Another One Bites the Dust

Generations of students have been taught that birds descended from dinosaurs and that a particular bird, Archeopteryx, is not only an intermediate species between the two taxa but proof of their evolutionary relationship. Well, now it appears that all those students will have to unlearn that "fact" of evolutionary history. It turns out that there's conclusive evidence that birds did not arise from dinosaurs and that the common ancestor, if there is one, between the two groups is unknown.

This story from Science Daily recounts the bad news for those who for decades have cited Archeopteryx to refute those benighted creationist claims that there are no transitional fossils between dinosaurs and birds:

Researchers at Oregon State University have made a fundamental new discovery about how birds breathe and have a lung capacity that allows for flight - and the finding means it's unlikely that birds descended from any known theropod dinosaurs.

The conclusions add to other evolving evidence that may finally force many paleontologists to reconsider their long-held belief that modern birds are the direct descendants of ancient, meat-eating dinosaurs, OSU researchers say. It's been known for decades that the femur, or thigh bone in birds is largely fixed and makes birds into "knee runners," unlike virtually all other land animals, the OSU experts say. What was just discovered, however, is that it's this fixed position of bird bones and musculature that keeps their air-sac lung from collapsing when the bird inhales.

However, every other animal that has walked on land, the scientists said, has a moveable thigh bone that is involved in their motion - including humans, elephants, dogs, lizards and - in the ancient past - dinosaurs.

The implication, the researchers said, is that birds almost certainly did not descend from theropod dinosaurs, such as tyrannosaurus or allosaurus. The findings add to a growing body of evidence in the past two decades that challenge some of the most widely-held beliefs about animal evolution.

"For one thing, birds are found earlier in the fossil record than the dinosaurs they are supposed to have descended from," Ruben said. "That's a pretty serious problem, and there are other inconsistencies with the bird-from-dinosaur theories.

"But one of the primary reasons many scientists kept pointing to birds as having descended from dinosaurs was similarities in their lungs," Ruben said. "However, theropod dinosaurs had a moving femur and therefore could not have had a lung that worked like that in birds. Their abdominal air sac, if they had one, would have collapsed. That undercuts a critical piece of supporting evidence for the dinosaur-bird link.

The newest findings, the researchers said, are more consistent with birds having evolved separately from dinosaurs and developing their own unique characteristics, including feathers, wings and a unique lung and locomotion system.

There's more at the link. It's a fascinating thing about the whole evolution/creation debate that it seems like so many of the major discoveries in biology in the past two decades support what creationists have been saying since the 1950s. It must be terribly frustrating for the Darwinians, convinced as they are that creationists are a bunch of scientific simpletons, to see their favorite icons tumbled seriatim from their pedestals into the dustbin of history.

RLC

Apostate from Atheism

The pseudonymous Jenn Q. Public recounts her long march from atheism in an interesting essay at American Thinker. She begins with these lines:

Do you believe in God? Really? And you're willing to admit it in public?

Oops. Sorry, for a moment I slipped back into the arrogant Atheism of my youth.

Before my parents had children, they decided to raise their kids in a secular home. We had gifts at Christmas time and chocolate covered matzoh during Passover, but there was no religion and certainly no God.

When I was in grade school, God was just a kind of nondescript character who popped up in Little House on the Prairie books from time to time. He seemed like a decent enough fellow, but was more or less a bit player who didn't have much to say.

After my grandfather died when I was seven, his Baptist minister lifted me up in his arms and told me, "It's all right, Grandpa's with God now." At that moment, I could feel my dress was hiked up in the back and all I could think about was pulling it back down. But later, I asked around and discovered that God was our Heavenly father, whatever that was supposed to mean.

I figured, who better to ask about my Heavenly father than my earthly father, but when I did he laughed.

He wasn't amused in a "kids say the darnedest things" kind of way. He was laughing derisively at the idea that my mother's family believed in God. And thus began my introduction to Atheism.

There are people who call themselves atheist who are simply nonbelievers, and then there are the big "A" Atheists for whom Atheism is almost a religion. This quasi-religious doctrine isn't neutral on the existence of other religions; rather, Atheism is a virulently anti-theistic creed characterized by sneering contempt for religion and a profoundly dogmatic bigotry toward people of faith.

Want to know how Atheists see the rest of us?

If so, click on the link. It's a good read.

RLC

Transparently Ordinary

Obama acolyte Michael Isikoff of Newsweek expresses dismay and disappointment with his hero:

As a senator, Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration for holding "secret energy meetings" with oil executives at the White House. But last week public-interest groups were dismayed when his own administration rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss Obama's "clean coal" policies. One reason: the disclosure of such records might impinge on privileged "presidential communications."

The refusal, approved by White House counsel Greg Craig's office, is the latest in a series of cases in which Obama officials have opted against public disclosure. Since Obama pledged on his first day in office to usher in a "new era" of openness, "nothing has changed," says David Sobel, a lawyer who litigates FOIA cases. "For a president who said he was going to bring unprecedented transparency to government, you would certainly expect more than the recycling of old Bush secrecy policies."

Well, of course nothing has changed. There was never any intention that anything would change. I guess I'm too much of a cynic, but it surprises me that anyone would think that a Chicago politician's promise to make government more open would actually be kept.

Radical activist Saul Alinsky, Obama's tactical mentor, writes about this very matter of saying one thing in order to get power and then doing another once you have it in his book Rules for Radicals. He observes and recommends that once "the Have-Nots achieve success and become the Haves, they are in the position of trying to keep what they have and their morality shifts with their change of location in the power pattern." He goes on to cite historical examples that illustrate the "principle."

The matter of transparency in government is just one example of how President Obama has implemented the tactic endorsed by Alinsky. His rapid-fire passage of the stimulus bill is another. Having promised in the campaign that he would always insure there would be time to carefully consider any legislation he proposed, he pushed the stimulus bill through the Democrat-controlled legislature so fast that no one who voted for it had a chance to even read it.

Barack Obama may be historic in being our first African-American president, but in many other ways he's just an ordinary political opportunist bent on doing whatever's necessary to gain, hold, and expand his power. The sooner journalists like Isikoff realize this the better it will be for all of us.

RLC

Body and Soul

In a post yesterday on the possibility of technological immortality and resurrection, I promised to share some thoughts on the nature of the body and soul. What follows are some random musings on the topic. They're purely speculative of course, but who knows, some of them may be right.

First, I think it very likely that whatever body we have in the next life, and I do believe we will be embodied, it won't be like this one. The bodies we currently enjoy, or are cursed with, are, or appear to be, three dimensional, but it's possible that the next world is more than three dimensional. If so, then we'll look completely different to each other there than we do here, assuming we will be able to perceive the additional dimensions.

To illustrate this imagine what a sphere would look like to inhabitants of a two-dimensional world. In a world in which there is no up or down a sphere would appear to be a straight line, like looking at a sheet of paper edge-on. Of course, this is not at all what a sphere looks like in a three-dimensional world. Likewise, even if we had the same body in eternity that we have now (a terrible prospect for some of us)it probably would not look at all the same.

If such a world does exist then perhaps death is like a character in a movie stepping off the two-dimensional screen to join the people in the three-dimensional theater much like Jeff Daniels does in The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Further, in this body we have five senses but there's no reason to believe that everything that exists is apprehensible with those five senses or that those senses could not be more acute than they are. There could be all sorts of phenomena in our world to which we are totally oblivious because either our senses lack the necessary acuity to perceive them or we simply lack the requisite senses to perceive them.

Consider what the world would look like if we could see radio waves, for example. What colors would they be? What if we had the same powers of smell as a dog? How much different would the world be?

Or imagine a man born blind and deaf walking along a city street. How would he imagine his world? He would be aware of the pavement at his feet the breeze, perhaps, in his face, the smells of the city, but that would be about it. Every now and then he'd be jostled but he would have a very limited notion of what the cause of the jostling looked like. Now imagine that suddenly he acquires both of the missing senses. I think the torrent of sensations that would pour over him would knock him to his knees in wonder and astonishment.

Maybe we are like the man with only three senses, except we have five. Even so, the world may exhibit all sorts of phenomena that we simply cannot experience because our five senses are not adequate to apprehend them all. Perhaps when we die we take on a new body, like the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, and that new body enables us to experience things we could never experience before. Indeed, the bodies we have now may by comparison be no more real or substantial than the shifting arrays of phosphor dots that make up the image of a person on a television screen are like the person watching the TV.

So much for the body. What about the soul? What is soul? I prefer to think of the soul not as a ghost-like thing that resides in our bodies but rather as the totality of information comprising an exhaustive description of who we are. It's every true fact about us - our genealogy, our personal biography, our personality, our infirmities, our vices and virtues, our appearance at every moment of our life - everything. This information is our essence and it's held or stored in the mind of God which makes it eternal, or potentially so.

When we die perhaps God downloads it, or selected parts of it, into some other body, some other vessel, and thus we are reinstantiated. Because our soul is information in the mind of God, it never ceases to exist. It's always in His database, as it were, ready to be downloaded at the next iteration of our bodily existence, and to give us continuity from life to death to life.

Of course, some individuals may never have their essence reinstantiated, or God may even choose to delete it, in which case the person is annihilated. That may be what many religious traditions interpret as hell.

At any rate, because each of us is potentially eternal, each of our lives is infinitely important and meaningful. Because bodily death isn't the end of our existence we have a basis for hope that justice, meaning, and moral value exist and we have a reason for believing that the choices we make in this life really do matter. After all, our eternal destiny may hinge upon them.

RLC

Civil War Animation

Civil War buffs will want to check out this site which features animations of all the major battles. It's often difficult to get a sense of how the warring forces maneuvered throughout an engagement from static diagrams of their positions. This site explains the troop movements in ways that show their complexity and make those movements much more clear. It's pretty cool.

Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip.

RLC

What's Needed Now

Remember back after 9/11 when then President George W. Bush tagged Iran, North Korea and Iraq as the axis of evil? Do you recall the withering scorn to which he was subjected by the left for such an improvident accusation? Well, Iraq has been neutralized but Iran and North Korea are working together to develop nuclear weapons and delivery systems and both are among the repressive regimes in the world today. In light of the news coming out of both of these countries Bush's label looks absolutely accurate and his liberal detractors look absolutely foolish, a look to which they've perhaps grown accustomed by now.

On Saturday as Iranian citizens were dying in the streets, our current president went out for ice cream. Yesterday, while Iranians were pleading for his support, he played golf. I have no problem with this, actually, and don't criticize him for it. I only wonder how the liberal wing of the media would have reacted had George Bush done likewise in similar circumstances. Keith Olbermann would have been at his snarly, snarky "Have you no shame, sir?" best. But Mr. Obama unwinds in the midst of a historic crisis and there's nothing but acceptance from the traditional left-wing media.

Anyway, enough about the left's lack of objectivity and fundamental fairness. The more important question is how should the president respond to what's happening in Iran? I understand that he doesn't want to spoil the possibility of negotiating away Iran's nuclear ambitions by offending the Iranian mullahs, but there's almost no chance that those negotiations are going to succeed with Iran any more than they have with North Korea. Nor is there any reason why he can't give a major address and lay out the moral case for why the government should stop killing its people and live up to the basic principles of democracy. Surely, Mr. Obama, of all people, can do this in a non-threatening manner without humiliating the Iranian government.

The president deserved the benefit of the doubt about his relative silence in the first few days after the election, but now that time has passed. That doesn't mean we need saber-rattling. It doesn't mean we need to move a couple of aircraft carriers into the Persian Gulf. It does mean that we need moral leadership. We need an international Martin Luther King to stand up for freedom, democracy and the right of citizens to redress grievances in the Muslim world just as Reagan did in the communist world. Islamic nations around the globe, but especially in Iran, need to hear a powerful, landmark speech in defense of basic human rights. Who better than the president of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, to provide that leadership and give that speech?

UPDATE: After completing these thoughts I came across this essay by Victor Davis Hanson in which he lists several reasons why Obama should now speak out and several possible reasons why he might not. Read it. It's excellent.

RLC

Technological Immortality and Resurrection

Mike Labossiere has an interesting post up over at Talking Philosophy in which he thinks about Ray Kurzweil's idea that in the future technology will be able not only to keep us alive indefinitely but also enable us to resurrect the dead. Here are a few excerpts from Labossiere's post with some of my comments thrown in:

Oversimplifying things, Kurzweil envisions a future in which humans will be immortal and the dead will return to life. While these are common claims in religion, Kurzweil's view is that technology will make this possible. While some describe his view as a religion, I'd prefer to use a made up word, "techion" to refer to this sort of phenomena. As I see it, a religion involves claims about supernatural entities. Kurzweil's view is purely non-supernatural, but does have most of the stock elements of religion (the promise of a utopian future, immortality, and the raising of the dead). So, it is sort of a technological religion-hence "techion."

I'd want to quibble here with Labossiere. I don't think religion needs to be supernatural at all. Pantheisms, humanisms, and ideologies of various sorts are not necessarily supernatural, but are still religious. Even so, that's not really important to the rest of the post:

In the abstract, technological immortality is quite simple: just keep repairing and replacing parts. In theory, this could be kept up until the end of time, thus granting immortality. Even with our current technology we can repair and replace parts. For example, my quadriceps tendon was recently repaired. I have friends with artificial hips and other friends who gotten tissue and organ transplants. It is easy to imagine technology progressing enough to replace or repair everything.

Technological resurrection is a bit trickier. While we can "jump start" people who have died, Kurzweil envisions something more radical. His view is that we might be able to take the DNA of dead people and rebuild them using nanobots. This, he claims, could create a new body that would be "indistinguishable from the original person." Of course, having a body that is indistinguishable from the original is hardly the same as having the original person back. It would, rather, be a case of having a twin. To recreate the person, his plan is that information about the original (such as things the person wrote and recollections of people who knew them) would be used to recreate the mind of the original.

Turning to immortality, the key question is this: would the identity of the person be preserved through the changes?

This problem is, of course, like the classic ship of Theseus problem: how much of the original can be replaced before it is no longer the same entity? Of course, it is also complicated by the fact that a person is involved and the identity of persons is a bit more complex than that of objects.

Actually this problem already exists since we are constantly replacing cells and tissue throughout our life. None of us is made of the same stuff that comprised us ten years ago. It's very difficult to say how a person in his seventies is the same person as he was when he was five.

Now, for resurrection....True resurrection, as noted above, has two key aspects. First, the original body has to be recreated. If you get a different sort of body, then you have been reincarnated.

This doesn't seem quite right, either. We don't think of butterfly metamorphosis as a kind of reincarnation, but surely the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis with a completely different sort of body than it had as a caterpillar. I don't think our resurrected bodies have to be anything like the ones we have now. They may be, but they don't have to be. (More on this tomorrow)

Second, the original person has to be restored. Locke's view on this matter is that come judgment day, God will recreate our bodies (hopefully at their prime) and place the right consciousness into each body (for Locke, the person is his or her consciousness).

Locke is right about this if we think of consciousness as somehow related to soul. (More on this tomorrow also)

Getting the original person back in the recreated body is the real challenge. Kurzweil does seem to clearly recognize that the method he envisions will not restore the original person. He seems to be right about this. After all, the method he describes relies on "public" information. That is, it depends on what information the person provided before death and what other people remember of him. This obviously leaves out everything that was not recorded or known by others. As such, it will be a partial reconstruction - a new person who is force fed the scraps of another person's life. This, obviously enough, raises some serious moral issues.

On the face of it, Kurzweil's resurrection seems to be morally appalling. That this is so can be illustrated by the following analogy. Imagine that Sally and Ivan have a son, Ted. Ted dies at 18. Sally and Ivan go through all the adoption agencies until they find a baby, Joe, that looks like Ted did. They rename Joe as Ted and then reconstruct Ted's life as closely as possible - punishing the former Joe whenever he deviates from Ted's life and rewarding him for doing what Ted did. Sally and Ivan would be robbing Joe of choice and using him as a means to an end-fulfilling their need to have Ted back. But, they have no right to do this to Joe - he is a person, not a thing to be used to recreate Ted.

The same certainly seems to hold in the situation Kurzweil envisions. To create a human being and force him to be a copy of a dead person is a horrible misuse of a person and a wicked act.

Hmmm. Why is it a wicked act? Why is it wicked to misuse people? Labossiere doesn't tell us. He just assumes we'll agree with him, but why should we? The only way misusing others is wicked is if there is a transcendent, objective moral right and wrong, but there can only be such a transcendent, objective right or wrong if there is a God. Does Labossiere believe in God? He doesn't say, but if he's going to make these kinds of moral claims, he certainly should say.

Anyway, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that although technological immortality is theoretically possible, technological resurrection is not. There's no way technology could, even in theory, recover the original person. It's dangerous to make pronouncements about what's technically possible and what isn't, I know, but a person is the totality of all one's experiences, memories, feelings, intentions, regrets, knowledge, etc. and there's no way that these, once gone, could even in theory be recovered.

Except by God.

RLC

Crisis in Iran

As is usually the case the best coverage of today's events in Iran can be found at Hot Air. Some of the videos require a Facebook account, others require a strong stomach, but just about everything that can be learned about what happened today, including President Obama's decision to go for an ice cream in the midst of it all, can be learned by clicking on the link.

Republicans are calling for Mr. Obama to speak out more forcefully against the Iranian brutality, but forceful words are meaningless unless we're prepared to back them up with forceful action. Otherwise we just look weak and impotent, and clearly Mr. Obama is not prepared to use force in any way against the Iranian government. Before we encourage Mr. Obama to come back from the ice cream parlor and denounce the Iranian thuggery we should think long and hard about what measures we're willing to take should words escalate to action.

On the other hand, as many are pointing out, President Reagan did not stand before the Berlin Wall and simply say "Mr. Gorbachev, this wall is not our problem," but then, keep in mind that no one will ever mistake Barack Obama for Ronald Reagan.

Anyway, word has it that he ordered a cup of vanilla.

RLC

Socialism and Secession

If Obama succeeds in his desire to impose Euro-socialism on the U.S., or if he takes us much further down that road, there will be an enormous backlash that will fundamentally change this nation. At least that's the prognostication of Paul Starobin in the Wall Street Journal. Starobin concludes his startling essay with this thought:

[T]he precedent for any breakup of today's America is not necessarily the one set by the musket-bearing colonists' demanded departure from the British crown in the late 18th century or by the crisis-ridden dissolution of the U.S.S.R. at the end of the 20th century. Every empire, every too-big thing, fragments or shrinks according to its own unique character and to the age of history to which it belongs.

The most hopeful prospect for the USA, should the decentralization impulse prove irresistible, is for Americans to draw on their natural inventiveness and democratic tradition by patenting a formula for getting the job done in a gradual and cooperative way. In so doing, geopolitical history, and perhaps even a path for others, might be made, for the problem of bigness vexes political leviathans everywhere.

In India, with its 1.2 billion people, there is an active discussion of whether things might work better if the nation-state was chopped up into 10 or so large city-states with broad writs of autonomy from New Delhi. Devolution may likewise be the future for the European continent-think Catalonia-and for the British Isles. Scotland, a leading source of Enlightenment ideas for America's founding fathers, now has its own flourishing independence movement. Even China, held together by an aging autocracy, may not be able to resist the drift towards the smaller.

So why not America as the global leader of a devolution? America's return to its origins-to its type-could turn out to be an act of creative political destruction, with "we the people" the better for it.

This article wasn't published in some fringe pamphlet, mind you, but in the Wall Street Journal. George Joyce at The American Thinker remarks:

A failed presidency for Barack Obama could turn into liberalism's worst nightmare. Barely six months into his term, the 44th president has succeeded in generating the most widespread and serious discussion of secession since the Civil War. Despite what Newsweek's Evan Thomas may claim, Obama is not the "God" who will bring us together but the autocratic sponsor of an overbearing, oppressive leviathan from which a growing number of Americans are seeking refuge.

That refuge, according to author Paul Starobin, will come in the form of several regional republics that reflect the diverse character of Americans no longer bound in any meaningful way by our unrecognizable Federal government.

I recommend reading Joyce's article first. It contains a succinct summary of Starobin's essay and isn't as long.

I don't know if secession or fragmentation is in our future, but I do think that the left's tendency to pit groups against each other, to play identity politics, to take what people have worked and sacrificed to earn and give it to others who have done nothing to earn it, is going to generate increasingly greater social frictions that will at some point become explosive.

Surely this isn't what candidate Obama had in mind when he promised us change, but it's where his leftist agenda is taking us.

RLC

The Anti-Reagan

After cataloguing President Obama's proclivity for obsequiousness to foreign despots and others who don't wish us well, Pat Buchanan diagnoses the difference between this president and one of his more illustrious predecessors:

Obama is the anti-Reagan. Where Reagan ever spoke of the greatness and glory of America, her history and heroes, her capacity to make the world all over again, Obama is like a dismal parson, forever reminding us - and everyone within earshot - of our own and our fathers' sins.

Obama is not only demoralizing Middle America, he is driving away the God-and-country patriots who are sick of hearing this rot from professors and journalists, and prefer not to hear it from their president. He is ceding moral high ground to regimes and nations that do not deserve it.

If Obama believes he can build himself up by tearing America down, he is mistaken. Cynical foreigners will view it with snickering contempt, patriotic Americans with disgust. What kind of leader is it who talks down his own country on foreign soil? America's performance in the Cold War was hardly flawless. But does anyone deny that we were on the right side, that the Soviet Empire and Mao's China and communist Vietnam and Castro's Cuba were on the side of tyranny - and that the neutrals were by and large irrelevant or worse in that great cause?

A nation is an extended family. While families fight and quarrel, often bitterly, you do not take the family quarrel outside the family. You don't hang the family's dirty linen on the communal clothesline. Obama, however - like some Hollywood actress seeking sympathy and public approbation with her tell-all biography detailing how she was abused by her father - trolls for popularity with America's adversaries by reciting for the benefit of the world all the sins his country has allegedly committed. When did this become the duty of the president of the United States?

Buchanan is exactly right. President Obama has behaved something like a man who goes to the local Kiwanis club or tavern and spends the evening derogating his wife and children to all within earshot. Such a man is of dubious character and is certainly unpleasant company, and probably deserves neither the family he has nor the position he enjoys as their head.

RLC

A Trio of Rarities

Those who've been with us for a while know that I enjoy birding as a pastime and that occasionally I post photos of birds that I've come across in my travels. Here are some beauties seen this spring near my home in Pennsylvania. It's unusual to find any of these in PA, so it was nice to see them all in the same month within a few miles of each other in the south central part of the state.

Enjoy.

Black-necked stilt

Avocet

These long-legged waders are both more common along the Atlantic coast and out west, but were found this spring in the Susquehanna river in Lancaster county, PA.

Another rarity seen this spring not far from where the stilt and avocet were found is the Mississippi kite, a bird of prey found more commonly in the midwest. It likes to soar high and catch insects on the wing which is a rather unusual behavior for a raptor.

Mississippi kite

RLC

Theism and Theistic Evolution

The Washington Post hosts a column by John West of the Discovery Institute in which he explains the fundamental disagreement between Darwinists (both theistic and atheistic) and Intelligent Design. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Is evolution compatible with faith in God? It's a question that is receiving lots of attention of late. [A new] Discovery Institute website www.faithandevolution.org seeks to clear-up confusion about why Darwin's theory poses such a challenge to faith in the first place. Contrary to what many people suppose, it's not because evolution proposes that living things change over millions of years, or even because it suggests that animals are descended from a common ancestor.

The real sticking point is Darwin's claim that all of life--human beings included--developed through a blind and undirected process of natural selection acting on random variations. In the words of late Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, "Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind."

Thus Darwinism is incompatible with most versions of theism which see man's creation, and the creative process, as intended by the Creator, but there are some theists, called theistic evolutionists, who seek an accommodation with Darwin:

There are ways to try to reconcile Darwinism's undirected process with theism, but they involve throwing overboard some long-cherished beliefs about God.

The first idea to go is the belief that God directed the development of life toward specific ends. According to biologist Kenneth Miller, one of the most prominent proponents of "theistic" evolution, God did not plan the specific outcomes of evolution--including the development of human beings. Miller describes humans as "an afterthought, a minor detail, a happenstance in a history that might just as well have left us out."

While God knew that undirected evolution was so wonderful it would create some kind of creature capable of praising Him, that creature could have been "a big-brained dinosaur" or "a mollusk with exceptional mental capabilities" rather than us.

But if evolution really is undirected how did God know what would come of it? What makes Miller think that God would have any knowledge at all of how the process would turn out when He set it all in motion? And if He did know how it would turn out is it not reasonable to believe that he knew this because He established the conditions both necessary and sufficient to achieve the expected outcome.

Seeking to lessen the discomfort such arguments pose for most religious believers, Francis Collins suggests that God "could" have known the specific outcomes of evolution beforehand even though He made evolution appear "a random and undirected process." In other words, God is a cosmic trickster who misleads people into thinking that nature is blind and purposeless, even though it isn't.

Isn't it easier to suppose, if one is both an evolutionist and a theist, that God is the actual channel that guides moment by moment the flow of evolutionary history, like the bed of a river guides the flow of the stream? In this view, God doesn't actually intervene in that history rather he is the matrix in which it occurs, leading it ultimately through the twists and turns of a phylogenetic maze to his intended outcome.

The theistic evolutionist is a Darwinian in that he believes that evolution is an undirected process, but he could still be a theist and an evolutionist if he held that the process is directed. The direction could come not from miraculous interjections of biological novelty here and there throughout time by a Creator ontologically detached or separate from the evolutionary river, but one whose mind or being forms the very conduit through which the river flows and by which it is guided.

RLC

More U.N. Ineptitude

No sooner did we cite four good reasons for putting the U.N. in our rearview mirror the other day than we come across yet another example of U.N. corruption. Does it make you feel good to know that your tax dollars are being spent to send food to starving children in Somalia? If so, you might not want to read this:

One of the UN's largest international relief efforts is under investigation after it emerged that thousands of sacks of food aid were being diverted from starving refugees and openly sold for profit.

The head of the UN's $955 million aid operation in Somalia has launched an inquiry after being shown footage showing tonnes of food bearing the World Food Programme (WFP) logo widely on sale in Mogadishu, the capital.

Stacks of bags of maize and wheat and tins of cooking oil - marked "not for re-sale" and bearing the UN stamp - are on sale from ten warehouses and 15 shops in the city's main market.

About 45,000 tons of WFP food are shipped to Somalia from Kenya every month. Mogadishu traders told Channel 4 News that they bought their supplies straight from UN staff. "We buy [food] aid from WFP staff directly or from people they employ," one market trader said.

"They take us to the warehouses used by the WFP and let us load our lorries. The goods are freely available and you can buy as much as you like, but we usually buy no more than 500 to 1,000 sacks at a time. Just a tonne or half a tonne a day can be shifted more discreetly."

The food could hardly be more needed. More than a million people have been driven from their homes by fighting in the area, including 117,000 thought to have fled from Mogadishu in the past month.

Children starve while warlords and others line their pockets with the connivance of U.N. employees. The U.N. does not keep the peace anywhere in the world (Watch, for example, movies like No Man's Land, or Beyond the Gates, or Hotel Rwanda) and its humanitarian functions are in serious need of oversight.

Wouldn't it be safer, cheaper, and more efficient to just cut out the middle man, take the money we give to the U.N., and use it to deliver the food ourselves?

RLC

ObamaCare

Yuval Levin and Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard urge the defeat of the President's plan for health care. Central to Mr. Obama's plan is the option of allowing people to buy government health insurance, but, since this would be cheaper than private insurance, it would inevitably drive private insurance companies out of business, leaving the government as the sole source of health insurance in the country. Levin and Kristol, along with many other observers, think this would be a disaster:

The government insurance "option" is clearly shaping up to be the first key vulnerability of ObamaCare. It is crucial to the logic of the Democrats' approach, as it would offer convenient cover both for the move toward government financing of coverage and for the rationing of care such a move would require. The president, congressional leaders, and key liberal interest groups have insisted it be part of any reform effort. But as outside opposition grows, it is far from clear that the government option will have the votes to pass. If it were voted down or pulled out of the Democrats' bills, the logic and the inevitability of the remainder of their reform effort would be called into question, and Republicans would face a real opportunity to make the case for their own brand of reform, and to stop the ObamaCare train in its tracks.

It is crucial that they seize the opportunity. The public plan is not the only important question in the health care debate. There are many other strong reasons for stopping a plan that would cost at least $1.5 trillion, create a huge and growing new entitlement without paying for it, impose great financial burdens on employers and individuals, displace millions of families who are happy with their existing health care arrangements, lead to increasing rationing of care, and do very little else to control health care costs.

If they lose the government plan the Democrats will still pursue its ends by other means--including onerous new mandates and the federalization of insurance regulation envisioned in their bills. So conservatives need to defeat the government insurance "option"--and then move on to finish the job by exposing the other massive problems with ObamaCare, so as to bring the whole edifice of bad and dangerous "reform" crashing down.

There's much more to the argument against "ObamaCare" at the link, and everyone should familiarize themselves with it to be informed about what's in store if the president's plan should pass.

I certainly hope that congress comes up with a way to make health care more affordable, but I wonder why, if the administration is really serious about lowering the cost of insurance, they don't simply reform the laws allowing lawyers to extract exorbitant judgments from doctors and drug companies in lawsuits.

One reason why insurance and care are so expensive is that it costs doctors and pharmaceutical companies a fortune to protect themselves against lawyers and their clients who are always on the lookout to sue somebody with deep pockets, and the cost of that protection simply gets passed along to their customers.

RLC

Squandering Our National Treasures

Liberals concerned about conserving our scenic and wild lands as well as threats to the health of our wildlife populations and parks should take note. It's their fiscal policies which are today the dominant menace to all of these. Take the plight of California as an illustration of how government profligacy endangers the very resources it wishes to preserve:

Conservation projects in California's state parks face a bleak future, if cuts proposed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger go through.

To tackle a swelling state deficit that has reached $24.3 billion, the "Governator" wants to slash spending across the board - including funding for 80 per cent of the 270 sites run by the California Department of Parks and Recreation. Those parks earmarked for closure (pdf) include world-famous attractions such as the giant sequoias at Calaveras Big Trees State Park in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Gated access roads to some parks would be closed, but many parks can be easily entered from public highways. With no rangers on hand to keep a watchful eye on visitors, that could be bad news for threatened species such as the desert tortoise.

In a recent survey, researchers led by Kristin Berry of the US Geological Survey in Moreno Valley found a worryingly high death rate among young animals in the Red Rock Canyon State Park, north of Los Angeles - some of which had gunshot wounds.

The proposed funding cuts would also eliminate conservation management activities such as the removal of invasive plants and efforts to prevent catastrophic fires. In Calaveras, this involves the removal of fir trees allowed to grow by earlier fire suppression efforts - and which now threaten a conflagration that could engulf the sequoias.

Out of control spending and deficits have forced the California state government to cut back on its expenditures on "non-essentials," and what is in line to be cut are not the wasteful projects, not the spending on the millions of aliens who are in the state illegally, but our natural heritage.

If we extrapolate this onto a national scale, we might wonder how long it will be before the White House announces that our national parks, forests and seashores are no longer affordable and that in order to pay the interest on the astronomical national debt President Obama has bequeathed us we should sell these off.

If this state of affairs ever does come to pass what an irony it'll be that the "environmental party," the party so distraught over global warming and other ecological cataclysms, will be the party responsible for the loss of our nation's most beautiful jewels. In squandering our nation's treasure the Democrats may well have squandered our national treasures.

RLC

Puzzler

According to Gallup there are almost twice as many self-identified conservatives in the U.S. as there are liberals. This is very hard to believe given the election results the last two cycles. Nevertheless, according to the famous polling agency:

Thus far in 2009, 40% of Americans interviewed in national Gallup Poll surveys describe their political views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal. This represents a slight increase for conservatism in the U.S. since 2008, returning it to a level last seen in 2004. The 21% calling themselves liberal is in line with findings throughout this decade, but is up from the 1990s.

So, if this is true why do we have the most liberal House, Senate and White House in the history of this country?

Could it be that regardless what people themselves believe, they have no idea what the people they vote for believe? Put that down as my guess.

RLC

The Speech We Wish He'd Given

Dennis Prager gives us the speech we wish President Obama would have given in Cairo. Here's an excerpt:

To my great disappointment, many Muslims have come to believe that my country has declared war on Muslims and Islam. Because of this widespread belief, I said in an interview with al-Arabiya a few months ago, that we need to restore "the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago."

Let's look a little deeper at that relationship. For the truth is, as noted by the Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist for the American newspaper the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer, in the last 20-30 years America did not just respect Muslims, it bled for Muslims. We Americans engaged in five military campaigns on behalf of Muslims, each one resulting in the liberation of a Muslim people: Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as the failed 1992-93 Somalia intervention to feed starving African Muslims -- in which] 43 Americans were killed -- were all humanitarian exercises. In none of them was there a significant U.S. strategic interest at stake. So, in fact, in these 20 years, my country, the United States of America has done more for suffering and oppressed Muslims than any other nation, Muslim or non-Muslim.

While I recognize that gratitude is the rarest positive human quality, I need to say -- because candor is the highest form respect -- that America has not only not received little gratitude from the Muslim world, it has been the object of hatred, mass murder, and economic attack from Muslim individuals, groups, and countries.

There's much more at the link. Would that our president was less inclined toward ingratiation and self-abasement and more inclined toward presenting the Muslim world with the hard facts about the history of American/Islamic interactions.

RLC

Color Specific Justice

As everyone knows by now, President Obama's candidate for the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, is under fire for her comment that she thinks a wise Latina woman would come to better conclusions on many court cases than would some old white guy, or something. Be that as it may, the details of her ruling in the Ricci case - which is now before the Supreme Court - leave a lot of doubt whether wisdom is a trait of which this particular Latina can boast.

Stuart Taylor at National Journal reviews the details of the case and shows beyond a reasonable doubt that "the decision to kill the promotions (in the Ricci case) was driven less by purported legal concerns than by raw racial politics."

Taylor adds that:

But the unmistakable logic of Sotomayor's position would encourage employers to discriminate against high-scoring groups based on race -- no matter how valid and lawful the qualifying test -- in any case in which disproportionate numbers of protected minorities have low scores, as is the norm.

Such logic would convert disparate-impact law into an engine of overt discrimination against high-scoring groups across the country and allow racial politics and racial quotas to masquerade as voluntary compliance with the law.

In other words, this "highly intelligent," "highly accomplished," "empathetic" Latina judge likes to lift the blindfold that represents a judge's indifference to who stands before her in her court in order to take a peek at the skin color of the people involved in the case. She then rules accordingly. Her much vaunted empathy appears to be very color specific.

Read the rest of Taylor's essay at the link to gain a good idea of the sort of person President Obama thinks should be dispensing justice in America.

RLC

Iranian Democracy

According to a piece by Amil Imani and Dr. Arash Irandoost at American Thinker, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have actually finished third in the recent Iranian election:

[T]he turnout was massive, a near record high 85 percent of Iran's 49.2 million eligible voters. Based on the information from Mousavi's website, a group of Interior Ministry employees have leaked out the following results which seem to be closer to reality than the one released by the establishment:

• Total eligible voters: 49.2 million
• Participated in the election: 75% to 85%
• Mir Hussein Mousavi: 45%
• Mehdi Karoobi: 33%
• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: 13%
• Mohsen Rezai: 9%
• Cancelled votes: 3%

It is clear that Mr. Mir Hussein Mousavi won the election by a large margin. Ahmadinejad came out third. But on Friday June 12, 2009, in the Islamic election something happened. Something beyond what anyone could have ever imagined. Something huge. A daylight coup d'�tat by the elements of the establishment, particularly, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which the U.S. Senate had designated as a terrorist organization (with Senator Obama not voting).

One might be forgiven for wondering whether President Obama's reluctance to vigorously condemn the fraudulent Iranian elections stems from the fact that, having once worked for ACORN, he has a soft spot in his heart for voter fraud.

RLC

Living Within Our Means

My friend Jason weighs in with a "guest post" this morning:

George Will diagnoses here three causes which stifle American economic growth and, consequently, deepen global financial woes further:

• Ecological protectionist legislation enacted by the United States which heavily taxes foreign "carbon-intensive" goods
• Refusal by the Obama Administration to allow for the "creative destruction" of failed corporations such as General Motors and Chrysler (Will argues that such executive intervention doesn't allow the corporations to die naturally which would free up greater amounts of capital over time.)
• Rising long-term interest rates resulting from national governments, most notably Great Britain and the United States, borrowing heavily to pay off their respective national debts.

The financial picture that Will paints in his editorial isn't pretty. The Standard and Poor indices he cited regarding British and U.S. national deficits relative to their total national gross domestic products for this year prove especially disheartening.

But Will shines some much needed light on a solution already in the works courtesy not of the latest Obama Administration czar or Congress, but by an increasing number of individual American consumers. The major credit company, Visa, reported that in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2008, and for the first time ever in U.S. financial history, purchases made by debit cards exceeded credit cards.

In other words, individual consumers decided to buy goods and services with only the money immediately available in their checking accounts as opposed to increasing their monthly credit debt.

Spending only what you have. Imagine that.

JRG

Where's the Boundary?

In almost any controversy one can find words being employed whose meaning everyone understands until someone asks for a definition. Then it turns out, sometimes, that the meaning isn't so clear after all.

In the controversy over Intelligent Design (ID) disputants often speak piously about science as a discipline which deals only with the realm of nature and which does not concern itself with supernature, which is the province of religion. Since ID allegedly relies on supernatural causes of biological complexity it's ipso facto religious rather than scientific. Perhaps, though, we should ask exactly what is the distinction between what's natural and what's supernatural. Where's the boundary between them?

Cornelius Hunter puts his finger on the problem in a post on anti-ID philosopher Barbara Forrest. Hunter says:

In her recent paper, The Non-epistemology of Intelligent Design: Its Implications for Public Policy, evolutionary philosopher Barbara Forrest states that science must be restricted to natural phenomena. In its investigations, science must restrict itself to a naturalistic methodology, where explanations must be strictly naturalistic, dealing with phenomena that are strictly natural. Aside from rare exceptions this is the consensus position of evolutionists. And in typical fashion, Forrest uses this criteria to exclude origins explanations that allow for the supernatural.

The question for Forrest and the evolutionists then is: What is the boundary between natural phenomena and supernatural phenomena?

Forrest tells us science must never violate this boundary, so it is important that we discern it. We need to distinguish between natural and supernatural phenomena? How can science know when it is investigating a supernatural phenomena rather than a natural one?

We've actually discussed this problem at Viewpoint several times over the years. Here's some thoughts from three years ago on this very question:

One of the fundamental problems in the debate over design is the vagueness of the terms "natural" and "supernatural." What exactly are natural or supernatural entities? Is a natural entity simply something which is part of the space-time universe and a supernatural entity something which transcends this universe?

If so, then those cosmologists wrestling with theories about "other worlds" are really doing theology, not science. If, however, we wish to consider the theorizing of cosmologists to be legitimate science then we have to say that excluding theorizing about an extra-cosmic designer from science is an arbitrary and unwarranted step.

For all we know, the designer of our universe could be a denizen of one of those other universes or it could be the "generator" which manufactures those universes.

In other words, the concept of other worlds effectively erases the natural/supernatural distinction and greatly expands the purview of science.

The question then becomes not whether talk of a designer is scientific or not, but whether there is reason to think that our universe and the living things in it show evidence of intention and intelligent engineering.

The next time someone tells you that Intelligent Design is not science because it invokes the supernatural and science only deals with what is natural ask them what they mean by those terms. Chances are they won't be able to give a coherent, non-arbitrary reply.

Indeed, the only way to meaningfully distinguish between natural and supernatural is to say that the word natural encompasses everything that exists or may exist, including angels and demons, except the creator God of theism. That is, nature is comprised of all ontological contingent entities and supernature is comprised of the ultimately necessary being. This distinction is fine with me, but then there's surely no warrant for saying that ID is religious, or non-science, since the designer of our little corner of reality could theoretically be any intelligent entity which transcends our world but which is not God.

I think that those, like Forrest, who insist on excluding ID from science, should be clear that what they're really doing is not striving for some methodological purity but rather trying, perhaps for their own religious purposes, to incorporate an explicitly anti-theistic epistemological bias into the very definition of science.

RLC

Tough Going for Terrorists

According to Strategy Page the war in Pakistan and Afghnaistan is not going well for the terrorists. In Pakistan al Qaeda has had enough of our predator drones and is absconding to Somalia while the Taliban are finding themselves relentlessly hunted down by Pakistani troops and American missiles.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan the troop surge is paying dividends:

The influx of American troops is showing up throughout southern Afghanistan. Areas that had long been dominated by the Taliban, or pro-Taliban tribes, are now being raided by American troops. U.S. intelligence forces arrived before the combat troops, and the increased reconnaissance and electronic monitoring effort produced a more detailed picture of who the Taliban were, where they lived and what they were up to. All that was needed was more troops to work the target list. The Taliban tactics appear to consist of avoiding foreign troops (except for greater use of roadside bombs), and trying to concentrate forces to drive Afghan police and government officials out of the countryside. This would have some chance of success were it not for the foreign troops.

There's more about the conflict in both of these theaters at the links.

Oddly enough, even though the increased American presence and combat activity has caused an increase in American casualties, very little is being said about this in the media. This time last year 40 U.S. troops had died in Afghanistan. So far this year American deaths number 70 - a 40 percent increase. If these deaths were occuring in Iraq, the casualty figures would be a prominent feature of the evening news, but maybe that's because Iraq was Bush's war and people had to be reminded daily what an awful failure it was. Afghanistan is now Obama's war and we must not weaken our resolve or lose sight of our goal by focusing on negatives.

Makes sense to me.

RLC

The Silence

President Obama is getting some flak for not speaking out more forcefully on behalf of the Iranian dissidents protesting the results of what was, from all appearances, a fraudulent election. I don't think the criticism is quite fair. There may, for all we know at this point, be good reasons for keeping quiet. The President may have intelligence, for example, that suggests that Ahmadinejad is waiting to use the excuse of American meddling as a pretext for cracking down even harder on the demonstrators. Obama may know that strong words at this juncture will cost innocent lives. If so, he's probably doing the right thing, but, in any event, he deserves the benefit of the doubt. For now.

If, however, the demonstrations persist and the government continues to kill innocent people then Mr. Obama will not be able to postpone stinging denunciations of the tyrants in Tehran. After all, as Steven Hayward at No Left Turns notes, were these protests occurring in apartheid South Africa, and it was blacks being shot in the streets, it's doubtful that Mr. Obama would show such restraint.

As things continue to escalate in Iran Mr. Obama will have to take a stand for democracy. He'll have to show by his response that he's willing to confront fascist tyranny or that he prefers to accommodate it. And tyranny it is:

RLC

Atheists Are IDers, Too

One of the claims made by the detractors of Intelligent Design is that it's really a religious position held by a bunch of Christian fundamentalists eager to use it as a Trojan Horse to sneak creationism into public schools. One would think that the fact that there are so many atheists and agnostics sympathetic to ID might give pause to those who subscribe to this allegation, but the critics seem undeterred by the evidence which, nevertheless, continues to mount. Alfred Russel at Uncommon Descent writes, for instance, about the atheistic scientist Fred Hoyle who was an opponent of Darwinism and who believed that an intelligence of some sort was driving the universe. Here's part of Russel's post:

[T]he truth is that Hoyle absolutely disbelieved in Darwinism. He thought that there is intelligence "out there" in the cosmos, and perhaps in past time, that is directing the progress of life on Earth. In The Intelligent Universe, Hoyle meticulously demolishes Darwinism in great detail and with scientific precision. He even goes after Darwin himself, suggesting that Darwin only understood how evolution might work after he received Wallace's letter detailing the role of natural selection. Hoyle returns time and time again to quote Wallace, whom he evidently admired.

What Russel's post on Hoyle shows is that skepticism about Darwinism, atheism, and sympathy for ID are all compatible with each other.

The claim, made by Richard Dawkins and others, that ID logically entails belief in God is simply false. ID is certainly compatible with belief in God, and it may make belief in God easier to accept - the real reason, in my view, why there's so much opposition to it - but it does not require belief in God.

But, skeptics demand, who else could be the designer if not the God of religious belief? Well, there are lots of atheists who, in order to escape the conclusion that this amazingly fine-tuned universe is the product of a Creator, are suggesting that our universe is just one of a near infinite number of worlds and that, given so many worlds, it's not so implausible to believe that one like ours would exist by chance.

If you buy into this "multiverse" argument (I don't) then you have to admit that in one of those worlds there could well be a civilization so advanced that it has the technology to design and create other worlds. Perhaps our world is the product of such a civilization. If so, it would have been intelligently designed but there would be no necessary religious dimension to belief in the designers.

The point is that ID should not be excluded from classrooms or anywhere else on religious grounds. It's no more religious than is the Darwinian view that all of life and the cosmos can be explained in purely natural terms. To exclude intelligence as a legitimate causal explanation while allowing alternative naturalistic explanations demonstrates a materialist bias against any view which makes the existence of a transcendent intelligence more likely.

RLC

Slumdog

I just got around to watching Slumdog Millionaire over the weekend. What a great movie. The glimpse of Indian life, the music, the story, the acting, the cinematography - everything was superb. Or am I just too uncritical and too easy to please? What did you think about the film?

RLC

Lots More Land

Don't lose any sleep over this, but the ice sheet covering Greenland is melting faster than expected:

Study results indicate that the ice sheet may be responsible for nearly 25 percent of global sea rise in the past 13 years. The study also shows that seas now are rising by more than 3 millimeters a year--more than 50 percent faster than the average for the 20th century.

UAF researcher Sebastian H. Mernild and colleagues from the United States, United Kingdom and Denmark discovered that from 1995 to 2007, overall precipitation on the ice sheet decreased while surface ablation--the combination of evaporation, melting and calving of the ice sheet--increased. According to Mernild's new data, since 1995 the ice sheet lost an average of 265 cubic kilometers per year, which has contributed to about 0.7 millimeters per year in global sea level rise. These figures do not include thermal expansion--the expansion of the ice volume in response to heat--so the contribution could be up to twice that.

Is this a good thing, a bad thing, or neither? It certainly has consequences. The sea level is apparently rising due to melting ice around the globe, and that has implications for coastal cities and agriculture. The oceans will get somewhat less salty which will have implications for marine ecology, but no one really knows how these things are going to play out. One thing that we do know, though, is that if the ice covering Greenland continues to recede, far more land is going to become available for use not only by humans but also by plants and animals. Vast tracts of land in Greenland could within a century or so become habitat for all sorts of creatures which are currently confined to more restricted ranges.

More land will also be available for agriculture, mining, and who knows what all else. This is true not just of Greenland but also North America and Russia. The idea that a changing climate is a global disaster is rather short-sighted. It's more likely to be, like most things, a mixed bag. The point is we just don't know yet.

RLC

Hearts vs Minds

This is bound to upset a lot of liberal stereotypes: Yahoo News reports on a pair of studies which conclude that conservatives are more open-minded to opposing views than are liberals. Here's a quick summary:

People with stronger party affiliation, conservative political views, and greater interest in politics proved more likely to click on articles with opposing views, according to the Ohio State study. "It appears that people with these characteristics are more confident in their views and so they're more inclined to at least take a quick look at the counterarguments," Knobloch-Westerwick noted.

Among the political blog readers, a similar trend emerged in which "liberals read almost exclusively liberal blogs, but conservatives tend to read both," Davis said.

The article offers several possible explanations for this finding, including genetic disposition, the success of talk radio, etc., but I suspect that the biology-based explanation is closest to the truth. I think, but couldn't possibly prove, that conservatives are generally more left-brained, logical and analytical. They want to find the best arguments to support their views. In other words, for most conservatives a position or idea has to make sense.

Liberals, on the other hand, tend to be more right-brained, subjective and intuitive. If a particular view makes them feel good, if it's compatible with the way they'd like the world to be, then they have no need of argument. In fact, they often find contrary opinions to be unsettling and often think that someone who questions liberal dogma must be lacking in compassion or have some other pernicious character flaw.

Or maybe this theory and the studies cited above are all a bunch of horse-puckey.

RLC

That Seventies Show

Economist Arthur Laffer has some gloomy tidings for us in the Wall Street Journal:

With the [economic] crisis, the ill-conceived government reactions, and the ensuing economic downturn, the unfunded liabilities of federal programs -- such as Social Security, civil-service and military pensions, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, Medicare and Medicaid -- are over the $100 trillion mark. With U.S. GDP and federal tax receipts at about $14 trillion and $2.4 trillion respectively, such a debt all but guarantees higher interest rates, massive tax increases, and partial default on government promises.

But as bad as the fiscal picture is, panic-driven monetary policies portend to have even more dire consequences. We can expect rapidly rising prices and much, much higher interest rates over the next four or five years, and a concomitant deleterious impact on output and employment not unlike the late 1970s.

What monetary policy is he talking about? The picture below is worth a thousand words. It shows the massive increase in the money supply undertaken by the Federal Reserve to pay on the enormous debt the current administration has buried us under.

The more you have of something the cheaper is its value. It's as true of money as it is of anything else, and the unprecedented infusion of cash into the economy means that the value of the dollar will inevitably sink which means we're headed for double digit inflation just like, or worse than, we had in the seventies.

Russian blogger Stanislav Mishin writing in the newspaper Pravda, of all places, offers(courtesy of the Washington Times)the following commentary on our current precarious economic condition:

It must be said that like the breaking of a great dam, the American descent into Marxism is happening with breathtaking speed, against the backdrop of a passive, hapless sheeple. Excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well-prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past 20 years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia, and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls to the whims of their elites and betters.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more than another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Weimar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

In other words, President Obama's policies could well turn the U.S. into a third world country, but, hey, didn't he and Michelle look so cool together on their New York date night.

RLC

Moral Purity and the U.N.

Americans, concerned about their image as a human rights violator, last November elected Barack Obama to lead us back to righteousness. One of the first things the new President did in order to fulfill his mandate to restore moral purity to American foreign policy was to order the closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba because it's important to avoid the very appearance of evil.

Very well, but the case is even stronger for dissociating ourselves not just from the figment of evil, but from the real thing. In this instance the real thing resides at the United Nations.

Here, courtesy of Ed Lasky, are four reasons why the United States should pull out of the U.N.

In elections last Wednesday:

1. Libya was elected President of the U.N. General Assembly. The Libyan minister for African affairs has been designated for the post.
   
2. Sudan has been elected vice president of the General Assembly.
   
3. Algeria has been elected chair of the Assembly's Legal Committee, known in the U.N.'s streamlined bureaucracy as the Sixth Committee.
   
4. Iran has been elected vice-chair of the Sixth Committee.
   

Closing Gitmo is a precipitous and foolish idea. The detainees held there were treated better than we treat convicts in many of our prisons in the United States and certainly better than they would be treated were they imprisoned in the countries in which they were captured. The only reason for closing it is symbolic, and it's not even clear what the symbol is.

Pulling out of the U.N., on the other hand, would be an act of genuine moral substance since it has become a haven for thugs and tyrants who are handsomely recompensed for blustering and threatening the free people of the world and accomplishing next to nothing on behalf of those who suffer.

RLC

Gravitational Mysteries

There are four fundamental physical forces that operate throughout the universe - the strong nuclear, which holds the atomic nucleus together against the force of repulsion of positively charged protons; the weak nuclear, which mediates radioactive decay; the electromagnetic, which is the force between charged particles and/or magnetic poles; and gravity. Of these four, gravity is by far the weakest being 10 to the 40th power times weaker than the electromagnetic force, which is in turn 100 times weaker than the strong nuclear force (which is why the SNF can hold protons together against the force of their mutual repulsion, at least over very short distances).

Gravity is the force with which we are perhaps most familiar, and yet no one really understands much about it. We can measure it and predict its effects, but when it comes to understanding it scientists are at a loss. It is indeed strange, when we think about it, that an object like the earth can somehow pull another object, like your body, without there being any discernable physical connection between them.

This is, however, just one of the mysterious aspects of gravity. New Scientist has a piece in which they briefly outline current thinking on each of the following questions about gravity:

1. What is gravity?
   
2. Why does gravity only pull?
   
3. Why is gravity so weak?
   
4. Why is gravity fine-tuned?
   
5. Does life need gravity?
   
6. Can we counter gravity?
   
7. Will we ever have a quantum theory of gravity?
   

The most interesting to me is #4 but check them all. It's a very interesting article.

RLC

Double Standard

As a minority who overcame a difficult childhood to rise to the top of her profession, Sonia Sotomayor has a compelling story, and Republicans who would block her nomination must be animated by the worst sort of motivations. At least that's the narrative we've been hearing, but those who are telling it have very short memories. Colleen Carroll Campbell reminds us of another compelling story:

Eight years before Sonia Sotomayor burst onto the national scene with her hardscrabble life story and bid to become America's first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, another judicial nominee almost made history. Honduran immigrant Miguel Estrada was nominated in 2001 to become the first Hispanic on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, a post seen as a stepping stone to the Supreme Court.

Estrada's rags-to-riches story and sterling resumé had the same star quality as Sotomayor's. Estrada barely spoke English when he arrived in America at age 17, but he wound up graduating with high honors from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, editing the Harvard Law Review and clerking for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. After a stint at a prestigious New York law firm, Estrada served as an assistant U.S. attorney in New York and an assistant solicitor general in the Clinton administration. His bid for the federal bench was backed by the left-leaning American Bar Association, which awarded him its highest rating of "well-qualified."

Unlike Sotomayor, however, Estrada never enjoyed fawning press coverage or effusive praise from the liberal activists and politicians who have spent the past week pontificating about the need for ethnic diversity on our nation's highest courts. In fact, many of the same voices gushing about the "empathy" that Sotomayor's Hispanic heritage allows her to bring to bench once raged against Estrada.

The key difference between Sotomayor and Estrada: Estrada is a conservative. Senate Democrats, wary of seeing a Latino Republican nominee advance toward the Supreme Court, spent more than two years blocking his nomination. Although he had the votes to be confirmed, Estrada withdrew his name in 2003 after it became clear that he would not be granted the courtesy of a simple up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.

Estrada's case marked the first time a filibuster was used to defeat an appeals court nominee. Yet the hard partisan line taken against Estrada by Senate Democrats was hardly unprecedented.

But Democrats' amnesia on judicial appointees doesn't end with Estrada:

Many of the same Democrats now extolling Sotomayor's underprivileged childhood showed no appreciation for the humble beginnings of conservative judges Clarence Thomas and Janice Rogers Brown, two African-Americans raised by sharecroppers who faced fierce confirmation battles on their way to the bench. And the same liberal activists who warned of a Catholic cabal on the Supreme Court during the confirmation hearings of Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito have made nary a peep about Sotomayor's Catholicism, perhaps because they regard her as the "right" kind of Catholic -- one who does not actively practice her faith.

And this doesn't include all of George Bush's other appointees whose nominations languished and died in the Senate because the Democrats didn't want Bush's selections making judicial decisions.

Then there is the total memory loss suffered by the President himself:

President Barack Obama recently called on senators to judge Sotomayor "on the merits" and eschew the "political silliness that has come to surround the Supreme Court." That challenge would carry more weight had Obama himself met it during his Senate tenure. When evaluating Roberts' nomination in 2005, Obama acknowledged that "there is absolutely no doubt in my mind Judge Roberts is qualified" but said he was more concerned about "what is in the judge's heart" than his resume. Citing what he perceived as Roberts' lack of enthusiasm for affirmative action and abortion rights, Obama rejected him.

The President's calls to eschew petty partisan fights over judicial nominees are risible, given his and his party's history of doing exactly that, but, even so, Republicans shouldn't follow the Democrat example. They should consider Ms Sotomayor on her merits, not on the basis of who nominated her. If she's qualified they should confirm her, but if it turns out that she's not the shining star the administration is making her out to be, Republicans should firmly oppose her.

That's how grown up statesmen behave.

Thanks to Jason for the link.

RLC

If Israel Strikes

It seems almost a foregone conclusion now that President Obama has switched his position on Iranian nuclear weapons from "unacceptable" to "acceptable" - having learned that the "unacceptable" position entails the use of force - that Israel will strike Iran to take them out. Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton writing for the Wall Street Journal outlines Iran's most likely responses to such an attack:

1. Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz.
   
2. Iran cuts its own oil exports to raise world prices.
   
3. Iran attacks U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
   
4. Iran increases support for global terrorism.
   
5. Iran launches missile attacks on Israel.
   
6. Iran unleashes Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel.
   

For one reason or another Mr. Bolton thinks most of these to be unlikely assuming there's a scintilla of sanity still left in Tehran. He's of the opinion that 6), another proxy war waged through Hamas and Hezbollah, is the likeliest outcome.

His discussion of these options is fascinating.

RLC

Presto!

The President has shown a fondness for talking about the number of jobs that he has "saved or created" with his stimulus spending, but as William McGurn of the Wall Street Journal observes this construction is at best meaningless and at worst dishonest:

His latest invocation came yesterday, when the president declared that the stimulus had already saved or created at least 150,000 American jobs -- and announced he was ramping up some of the stimulus spending so he could "save or create" an additional 600,000 jobs this summer. These numbers come in the context of an earlier Obama promise that his recovery plan will "save or create three to four million jobs over the next two years."

The reason this is either meaningless or dishonest is that the President surely knows that "the number is pure fiction -- the administration has no way to measure how many jobs are actually being 'saved.' "

Of course, the inability to measure Mr. Obama's jobs formula is part of its attraction. Never mind that no one -- not the Labor Department, not the Treasury, not the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- actually measures "jobs saved." As the New York Times delicately reports, Mr. Obama's jobs claims are "based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs." Nice work if you can get away with it.

And get away with it he has. However dubious it may be as an economic measure, as a political formula "save or create" allows the president to invoke numbers that convey an illusion of precision. Harvard economist and former Bush economic adviser Greg Mankiw calls it a "non-measurable metric." And on his blog, he acknowledges the political attraction.

"The expression 'create or save,' which has been used regularly by the President and his economic team, is an act of political genius," writes Mr. Mankiw. "You can measure how many jobs are created between two points in time. But there is no way to measure how many jobs are saved. Even if things get much, much worse, the President can say that there would have been 4 million fewer jobs without the stimulus."

Mr. Obama's comments yesterday are a perfect illustration of just such a claim. In the months since Congress approved the stimulus, our economy has lost nearly 1.6 million jobs and unemployment has hit 9.4%. Invoke the magic words, however, and -- presto! -- you have the president claiming he has "saved or created" 150,000 jobs. It all makes for a much nicer spin, and helps you forget this is the same team that only a few months ago promised us that passing the stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising over 8%.

During a March hearing of the Senate Finance Committee, Chairman Max Baucus challenged Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on the formula.

"You created a situation where you cannot be wrong," said the Montana Democrat. "If the economy loses two million jobs over the next few years, you can say yes, but it would've lost 5.5 million jobs. If we create a million jobs, you can say, well, it would have lost 2.5 million jobs. You've given yourself complete leverage where you cannot be wrong, because you can take any scenario and make yourself look correct."

Now, something's wrong when the president invokes a formula that makes it impossible for him to be wrong and it goes largely unchallenged. It's true that almost any government spending will create some jobs and save others. But as Milton Friedman once pointed out, that doesn't tell you much: The government, after all, can create jobs by hiring people to dig holes and fill them in.

If the "saved or created" formula looks brilliant, it's only because Mr. Obama and his team are not being called on their claims. And don't expect much to change. So long as the news continues to repeat the administration's line that the stimulus has already "saved or created" 150,000 jobs over a time period when the U.S. economy suffered an overall job loss 10 times that number, the White House would be insane to give up a formula that allows them to spin job losses into jobs saved.

So the President manages to escape media accountability for the loss of 1.6 million jobs since he took office by claiming to have saved or created 150,000 jobs with more on the way, and the fawning media is too busy ogling his abs to ask him how in the world he arrives at that number. As Ed Morrissey has noted, he could as easily boast of having saved all 140 million jobs in this country. How could anyone gainsay the claim?

Are you still working? Thank President Obama.

RLC

Silent Sisters

Melissa Clouthier wonders why the sisterhood has been so strangely silent about the egregious Playboy rape list compiled by Neanderthal misogynist Guy Cimbalo targeting conservative women. Oops, did I just inadvertently give the reason?

It is odd - well, maybe not - that hardly any liberal males have condemned this putrid piece of hate speech, and it's even odder that feminists have had so little to say about it.

Clouthier compares their silence to the person who sees an assault on a woman but does nothing to help, the very type of person feminists generally profess to loathe. Here's Clouthier's close:

Meanwhile, besides the women on the list and other conservative women media members (Megyn Kelly, Michelle Malkin, Elizabeth Blakney, the Smart Girls ladies, etc.), who presented the most vociferous defense?

Conservative men. That's right. Conservative men wrote ardently [in defense of] the attacked women. Ed Driscoll, John Hawkins, Ed Morrissey, Caleb Howe, Allahpundit, Jim Treacher. One liberal man likely lost his job for decrying Playboy's misogynistic actions.

The feminist women remain silent. I don't expect them to find their voices anytime soon. These are the same women who defended Bill Clinton's sexual harassment and blamed the victims. These are the same women who savaged Sarah Palin based on her hair, her clothes, and her choice to have a special needs child. And now, these are the women who stand by and watch other women get attacked because they are beautiful and believe differently. The feminists say nothing.

If you haven't been following this sordid tale, click on the link. The original Cimbalo article has been taken down, but Clouthier provides enough details to give you an idea of what's been going on.

UPDATE: Just as I prepared to post this I learned that the National Organization of Women has chastised David Letterman for his klunky "jokes" about Sarah Palin and her daughter. That's good news.

RLC

Tasteless and Cowardly

So, David Letterman calls Sarah Palin "slutty-looking" and cracks a humorless joke about her daughter being raped at a baseball game, and his audience, comprised mostly of New York, liberal-minded, compassionate people roars at the hilarity of it all.

Now imagine that it was not David Letterman, but rather some conservative radio talker like Rush Limbaugh who made these remarks to a conservative audience. Imagine, though, that it wasn't Sarah Palin that he called "slutty" but rather Michelle Obama, and suppose it wasn't Willow Palin who was the object of the humiliating and completely stupid comment but one of the Obamas' daughters. Suppose further that the conservative audience howled with laughter. What do you suppose would be the response? What was the response when Don Imus said something similar about the Rutger's girls basketball team?

Liberals would go ballistic, and properly so, at the sheer tastelessness and cruelty of it. They would excoriate Limbaugh and hound him from the airwaves. Conservatives would never live down the embarrassment of having one of their premier spokespersons say such a disgusting thing and having their brethren caught on tape laughing and applauding.

But David Letterman says it about the Palin family, liberals laugh themselves to tears, and no one on the left seems to think that anything unusual has happened. Few on the left seem to worry about what such behavior says about the kind of people they are. Some on the left are so blinded by their own hatreds and self-righteousness that they can't even see that what they would find despicable if done by conservatives is completely acceptable when done by one of their own.

--------------

Meanwhile, on show after show last night liberals tried to tie the Holocaust Museum shooter to conservatism in order to discredit "the right," but they failed to notice that conservatives were among the man's primary targets. He hated Fox News, The Weekly Standard, and neo-cons in general. His anti-semitism is much more agreeable with the sort of thing that emerges in left-wing discourse than anything that is heard on the right.

Unable to actually trace this man's derangements to conservativism, they simply assert that he was a "right-winger" because, well, he just has to be. It fits their stereotype.

Unlike the play the Holocaust Memorial murder is getting, when a few weeks back a black muslim terrorist shot and killed a young white soldier in Arkansas the story simply evaporated like morning fog. There was no public investigation into this man's background, his hatreds, and mental disorders. There was no soul-searching about the nature of Islam, black racism, and the anti-military mindset which infects the American left and which may well have incited this attack. Why not?

Anyway, Letterman says that making jokes about people in the news is what he does. Very well. Let's see how long it takes him to say something as tasteless and coarse about Michelle Obama and her daughters as he was "courageous" enough to say about Palin and her's.

RLC

Go South Old Man

Mark Steyn sends a shiver down our spines with a little anecdote about how nationalized health care works in Canada:

In the Province of Quebec, patients suffering from serious incontinence - i.e., they have to aller aux toilettes jusqu'� 12 fois par nuit (that's 12 times a night) - have to wait three years for a half-hour operation. That's 3 years times 365 nights times 12 trips to the bathroom.

There are only two urologists in the province who perform the operation, in part because hospital budgets are so tight they decline to buy the necessary "neurostimulator".

The central point about socialized medicine is that restricting access is the only means of controlling costs. And, when comparisons of health "costs" between nations are made, the time you spend in the bathroom each night and the subsequent impact on your work performance the following day are not factored in.

Of course, if you get sick of the three-year wait, you can always drive a couple of hours south, with frequent rest stops, to Fletcher Allen Hospital in Vermont or Dartmouth-Hitchcock in New Hampshire, and write a check. For the moment. Once the U.S. system has been "reformed" so that its wait lists are up to Euro-Canadian standards, poor incontinent Quebeckers will have to drive to Costa Rica. And that's a lot more rest stops.

Two urologists in the entire province? When the government is paying the bill for health care the government decides what equipment to invest in and what procedures are urgent, and the government cares not a tittle how many times you have to go to the bathroom every night.

If President Obama continues on the road to Euro-Canadian socialism, including a nationalized health care structure, I suspect a lot of people, both Canadians and Americans, will start moving to Costa Rica. Costa Rica is a beautiful country and folks there don't have to spend the entire night in the bathroom.

RLC

California Dreamin'

It may be hard for young people to believe, but it wasn't long ago that California was seen as the land of milk and honey. People flocked to the state to take advantage of the opportunities it offered. California was perhaps the most prosperous state in the country and it was a great place to live and raise a family. Today, however, California is a different place, an economic basket case on the brink of bankruptcy. What happened? Representative Tom McClintock tells the story:

A generation ago, California exemplified its nickname, the Golden State. State spending was less than half per capita, inflation-adjusted, what it is today. Its debt-service ratio was less than a third.

Californians enjoyed one of the finest highway systems in the world and one of the finest public education systems in the country. Water and electricity were so cheap many communities didn't meter consumption.

Only a few decades have passed, yet California is a dramatically altered place. The tax burden is one of the heaviest in the nation. State government consumes the largest portion of personal earnings of any time in its history and yet can no longer maintain its basic infrastructure. The once legendary California quality of life has declined precipitously and produced a historic first: More people are moving out of California than are moving in.

One thing - and one thing only - has changed in those years: public policy. The political left gradually gained dominance over California's government and imposed a disastrous agenda of policy changes that now are being replicated at the federal level.

There's much more to this sad tale at the link. McClintock explains how deficit spending, high taxes, onerous regulations on business, unions, and centralized, bureaucratic government have combined to destroy the west coast nirvana that was once one of the best places to live in the world. He closes by reminding us that the policies which have reduced California to its current low estate are precisely the policies that a Democratic congress and administration are now foisting on the rest of the nation. Just as California's best days may well be behind it, so, too, are those of the rest of us unless in 2010 and 2012 we vote to reverse the folly.

UPDATE: As if to add an exclamation point to McClintock's eulogy for his state McClatchy has a piece that says that California is considering ending its welfare program because it can no longer afford it. I doubt this will happen, but the fact that it's even being talked about is indicative of the gravity of California's crisis.

RLC

A Pair of Bigots

Two anti-semitic bigots are in the news today. The first is the deranged elderly white supremicist named James Von Brunn who shot and killed a guard at the Holocaust Museum yesterday. The left is playing this tragedy as a crime of "the right" even though there's nothing about Brunn that suggests he was a "right-winger." The tragedy is also getting round the clock coverage on the news outlets even though there are dozens of similar shootings in Washington everyday, shootings motivated by hatred, that no one seems to care much about.

The second bigot is Jeremiah Wright who was asked recently if he had spoken to the president, Wright replied that: "Them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me."

It's not comforting to know that the President's spiritual mentor is an anti-semite. Can you imagine what the media reaction would be had a pastor of former President Bush said such a thing? The media would be, rightly, drawing all sorts of conclusions about the character of the president from the fact that he was willing to subject himself and his family to such a man's teaching for twenty years.

Reverend Wright and Mr. Von Brunn are two peas in a pod. They're both haters - one incites hatred and the other acted on it. One, we'll probably be told over the days and weeks ahead, reveals something dark and ugly in the soul of white, conservative America. The other, who may reveal something dark and ugly in the soul of our president, we won't be hearing much about at all.

RLC