consequences.

RLC

Bristol and Ashley

It'd be a terrible shame if the allegations of a tape of Joe Biden's daughter using cocaine really exists. I'm sure it would be a source of anguish for Biden and his wife, and it's beneath contempt that someone made it and is trying to shop the tape around. I'm frankly very reluctant to talk about it and prefer that this sort of thing just be ignored.

However, there's a point about this that needs to be made. Vice-president Biden has, to his credit, been a leader in the war on drugs, created the Drug Czar post and sponsored much anti-drug legislation. Thus the problems his daughter is allegedly having must be especially painful, and we should all be sympathetic, but this leads me to my point.

When word came out that Sarah Palin's daughter was pregnant and unmarried the media and many Democrats richly, and publicly, enjoyed the irony of the daughter refusing to abide by the values of the mother. Bristol Palin's story was all over the media. Some outlets even ran unsubstantiated allegations that Sarah's mentally retarded child was really Bristol's. Then, even after the election was over, the media came back to get in a few more kicks to the Palins' ribs when Bristol and the baby's father broke up. The whole episode was very sad and quite contemptible, but that didn't hinder gleeful reporters from doing their worst to gloat over every detail.

Now the shoe may be on the other political foot, but you'll probably not hear much about Ashley Biden on the six o'clock news, nor should you. But then you shouldn't have heard much about Bristol Palin, either. A principled reluctance on the part of journalists and political operatives to embarrass the families of our public figures is only principled if it's a courtesy extended to all of our public figures and not just those on the side we want to see win.

RLC

Is ID Boring?

At Telic Thoughts Bilbo recalls that in the documentary, Expelled, professor of evolutionary biology William Provine complains that Intelligent Design is "boring." Provine goes on to insist that Darwinism leads to the view that life is meaningless, there's no foundation for ethics, no basis for free will, and no life after death. Provine is surely correct about these entailments of a Darwinian worldview, but he's hardly correct about ID being boring. Nevertheless, a lot of commenter's at Telic Thoughts agreed with him, so I felt constrained to throw my two cents in:

Boring? What could be more exciting than to believe that scientific investigation actually means something, that the whole universe is imbued with purpose, that there's a reason, an intention, for why things are the way they are? What could be more exciting than thinking that one's research is literally thinking the designer's thoughts after it?

On the other hand, what could be more depressing than Professor Provine's view that life is meaningless, moral obligation is groundless, free will is an illusion, and the universe is just a pointless, accidental ontological burp?

Not surprisingly, several readers disagreed with me. One remarked that:

...except that the ID community doesn't do any research. And most of the time doesn't show much interest in biology except insofar as it supports their metaphysical predilections. While Darwin's Theory spawned generations of research, entire new fields of study, ID is a deadend.

Whatever the truth of these claims may be, they're a bit beside the point. The question is not whether intelligent design is a research program, it's whether it's interesting as an interpretation of the results of scientific investigation. Regardless of its merits as a scientific enterprise in itself, ID is a fascinating way of looking at the world. It maintains that the world is filled with transcendent purpose and meaning. It holds that scientific labor is not just mere fact collecting, but is actually a way of discovering how a superhuman intellect thinks.

Another commenter took exception to this claim. He wrote that, "Grandiose self-delusion like that is more properly the domain of theology and philosophy departments."

On the contrary, the idea that science is "thinking the designer's thoughts after it" goes back as far as Johannes Kepler and is certainly the attitude held by many of the founders of modern science. Men of the intellectual stature of Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Boyle, Einstein and, more recently, George Smoot, all have employed some variation of this sentiment in describing their work. To call it "grandiose self-delusion" is to belie an unfortunate ignorance of the history of science.

At any rate, I thought it interesting that no one chose to respond to the second part of what I wrote, i.e. that what's really discouraging and boring is the view Provine derives from his Darwinism that life is fundamentally pointless. If that's true, and I think it is given Provine's atheism, then what is the point of scientific research? Scientists spend their lives gathering a few facts, and some small number of them may even discover something that makes life better for a while, but in the end it's all for nothing. We all die, the world perishes in a solar explosion, and none of it matters at all. That view may not itself be exactly boring, but it sure does sap the motivation to go to the lab each day out of anybody that allows it to sink in. How can someone who really thinks this take their work seriously?

RLC

Presidential Trends

Sitting in my favorite restaurant the other day I reflected over lunch on the last five presidential elections and realized that there are some interesting patterns to be found in them:

Since 1992 we have had five presidential elections. In every one of them (3 elections) in which a younger candidate ran against a significantly older candidate the younger man won. In every election in which one candidate was a former governor and the other was not (4 elections) the former governor won. In every one in which one candidate was a war veteran and the other was not (all 5), the veteran lost. In every one of them (all 5) in which one candidate appeared considerably more at ease talking about his religious faith than did his opponent that candidate won.

The implications of this seem obvious. If the GOP wants to enhance its prospects of reclaiming the White House in 2012 they should look not to aging senators but to young, charismatic governors or ex-governors who hold sincere and well-thought out religious convictions.

It sounds like a recipe for Bobby Jindal, Sarah Palin, or Jeb Bush, if he had a different last name. Of course, if the Republicans do decide to go with another war vet in 2012, and choose David Petraeus, the trend against electing vets could come to a screeching halt.

RLC

Age of Confusion

National Review's Katherine Jean Lopez reflects on a recent poll of teenagers which found that 50% of them blamed Rihanna for the drubbing she received at the hands of her boyfriend Chris Brown. Half of the teens surveyed believed that Rihanna must have deserved it somehow. Here are some highlights of her post:

It's just one survey. But it's very bad news. And feminists are to blame.

I don't say that to bash Gloria Steinem, or whoever the most easily blamed feminist would be at this point. I say that so we can collectively get our heads out of the feminist fog in which we've been lost.

What has happened - and what Rihanna and Chris have to do with Gloria and us - is that by inventing oppression where there is none and remaking woman in man's image, as the sexual and feminist revolutions have done, we've confused everyone. The reaction those kids had was unnatural. It's natural for us to expect men to protect women, and for women to expect some level of physical protection. But in post-modern America, those natural gender roles have been beaten by academics and political rhetoric and the occasional modern woman being offended by having a door opened for her. The result is confusion.

And perhaps, too, a neo-feminist backlash.

The need for some return to sanity is presented pretty clearly in an article in the April issue of O, the Oprah Magazine. The article details how some women find themselves leaving men in favor of relationships with partners of their own gender.

One recently divorced academic describes what attracted her to a future female lover. "She got up and gave me the better seat, as if she wanted to take care of me. I was struck by that," she said. "I felt attracted to her energy, her charisma. I was enticed. And she paid the bill. Just the gesture was sexy. She took initiative and was the most take-charge person I'd ever met."

This article isn't about closeted homosexuality. It's not making the case that there is a vast population of women who were born to be with women, who are instead trapped in unfulfilling heterosexual arrangements. No, this article, despite its celebration of unconventional lifestyles, boils down to something much more orthodox: Femininity and masculinity mix well together. And women are taking masculinity where they can get it, even if that's in the arms of another woman.

Last year, Kathleen Parker published a book called Save the Males. What a perfect title, what a necessary cause, I thought at the time. As Parker wrote: "For the past thirty years or so, males have been under siege by a culture that too often embraces the notion that men are to blame for all of life's ills. While women have been cast as victims . . . men have been quietly retreating into their caves."

Lopez's article isn't long and could be read with profit by both men and women. Give it a look.

RLC

GOP Fiddles While Economy Burns

While the economy is being consumed in the flames of out of control spending and borrowing, and the administration rushes to throw ever more gasoline onto the inferno, the GOP is addressing itself to the gravity of the problem by valiantly undertaking to change the way we pick the national champion of college football:

Everyone from President Barack Obama on down to fans has criticized how college football determines its top team. Now senators are getting off the sidelines to examine antitrust issues involving the Bowl Champion Series. The current system "leaves nearly half of all the teams in college football at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to qualifying for the millions of dollars paid out every year," the Senate Judiciary's subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy and consumer rights said in a statement Wednesday announcing the hearings.

Under the BCS, some conferences get automatic bids to participate in series, while others do not. Obama and some members of Congress favor a playoff-type system to determine the national champion. The BCS features a championship game between the two top teams in the BCS standings, based on two polls and six computer ratings.

Behind the push for the hearings is the subcommittee's top Republican, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah. People there were furious that Utah was bypassed for the national championship despite going undefeated in the regular season.

The subcommittee's statement said Hatch would introduce legislation "to rectify this situation." No details were offered and Hatch's office declined to provide any.

Hatch said in a statement that the BCS system "has proven itself to be inadequate, not only for those of us who are fans of college football, but for anyone who believes that competition and fair play should have a role in collegiate sports."

In the House, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the top Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, has sponsored legislation that would prevent the NCAA from calling a football game a "national championship" unless the game culminates from a playoff system.

Forgive my asking, but where in the Constitution is Congress granted the prerogative of determining how we select a football champion? What business is this of the government's? Will my grandson's 8-10 baseball team be the next to fall under Senator Hatch's scrutiny?

God save us from our elected leaders.

RLC

Toward a Secular Society

Peter Glover claims at First Things that "the government and media of Great Britain have put in place over the last few decades a determined program to abolish the influence of Christianity" in that nation. Lest you think Mr. Glover exaggerates you should read some of the examples he cites:

How else to read the story, in November 2008, of a foster mother struck off the register by her local council for "allowing a Muslim girl in her care to convert to Christianity"? The woman had looked after as many as eighty children over the previous decade. Although she was a practicing Anglican, everyone agrees that she put no pressure on the girl. The woman testified, "I did initially try to discourage her. I offered her alternatives," including "finding places for her to practice her own religion."

Eventually though, at her own insistence, the girl was allowed to attend church with her foster mother. Within months she asked to be baptized (under Shari'a Law, an act of apostasy for which the death sentence is prescribed). Local officials ruled that the foster mother had "failed in her duty to preserve the girl's religion and should have tried to stop the baptism." Council officers subsequently barred the woman from foster parenting, her sole source of income.

This case was matched by that of Caroline Petrie, who was suspended from her post as a community nurse when she offered to pray for an elderly patient. (The public furor eventually led to Petrie's reinstatement.) In another case late last year, a registrar of marriages asked to be relieved of the duty of officiating at "gay marriages." She was refused and threatened with dismissal.

Jeremy Vine is a highly visible BBC broadcaster and a practicing Anglican. In a recent interview, Vine explained how difficult it had become to speak of his faith on air. It is, he claimed, now "socially unacceptable" to mention one's Christian faith in public. Society in Britain has become intolerant of the freedom to express the religious views that were "common currency thirty or forty years ago," Vine added. "The parameters of what you might call 'right thinking" are closing. Sadly, it is almost socially unacceptable to say you believe in God." All of which is unsurprising, given that last year Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC and a practicing Catholic, issued an edict stating that the BBC should treat Islam "more sensitively" than Christianity.

This is truly disturbing stuff. As we wrote the other day, history shows that nations which self-consciously jettison the Judeo-Christian heritage upon which they were built not infrequently collapse into moral anarchy and thence into oppression and tyranny.

Another unsettling aspect of this trend is that so many Americans think it would be just great if we followed Europe's example.

RLC

The Sky Is Falling. Really.

A reader once pointed out that we at Viewpoint, much like the MSM, seem to dwell disproportionately on bad news. I don't think that's true. After all, we regularly featured Good News from Iraq posts back when few could find any good news about Iraq. We've also reported on medical advances that promise to make our lives better, and we have even on occasion wished our readers merry Christmas. Nonetheless, we're sensitive to the charge that we're rivaling Glenn Beck for perpetual "gloom and doom."

Yet, having said all that, we still find this depressing report from the National Academy of Sciences irresistable.

It appears that, in fact, we're all doomed, and by the very thing that has made modern life so wonderful - electricity. More precisely, we're doomed by our failure to adequately protect our power grid against solar storms.

These excerpts will give you the gist of the report, but the whole thing makes fascinating reading - that is, if you're fascinated by reading about how civilization could come to an abrupt end and millions will die:

It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

According to the NAS report, a severe space weather event in the US could induce ground currents that would knock out 300 key transformers within about 90 seconds, cutting off the power for more than 130 million people (see map). From that moment, the clock is ticking for America.

First to go - immediately for some people - is drinkable water. Anyone living in a high-rise apartment, where water has to be pumped to reach them, would be cut off straight away. For the rest, drinking water will still come through the taps for maybe half a day. With no electricity to pump water from reservoirs, there is no more after that.

There is simply no electrically powered transport: no trains, underground or overground. Our just-in-time culture for delivery networks may represent the pinnacle of efficiency, but it means that supermarket shelves would empty very quickly - delivery trucks could only keep running until their tanks ran out of fuel, and there is no electricity to pump any more from the underground tanks at filling stations.

Back-up generators would run at pivotal sites - but only until their fuel ran out. For hospitals, that would mean about 72 hours of running a bare-bones, essential care only, service. After that, no more modern healthcare.

The truly shocking finding is that this whole situation would not improve for months, maybe years: melted transformer hubs cannot be repaired, only replaced. "From the surveys I've done, you might have a few spare transformers around, but installing a new one takes a well-trained crew a week or more," says Kappenman. "A major electrical utility might have one suitably trained crew, maybe two."

With no power for heating, cooling or refrigeration systems, people could begin to die within days. There is immediate danger for those who rely on medication. Lose power to New Jersey, for instance, and you have lost a major centre of production of pharmaceuticals for the entire US. Perishable medications such as insulin will soon be in short supply. "In the US alone there are a million people with diabetes," Kappenman says. "Shut down production, distribution and storage and you put all those lives at risk in very short order."

Actually the results of a severe solar storm are similar to the results from a single nuclear warhead detonated high over the continent to generate an electro-magnetic pulse (For more on EMP use our Search function and type in EMP). Anyway, check out the whole article sometime when you're feeling a sense that all's well with the world.

Now I have to go read some more about the global economic meltdown.

RLC

Political Orcs

Who does the left see as the biggest threat to their quest to keep their grip on government power and turn us into Sweden? The key to answering the question is to see at whom they've been aiming their fire and who is the target of their most despicable attacks. For a while it was Rush Limbaugh. Now it's Sarah Palin:

The people who are doing this to Governor Palin are shameless, unprincipled Machiavellian Leninists who are determined to destroy anyone who stands in their way. They don't care about the Constitution, they don't care about truth, they don't care about law, they care only about acquiring and keeping power. Here's what Lenin himself said in a speech in 1920:

"We repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas that are outside class [socio-economic class] conceptions. Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat."

The modern left and its tool the Democrat party have adopted Lenin's political pragmatism. For them whatever works is right. If it helps to neutralize a political threat to their power by hounding a good woman and her family with lawsuits, if it means ridiculing her because her daughter doesn't live by the values the mother does, if it means reporting every bit of embarrassing news about the family that can be dug up, then that's what they're going to do.

When power is your summum bonum you can justify almost any behavior, no matter how contemptible. Palin's persecutors are, in my opinion, the political equivalent of Tolkien's orcs in the film version of Lord of the Rings.

RLC

Overseas Contingencies

The Washington Post blog reports that the Pentagon has been advised that we must no longer refer to the global war on terror as the global war on terror:

The end of the Global War on Terror -- or at least the use of that phrase -- has been codified at the Pentagon. Reports that the phrase was being retired have been circulating for some time amongst senior administration officials, and this morning speechwriters and other staff were notified via this e-mail to use "Overseas Contingency Operation" instead.

"Overseas Contingency Operation" sounds like a project to deliver relief aid to some third world basketcase. And what, exactly, does the word "contingency" mean in this context, anyway? Why do bureaucrats feel the need to obfuscate everything they can until no one knows what the heck they're talking about? Pat Buchanan says the new bureaucratese reminds him of the old CIA term for killing the enemy. It was not called "killing," it was called "terminating with extreme prejudice." I don't know which formulation is a greater offense to intelligent people - the current Pentagon jargon or the old CIA construction.

Anyway, I was kind of getting used to calling the war on terror the Global War on Man-Caused Disasterists. I don't know why we can't just stick with that.

RLC

Happy Birthday, Flannery

If you're a cynic about human nature, if a wry smile flickers across your face when you're exposed to progressive flummery about the inherent goodness of man, if you think that life is indeed a tale told by an idiot and is mostly sad, if you have a deep appreciation for a writer who is able to paint word pictures with extraordinary artistry, and if you have a somewhat off-beat sense of humor, then Flannery O'Conner is your gal. I love her work, so you know what that says about me.

I'm not alone, though. Millions of others do, too, among whom is Ralph Wood of Baylor University. His brief essay on O'Conner on the anniversary of her birth (3/25/1925) is worth reading. He begins with this improbable opening:

Flannery O'Connor is an offensive writer. Readers who haven't dipped into her stories and books sometimes don't know where to begin with this author, who was born on this day in 1925.

It is almost impossible to read O'Connor without revulsion - so frequent are the deaths, so maniacal the characters, so uninviting the fictional world. There we encounter, for example, a club-footed delinquent who lies and steals because, he says, he's good at it; a little rich boy who drowns himself in search of the salvation his parents hold in contempt; a baptizing backwoods prophet who has spent time in an insane asylum and who deafened his own nephew with a shotgun blast; a failed white liberal writer who contracts a lifelong disease while seeking to celebrate a secular communion with black dairy workers; a mass-murdering misfit who guns down a complacent grandmother while complaining that Jesus has "thown" everything off balance; and a self-satisfied farm wife who thanks Jesus daily for making her both white and prosperous - until she is slugged in the head with a psychology textbook thrown by a Wellesley student.

All true, all true, and yet she's the best short story writer I've ever read. Happy birthday, Flannery. I'm sure the angels are amused by your wit and amazed at your wisdom.

RLC

The Coming Death Match

Strategy Page offers this assessment of the situation existing between Israel and Gaza:

The deadlock continues, with Hamas refusing to compromise on its goals of destroying Israel and driving Jews from the region. Even though nearly three billion dollars in aid is being offered if Hamas will make peace, Hamas refuses to do so. Hamas is on a Mission From God, and acts the part. Negotiations over the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, held by Hamas for three years, also broke down (over the issue of how many senior terrorists would be released, and how many would be released outside if Gaza or the West Bank). In response to this, Israel arrested ten Hamas leaders in the West Bank, and restricted visitors and packages for 11,000 Palestinian prisoners. Israel has also continued its operations against terrorist group leaders in Gaza (where they are killed by missiles) and the West Bank (where they are taken alive, if possible.)

Israeli military and intelligence officials talk openly of "finishing" the military operations against Hamas. The January 18 ceasefire is considered just that, and it's expected that Hamas intransigence during any negotiations will result in a deadlock and the resumption of fighting. The second round is expected to be a death match, with no end until the Hamas leadership is captured or killed, and Hamas weapons (especially the thousands of rockets) captured or destroyed.

Israel now believes that Hezbollah and Hamas have over 50,000 rockets in place, to fire on Israel. Most of these rockets are small (under 100 pounds, with a range of under ten kilometers). Most of the rockets are controlled by Hezbollah in Lebanon, and can only reach largely Arab communities in northern Israel.

Eliminating Hamas is what the Israelis should have done the first time around, and why they didn't is a mystery. Their dilatory policy has only dragged out the inevitable and increased the suffering of the Palestinian people.

RLC

Begins With H

Democrats are so angry with AIG for awarding large bonuses to its executives that they passed a law that taxes those bonuses at a rate of 90% unless the recipients voluntarily return them. Wouldn't it set a better example and send a positive message to beleaguered taxpayers if the politicians who received contributions from AIG also returned those contributions?

For starters how about if President Obama returned the $110,332 in campaign contributions he received from AIG. Senator Dodd, who first amended the stimulus bill to allow for those executive bonuses and then launched a tirade against AIG for granting them, has himself collected $281,038 in campaign contributions from AIG. Senator Chuck Schumer, another Democrat outraged by the bonuses, was the recipient of $111,875.

While these and others of our political class pontificate on the wickedness of accepting multi-million dollar bonuses when the company needs all the help it can get and is receiving taxpayer-funded bailouts to keep them afloat, they nevertheless seem to have no intention of returning their own "bonuses."

There's a word for this that begins with "h" and ends in "y," and it's not "happy."

RLC

Runaway Train

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tells an audience comprised in part of illegal aliens that they are patriots and those who want immigration laws enforced are "unAmerican." If you think this sounds perverse you're not alone:

Now no one will ever mistake Ms Pelosi for either a deep thinker or a stateswoman, but her shameless pandering and blithe acceptance of a flood of illegals pouring into the country, imposing enormous burdens on communities and sucking up jobs while many Americans are losing theirs, reveals what I think is a secret among the political cognoscenti that no one is really talking about.

Why do so few in government care to stop illegal immigration despite the violence, crime and economic stress it's imposing on many of our cities and towns? Perhaps it has to do with the parlous future of social security and medicare. Quite simply, neither of these programs is sustainable. They're ponzi schemes built on the assumption that the workforce and economy will continue to grow, but that assumption is very doubtful. The economy looks to be entering a period of stagnation that could last well into the foreseeable future while at the same time boomers are moving into their retirement years, and the population of taxpayers paying into these systems is diminishing. This confluence makes the collapse of social security and medicare seem inevitable. Without an influx of workers both systems will be bankrupt within a decade or so, and that was before the Obama administration piled trillions of dollars of debt on the backs of a dwindling number of taxpayers.

To get an idea of the magnitude of the debt problem, by the way, see this.

At any rate, a growing population is thought by many to be our only hope of deferring calamity for a couple of generations, and the only way our population is going to grow is to let in millions of immigrants. Our irresponsible fiscal and monetary policies have put us on a runaway train that's hurtling downhill. About all we can do to slow it down a little is drag our heels by opening our borders and essentially stretching Mexico's boundary northward to Canada.

Great solution. I guess we better hope that those illegal immigrants are indeed patriots because if Washington has its way we're going to have a lot of them.

RLC

Model Railroaders

So maybe you like model trains and even built a layout of your own. If so, you'll find this pretty amazing:

There's more explanation of this display here.

Thanks to Hot Air for the tip.

RLC

Brief History of the Politicization of Iraq

David Horowitz and Ben Johnson at FrontPage Mag want to insure that the American people don't forget the history of the Democratic party's opposition to the Iraq War over the past five years. Their essay is worth quoting at length:

On this sixth anniversary of America's invasion of Iraq, there is finally a consensus among supporters and opponents that we've won the war. The surge that Bush launched and Democrats opposed has been successful and, as a result, Iraq has become a Middle Eastern democracy, an anti-terrorist regime, and an American ally.

It would be hard to imagine a more remarkable turnabout or a more comprehensive repudiation of conventional political wisdom. Yet this has not led to a comparable reappraisal by critics of the war of their previous attacks, or to any mea culpas by Democrats who launched a scorched earth campaign against the president who led it, and continued it for five years while the war dragged on.

The Democratic attacks on the war described America's commander-in-chief as a liar who misled his country and sent American soldiers to die in a conflict that was unnecessary, illegal and unjust. This made prosecution of the war incalculably harder while strengthening the resolve of our enemies to defeat us. It is time to re-evaluate the words and actions of the war's opponents in the stark light of a history that proved them wrong.

In the fall of 2002, a majority of Democrats in the Senate joined Republicans in voting to authorize President Bush to use force to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein. In July 2003, only three months after Saddam had been removed, the Democratic National Committee launched a national campaign which accused President Bush of lying in order to trick Democrats into voting for the war. It was the beginning of a five-year campaign designed to paint the president as the liar-in-chief and America as a criminal aggressor, and the military occupier of a poor country that had not attacked us.

What had changed in the intervening three months to turn Democrats so vehemently against the war they had authorized? The answer can only be found in domestic politics. In those three months, an unknown antiwar candidate named Howard Dean had taken the lead in the primary polls and was looking like a shoe-in for the Democratic presidential nomination. As a result rival candidates who had voted for the war, including eventual nominees Kerry and Edwards, changed their positions 180 degrees and joined the attacks on President Bush.

Naturally, the Democrats couldn't admit their attacks were motivated by crass political calculations. Instead, they claimed that they had been deceived by the White House which had manipulated the intelligence on Iraq, persuading them to support the war on false premises.

This allegation was in fact the biggest lie of the war, since Democrats had full access to all U.S. intelligence on Iraq through their seats on the congressional intelligence committees. This intelligence was available to them, in advance of their vote to authorize the use of force. In the months and years that followed, the Democrats added other false charges -- that troops "killed innocent civilians in cold blood," were "terrorizing kids and...women," and had committed atrocities comparable to "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime."

They rejoiced when news reporters leaked information about national security programs designed to combat the terrorists - and thus destroyed them. They held up funding for American soldiers on the battlefield, attempted to cut off all funding, and when that failed, tried to tie funding to a timeline that would ensure America's defeat. They openly accused uniformed officers like General David Petraeus of lying about conditions on the ground and hoped against hope that "this war is lost, and the surge is not accomplishing anything."

It's interesting to me that the Democrats' modus operandi seems to be to approve something and then, when it becomes politically expedient, to act as if they were opposed and outraged all along. This is what they did with corporate bonuses, for example, and its what they did with Bush and the Iraq war. No one will ever mistake these guys for profiles in political courage.

It's also interesting to me that ever since it became clear that the war was essentially over, that we had won, and that Bush had largely been vindicated, we've heard next to nothing about Iraq in our media. They don't want to remind people, I guess, how terribly wrong they were about it.

RLC

Inching Toward the Exits

When Frank Rich of the New York Times is casting nervous glances toward the lifeboat you know the USS Obama is in serious trouble. Rich thinks that Obama may well be having his "Katrina Moment," the moment when Bush's alleged dithering started his approval ratings on a long downward trajectory.

Rich is terrified that the same thing might be happening to Obama because of the mess at AIG and CitiGroup:

Six weeks ago I wrote in this space that the country's surge of populist rage could devour the president's best-laid plans, including the essential Act II of the bank rescue, if he didn't get in front of it. The occasion then was the Tom Daschle firestorm. The White House seemed utterly blindsided by the public's revulsion at the moneyed insiders' culture illuminated by Daschle's post-Senate career. Yet last week's events suggest that the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.

The rest of his column is a plea for the administration to get its act together - which it clearly hasn't - because if they don't not only will we suffer the economic consequences but, worse than that, we'll find ourselves delivered into the hands of the evil Republicans:

As the nation's anger rose last week, the president took responsibility for what's happening on his watch - more than he needed to, given the disaster he inherited. But in the credit mess, action must match words. To fall short would be to deliver us into the catastrophic hands of a Republican opposition whose only known economic program is to reject job-creating stimulus spending and root for Obama and, by extension, the country to fail. With all due deference to Ponzi schemers from Madoff to A.I.G., this would be the biggest outrage of them all.

This is vintage Rich. He can never resist deliberately misrepresenting the political opposition in order to make rhetorical hay. But never mind. The news in this column is that even Obama's most steadfast supporters are, barely two months into the administration, inching toward the exits. That is not a good sign.

RLC