So Long, Van

Perhaps by now you've heard that Van Jones, the President's very controversial Green Jobs czar, has resigned. If you're wondering who Van Jones is you probably get your news from the traditional media. Byron York explains:

Coverage of the Jones controversy was a case study of some of the deep divisions within the media. Fox News' Glenn Beck devoted program after program to Jones' past, and a number of conservative blogs were responsible for finding some of Jones' most inflammatory statements. Yet even as the controversy grew -- and even after Jones himself apologized for some of his words -- several of the nation's top media outlets failed to report the story. As late as Friday, as the Jones matter began to boil over, it had not been reported at all in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC. Although the Post and CBS went on to report the Jones story on Saturday, the Times did not inform its readers about the Jones matter until after Jones resigned.

The traditional media are either too lethargic or too ideological to have reported prior to his resignation that as the New York Times now tells us:

Mr. Jones did not go through the traditional vetting process for administration officials who must be confirmed by the Senate. So it was not until recently that some of Mr. Jones's past actions received broad airing, including his derogatory statements about Republicans in February and his signature on a 2004 letter suggesting that former President George W. Bush might have knowingly allowed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to occur in order to use them as a "pre-text to war."

Three questions press themselves upon us in the wake of this brouhaha: Why was Jones not vetted? If he was vetted why were his views and statements, including his Leninist sympathies, not considered disqualifying? And why did the traditional media ignore the story while it was raging on Fox and on the internet until after the man resigned?

It's all very puzzling and alarming. Either the Obama administration is displaying a distressing lack of competence or it's displaying a distressing fondness for people on the far left of the ideological spectrum.

RLC

Isa al Masih

A number of readers have pointed out to me that Isa al Masih is Arabic for Jesus the Messiah. I should have known but didn't.

Don't ask me why I didn't google the term before I wrote the response. I have no good answer.

RLC

Rule #12

Students sometimes wonder why and how our politics have gotten so nasty. Actually, this is not a recent development. Many conservative commentators trace the nastiness back to the ugly slanders to which Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas were subjected by Senate Democrats, particularly Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden, in the late 80s and early 90s. Liberal pundits, on the other hand, point to the impeachment of Bill Clinton by Republicans as another event that created wounds so deep that it may be decades before our public discourse ever recovers.

Whatever the more public catalysts may have been, it seems that a lot of people in politics today have taken rule #12 in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals to heart: "Pick the target. Freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct personalized criticism and ridicule works.)"

It's worth noting that Alinsky was a left-wing radical writing a manual for progressive activists. There's nothing that I'm aware of in all of conservative literature that comes anywhere close to Alinsky's adjuration to dehumanize and degrade one's political opponents. One searches in vain through Edmund Burke, William Buckley, Barry Goldwater, Russell Kirk, or even Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levine for anything that matches in cruelty or odiousness Alinsky's rule #12.

Yet Alinsky is the left's tactical lodestar and guru. Obama incorporated his teaching into his work as a community organizer. Hillary Clinton wrote her thesis on him. Reading Alinsky is a tacit requirement for leftists in good standing. Thankfully, not all of them follow him but evidently enough do that our political discourse has been gravely coarsened.

It's perhaps no coincidence that the left's attacks not only on Bork and Thomas, but also Ronald Reagan, Ken Starr, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin, Carrie Prejean, the tea partiers and town hall protesters, were so personal, vicious, and vile. Like Alinsky said, it works. Anyone who gets in the way of the progressive agenda can expect to be smeared, insulted, libeled, slandered, and ridiculed. It's the tactic their esteemed mentor urged them to employ and Alinsky's votaries, or at least too many of them, employ it with distressing gusto.

Unfortunately, we're likely to continue seeing this ugliness in our politics until the media and the public demand an end to it. Meanwhile, it's imperative that those on the right who value civil discourse ensure that their side, no matter how much they're angered by the behavior of the left over the last two decades, doesn't fall into the same destructive, degrading rhetorical cess-pool and that we dissociate ourselves from those on the right who may already be swimming in it.

Let's shine a light on this depraved behavior when we encounter it, but let us not succumb to the temptation to respond to it in kind.

RLC

Tough Love

An unidentified reader, who I infer from the screen name is a Muslim, sent me the following in response to the post on enhanced interrogation techniques titled Of Course They Work:

If your views on torture represent Christianity, I do not want anything to do with it as I do not want anything to do with terrorists that claim to be of the Islamic faith.

Concerning your support for torture, does that mean that a North American soldier or citizen can be tortured by your enemies in order to protect their nation from an U.S.A. invasion?

Are your views on torture the foundation of your theology about the death of Isa alMasih?

I deeply regret that the reader feels that my disagreement with the absolutist position against torture makes it impossible for him to consider the truth claims of Christianity. Nevertheless, I simply do not see rationality in the absolutist's position. Here's my reply to the writer (slightly edited and amended):

Thanks for your email. I appreciate the questions you raise.

I'm afraid, though, that you'll have to explain which views on torture you're talking about. I am very much opposed to torture, but I don't believe torture is an absolute moral evil. I believe there are extreme circumstances which justify its use. Do you disagree? Would you allow your child to be brutally murdered if torturing the murderer's accomplice was the only way to save her? Would you condemn someone who saved your child by employing painful measures on the accomplice? Would you look your child in the eyes and say that you would have rather she died than be saved through such means?

Would you allow millions of people to be vaporized in a nuclear explosion if torturing the terrorist who planted the bomb was the only way to learn its location before it went off? Do you think it permissible to use lethal force to prevent an intruder from harming your family? If so, if you think that killing a man in self-defense is morally justifiable, why would you balk at using pain to prevent a man from killing dozens or thousands of innocent people?

Christianity is a religion that enjoins us to love others and to honor their human dignity, but sometimes those two imperatives are in conflict with each other. When that's the case, I think the proper course is to love those you are responsible for and that may mean doing all you can to save them from a terrible death. It may mean violating the dignity of their would-be killer. Life is filled with tough moral choices, but for me this one isn't tough at all.

You asked about my theology about the death of Isa al Masih. I can't answer that because I don't know who al Masih is.

The question of torture, paradoxically, is really a question about who we will love. Will we love innocent human beings or will we love those who threaten them? Sometimes, in certain extreme cases, we can't do both. We have to choose who'll be the beneficiary of our mercy and compassion. When we're confronted with a forced choice, one we can't avoid, to choose the terrorist over one's children or the children of our neighbors strikes me as perverse. There are times in life when compassion and mercy require of us that we do very difficult things. Love is not always about warm, fuzzy feelings.

If you disagree please reread the questions I asked my correspondent and explain to your children why you would rather sacrifice them if the alternative was causing a terrorist discomfort.

A second correspondent's email can be found on the feedback page.

RLC

Senator Kennedy

The funeral is over and a decent interval has passed. Perhaps it's not unseemly now to offer a counterpoint to the public canonization that took place in the wake of Senator Ted Kennedy's passing.

To watch the television news and talk shows it might seem as if someone of the moral and political stature of George Washington had died. Ted Kennedy was not the sort of man that deserves the encomiums being heaped upon him by an adoring media. He was, like all of us, a flawed human being. He should be recognized for his commitment to the causes he championed, but it is a distortion of history to portray him as "great."

As a young man Kennedy was an indifferent student and was kicked out of school for cheating. He was probably intoxicated while driving home a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne after a party on Chappaquiddick Island. Kennedy, you've probably heard, drove off a bridge into the water. He escaped but Kopechne didn't. Even so, the woman could possibly have been rescued if Kennedy had called for help, but he left the scene and spent the next several hours worrying to a friend about how this would effect his career while Kopechne slowly asphyxiated in an air bubble in the back seat of the car.

During much of his subsequent life Senator Kennedy was a heavy drinker and a philanderer. He and Senator Chris Dodd were reported to have notoriously assaulted a waitress in a Washington restaurant, wrestling her under the table as they squeezed her between them in a "waitress sandwich."

The Senator arguably committed treason during the 80's when he wrote to Soviet premier Yuri Andropov offering to work with him to defeat Ronald Reagan's attempts to neutralize Soviet influence in Europe.

He was prone to smearing political opponents, as Robert Bork can attest, and despite George Bush's attempts to reach out to him, all the Massachussetts pol ever gave him was the back of his hand. His legislative successes were almost always of dubious worth to the country and his greatest achievement in the Senate may have been his longevity.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, however, was the recent revelation from friend and former Newsweek editor Ed Klein that Kennedy actually used to joke about the Chappaquiddick tragedy:

Except that he was born to privilege, Edward Kennedy was a man like the rest of us, full of faults and flaws. That his life would be celebrated by the media in the manner it was and that he would be held up as something of a hero reflects poorly on the state of American culture. It would be better if we asked of our heroes a little more virtue than Mr. Kennedy possessed.

We should certainly be saddened by his death, but let's not think he was someone that he wasn't.

Thanks to Hot Air for the audio.

RLC

Is China Crazy?

This report is big...

A report suggests that the Chinese government is pushing the general public into buying gold and silver bullion, which could have a dramatic effect on the markets.

This is an absolutely fascinating report. Just yesterday I was making the case that our government mistakenly believes we can spend our way back from bankruptcy to prosperity. Now here's a government, China no less, not only advocating that the people save, but that their savings be gold and silver.

A several observations may be made about this report:

• China is recommending physical gold and silver bullion as appropriate investment and savings vehicles, not stocks, ETFs, futures, options, etc. Why do you suppose that is? Answer: because the bullion is safer than the paper. A mine can be nationalized effectively sending the value of its shares to zero. Similarly, other paper investment vehicles are only promises to pay and subject to force major and can be defaulted. These risks are very real and that's why they tend to have a higher return than the bullion. The bullion is safe, and therefore, smart.
• China wouldn't dare make such recommendations if they didn't have confidence that gold and silver would be profitable as well as be a safe store of their wealth. Note that the Chinese people buying gold and silver will probably make the recommendation something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• China wants to become an economic super power. One of their tactics to accomplish this is to steadily swap their enormous dollar holding for raw materials thus turning worthless dollars into real assets. But they know a nation can hardly achieve such a goal if the majority of its people live in poverty. China knows the fast track to wealth for its citizens is through gold and silver, especially in the years ahead as the Western economies inflate their currencies into oblivion and crash and burn.
• This offers at least one explanation for why China continues to purchase our US Treasuries or at least hasn't dumped them yet - they are, in effect, supporting the dollar which in turn suppresses the price of gold making it relatively affordable for many Chinese. After, they start buying en masse though, the price will become prohibitively expensive if any of the metal is even available at all.

Now we have to wonder, why doesn't our government encourage us accordingly?

The Company We Keep

The Obama administration has populated itself with some of the most radical extremists ever to step onto the stage of our political life. We've talked on previous occasions about the worrisome views of men like John Holdren, Ezekiel Emanuel, and David Blumenthal (see here and here)

The latest to come to light is a communist by the name of Van Jones who is President Obama's "Green Jobs" czar. Jones may be the most radical of the bunch.

Here's an audio clip that reveals something of the kind of man Van Jones is and what his ambitions for this country are. The short of it is that he seems to want to turn America into Cuba:

Jones also believes that the Bush administration was actually behind the 9/11 attack or at least knew it was coming and deliberately chose not to prevent it.

When conservatives fretted that Barack Obama was too cozy with people like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright the media pooh-poohed their concerns. Now Mr. Obama is surrounding himself with people just like Ayers and Wright and the pooh-poohers have egg on their faces. You really can judge a man by the company he keeps.

It's deeply disturbing that such a man as Jones would be considered unexceptionable by the administration's vetters. If Jones is allowed to stay in his post after it has now become clear that he's a communist revolutionary and a fringe 9/11 "truther" then we will have learned, or confirmed, something very important, and very troubling, about Barack Obama.

RLC

Junk DNA Evidently Isn't Junk

There's a fascinating report in Science Daily. It seems that researchers have discovered that the difference between chimps and humans is due to the fact that some segments of what is called "junk" DNA, DNA that doesn't code for proteins, were somehow "switched on" in the early history of primates. The resulting proteins coded for by this newly activated DNA were responsible for the emergence of the human species:

Humans and chimpanzees are genetically very similar, yet it is not difficult to identify the many ways in which we are clearly distinct from chimps. In a study published online in Genome Research, scientists have made a crucial discovery of genes that have evolved in humans after branching off from other primates, opening new possibilities for understanding what makes us uniquely human.

The prevailing wisdom in the field of molecular evolution was that new genes could only evolve from duplicated or rearranged versions of preexisting genes. It seemed highly unlikely that evolutionary processes could produce a functional protein-coding gene from what was once inactive DNA.

However, recent evidence suggests that this phenomenon does in fact occur. Researchers have found genes that arose from non-coding DNA in flies, yeast, and primates. No such genes had been found to be unique to humans until now, and the discovery raises fascinating questions about how these genes might make us different from other primates.

They estimate there may be approximately 18 human-specific genes that have arisen from non-coding DNA during human evolution.

This is quite a revelation since Darwinians had long claimed that junk DNA has no function and Intelligent Design advocates had been predicting thatit would eventually be found to have a function in the cell. That there are 18 human-specific genes in what was previously thought to be genetic clutter is pretty embarrassing to Darwinism.

It's also interesting because the DNA was present in the cell prior to having any function. This is hard to square with Darwinian evolutionary theory since it suggests that the cell produced and carried macromolecules for which it had no use, a phenomenon which Darwinism disallows.

Finally, the finding fits nicely with the idea of front-loaded evolution, i.e. the theory that God laid the groundwork for biological evolution at the time of creation and that subsequent evolutionary change has simply been the unfolding of the genetic potentialities latent in life from the beginning.

Whatever the case, the news that junk DNA is not really junk should disturb those who wish to deny teleology in biology. The discovery that preexisting DNA was activated at a certain point in evolutionary history and subsequently gave rise to the human species certainly seems more compatible with a telic view of life than with the notion that evolution is purposeless and random.

RLC

The Hustle

Well, here we are in the beginning of September, notable for historically being a month in which the price of gold goes up so as we might expect, gold has been pretty perky lately. It was up around $20 per ounce yesterday and as I write this, it's up about $20 again for today. It appears that gold is attempting yet another assault on the $1000 level sometime soon.

One interesting observation is that the fundamental issues that have existed since the beginning of the gold bull market that started in 1999 have not changed and, if anything, they have gotten worse. Gold is the safe haven from geo-political and economic risk and it reflects the degree of concern at any given time.

Our government is particularly troubled about the perception of risk because people putting their money into gold are not putting their money into the economy. Since 70% of our GDP comes from the consumer, it follows they the government wants people to consume, not save. (It's ironic that excessive consumption is largely why we're in the economic mess that we are.) So it is predictable that we will see the government making every effort to instill confidence in the people about the economy. They're even rolling out VP Joe Biden to tell us about how the stimulus played a "significant role" in the recovery (in the past tense).

Yes, it's really all about confidence. Confidence in our politicians, our economy, and the strength of our dollar. The game will go on as long as there is confidence so we could accurately say this is a game of confidence or, a con game. A con game works until it doesn't. From the link:

In a sign of how times really haven't changed all that much from earlier in the decade when, in 2001, Federal Reserve Governor Laurence Meyer prodded Americans to "go out and buy an SUV" to help pull the economy out of the recession, today we have the wildly popular "Cash for Clunkers" program where, after spending like drunken sailors over the last few years leading the world into the current mess, the solution to our current economic woe is to borrow and spend even more.

The gold price reflects the degree of confidence inversely or better, we could say it reflects the lack of confidence. It's an invaluable tool for surviving and winning the con game being run on us.

The Myth of AI

There's a refreshingly contrarian view at New Scientist to all the claims that machines will soon be as intelligent as humans and that humans will eventually be almost indistinguishable, intellectually, from machines.

Noel Sharkey is a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield and he's very skeptical that we will ever succeed in creating machines that can think like human beings. Here's part of a recent interview he gave:

What do you mean when you talk about artificial intelligence?

I like AI pioneer Marvin Minsky's definition of AI as the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by humans. However, some very smart human things can be done in dumb ways by machines. Humans have a very limited memory, and so for us, chess is a difficult pattern-recognition problem that requires intelligence. A computer like Deep Blue wins by brute force, searching quickly through the outcomes of millions of moves. It is like arm-wrestling with a mechanical digger. I would rework Minsky's definition as the science of making machines do things that lead us to believe they are intelligent.

Are machines capable of intelligence?

If we are talking intelligence in the animal sense, from the developments to date, I would have to say no. For me AI is a field of outstanding engineering achievements that helps us to model living systems but not replace them. It is the person who designs the algorithms and programs the machine who is intelligent, not the machine itself.

Are we close to building a machine that can meaningfully be described as sentient?

I'm an empirical kind of guy, and there is just no evidence of an artificial toehold in sentience. It is often forgotten that the idea of mind or brain as computational is merely an assumption, not a truth. When I point this out to "believers" in the computational theory of mind, some of their arguments are almost religious. They say, "What else could there be? Do you think mind is supernatural?" But accepting mind as a physical entity does not tell us what kind of physical entity it is. It could be a physical system that cannot be recreated by a computer.

The rest of the interview is at the link.

The danger many people see in the idea of machines having innate intelligence is that it blurs the distinction between human and machine. If humans are not essentially different from machines then humans become de-humanized. When humans lose their uniqueness and are considered to be "just animals" or "just machines" then there's very little reason not to manipulate them and exploit them just as we would animals or computers. Dehumanization always leads to tyranny.

Humans have dignity and worth because they're uniquely created in the image of God. They have intelligence and reason because they were endowed with these gifts by God. To the extent that a machine could be made to think it is only because it was endowed with this ability by an intelligent programmer. As Sharkey says, "It is the person who designs the algorithms and programs the machine who is intelligent, not the machine itself."

RLC

The Starry Heavens Above Me

There are some lovely astronomical photos and other shots of the night sky at this site. Here's one:

Looking at the pictures I'm reminded of the words of Immanuel Kant: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe the oftener and more earnestly I think of them - the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."

Indeed, its hard for me to understand how someone could contemplate either without at least wondering whether God exists.

RLC

Jason and the Socialists

Jason Mattera really is a piece of work. For those who aren't familiar with him, he's a young political conservative who masquerades as a left-winger at various progressive rallies and demonstrations. The results are often hilarious. Here he's "undercover" at a pro-health care reform rally:

For more of Jason's escapades use the search button and type in Jason Mattera in the search field.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Of Course They Work

Anyone who still believes that what the CIA euphemistically calls enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) don't work needs to read this article in the Washington Post.

The anti-EIT absolutists (those who believe that EITs are always wrong and never justified) have pretty much lost the moral argument with the American people. Most of those who think about it would affirm that if their child's life could be saved by applying physical or psychological pain to those who threaten her then by all means have at it. Having failed to convince the American people that they are morally perverse for placing the well-being of their children above the well-being of a murderous thug the absolutists fall back on the argument that EITs don't work anyway and therefore should never be employed.

This argument has always carried with it more than a whiff of implausibility (after all, how do we know they don't work unless we use them?) The WaPo article, however, strongly suggests that they do indeed work. It turns out that Sheik Kalid Mohammed, the chief planner of the 9/11 attacks, after having been subjected to milder forms of interrogation to no effect, was then allowed to experience the bracing effects of sleep deprivation and waterboarding after which he pretty much ratted out the entire al Qaeda network in the U.S. Here's one relevant section of the piece:

Mohammed described plans to strike targets in Saudi Arabia, East Asia and the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks, including using a network of Pakistanis "to target gas stations, railroad tracks, and the Brooklyn bridge in New York." Cross-referencing material from different detainees, and leveraging information from one to extract more detail from another, the CIA and FBI went on to round up operatives both in the United States and abroad.

"Detainees in mid-2003 helped us build a list of 70 individuals -- many of whom we had never heard of before -- that al-Qaeda deemed suitable for Western operations," according to the CIA summary.

Mohammed was an unparalleled source in deciphering al-Qaeda's strategic doctrine, key operatives and likely targets, the summary said, including describing in "considerable detail the traits and profiles" that al-Qaeda sought in Western operatives and how the terrorist organization might conduct surveillance in the United States.

All of this information and more saved countless lives, and it was only obtained because Mohammed's interrogators grew weary of politesse and decided to resort to measures calculated to more compellingly concentrate the minds of the terrorists. Of course, this won't matter to the absolutists who are apparently willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of innocents on the altar of their own narrow-minded, dogmatic concept of inviolable human rights.

RLC

Miscarriage of Justice

Why, opponents of capital punishment sometimes ask, can we not be satisfied with putting criminals in prison for life? Why must we execute them? One reason, perhaps, can be found in the case of Phillip Garrido, the man arrested for the kidnapping, imprisonment, and rape of 11 year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard 18 years ago.

It turns out that on the day of the abduction, Phillip Garrido was on parole. He had been convicted of federal and Nevada state charges in connection with a Nov. 22, 1976, incident when he was 25 and kidnapped a woman, drove her to a warehouse in Reno and sexually assaulted her. Garrido was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison and five years to life in Nevada prisons. But, after stints in federal prisons in Leavenworth, Kan., and Lompoc, as well as a Nevada state prison, he was released on lifetime parole in 1988.

Having served less than twelve years of a minimum 50 year sentence, Mr. Garrido was released to inflict more horror on a girl and her family whose lives have been ruined by this man and by a system which seems indifferent to the people who must live with such monsters among them.

Whoever was responsible for this man's release, a judge or parole board or whoever, should be held liable for his crimes. If you or I, through an exercise of poor judgment, were to be responsible for harm befalling another person we would be liable and would probably lose all we have in lawsuits brought against us. Just so it should be possible to bring suit against those whose poor judgment results in crimes against others. The best way to stop early release of criminals from prison is to hold those who make those judgments financially accountable for their decisions.

RLC

Subsidizing Abortion

We've seen that the Democrats' health care proposals, despite insistent denials, would indeed cover care for illegal aliens and would also have government bureaucrats making decisions about who gets what treatment, especially at the end of life.

Now it turns out that supporters of the Democrat plan are acknowledging that yet another serious concern about the plan is well-founded. The plan currently before Congress would, as opponents have alleged, pay for abortions.

Pro-lifer Jim Wallis, an Obama booster, claimed on CNN's Lou Dobbs show that the Congressional plan would indeed cover abortions. However, he goes on to say, incorrectly, that the President doesn't want his plan to do that. In fact, contrary to what Wallis believes, the President has made it clear that he definitely does want abortion to be covered:

One of the reasons so many people are so mistrustful of our political leadership, especially on the issues being advanced by this administration, is that it seems the claims made by supporters of the President are too frequently out of phase with the President's own words. Indeed, it's not uncommon for the President himself to contradict things he had said on previous occasions. There may be reasons for this, it may not be deliberate dishonesty, but if the President is going to regain the confidence of the people he needs to be consistent in what he says. Otherwise, confidence in his word will continue to fade among the American electorate.

RLC

Lycan on Materialism and Dualism

William Lycan is a materialist philosopher, i.e. he rejects the dualist view that there are two fundamental essences to reality - matter and mind. He believes that matter is all there is and that mind is just a word we use to describe the functioning of the brain.

Nevertheless, in an upcoming paper he acknowledges that, though it pains him to say it, materialism is little more than a prejudice. The arguments for materialism, he notes, are no better than the arguments for dualism:

I mean to have shown here that although Cartesian dualism faces some serious objections, that does not distinguish it from other philosophical theories, and the objections are not an order of magnitude worse than those confronting materialism in particular. There remain the implausibilities required by the Cartesian view; but bare claim of implausibility is not argument. Nor have we seen any good argument for materialism. The dialectical upshot is that, on points, and going just by actual arguments as opposed to appeals to decency and what good guys believe, materialism is not significantly better supported than dualism.

Yet, I am inclined to believe, the charge of implausibility is not irrational or arational either, and I would not want this paper to turn anyone dualist. Have a nice day.

In the paper Lycan observes that the strongest argument against dualism is the incomprehensibility of two fundamentally disparate substances, mind and matter, interacting in the brain to produce mental phenomena. It's hard to imagine how an immaterial substance like mind could act causally on matter. Lycan doesn't think that this is much of an objection because we scarcely understand causality in the first place.

Another problem that the materialist has if he's going to cite "interactionism" as an objection to dualism is that materialists have long believed themselves that disparate entities could interact even though their interaction was incomprehensible. How, for example, does space generate quantum particles? Indeed, how does matter bend space? Whatever one's conception of space it's very difficult to conceive how such things happen. If a materialist, nevertheless, believes they do, as everyone since Einstein does, then it seems a case of special pleading to exclude mind/brain interaction on the grounds that we have no theory to explain how it could occur.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

Teen Employment at Record Low

In a development which was thoroughly predictable by anyone who has thought about it fewer youth were employed in July than in any July since 1948:

The Labor Department said 4.4 million youths were unemployed in July 2009, or about 1 million more than in July 2008, putting the youth jobless rate at 18.5 percent, about double the overall national percentage. Fewer young people were even trying to be part of the labor force this year than in recent years, perhaps choosing summer school, odd jobs around the house or idleness instead.

Two factors are surely responsible for this: The first is the tight economy and the second is the recent increase in the minimum wage. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air focuses on the latter:

Since 2007, Democrats have led the charge to increase the minimum wage in the US, claiming that the poor hadn't gotten a fair shake from employers. Nancy Pelosi and the late Ted Kennedy pushed hardest for mandating increases in wages despite warnings that the net effect would be to lower employment for teens and entry-level workers while creating inflationary pressures on prices, negating the gains through loss of buying power. For the second year in a row, those predictions have come true.

It is a simple matter of common sense that if employers are required to pay their workers more money they'll try to get by with fewer workers, especially in a recession. Those lucky enough to find a job will perhaps benefit from the higher wage but millions of others will get left out. Moreover, the higher wage rate usually results in higher prices which reduces everyone's real income.

Raising the minimum wage is a lousy idea, as it increases both unemployment and inflation, but Democrats push it because it makes them popular with people who don't really think about, or care about, the hidden consequences of such measures.

RLC

Whitaker Chambers, We Need You

The Obama State Department is moving toward cutting off all aid to the country of Honduras because, they say, the Honduran military has executed a coup and deposed the elected president. This is nonsense. The Supreme Court of Honduras ruled that Manuel Zelaya should be removed from office, the legislature concurred and the military was employed to carry out the will of these two civilian branches of the Honduran government.

Zelaya had violated the constitution by calling for a referendum on whether he should be allowed to remain president when his term expired. The law calls for the immediate removal from office of a president who did what Zelaya had done and the Supreme Court ruled that the law should be carried out.

Zelaya was an anti-American leftist disciple of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro and as such the American reaction to his ouster is very unsettling. Rather than looking for reasons to punish the Honduran government and the poverty-stricken Honduran people by cutting off aid, one would think that the State Department would be bending over backwards to find reasons to affirm what Honduras did.

Exit questions: Would the Obama administration cut off aid to a Latin American country which deposed a right-wing president who was seeking to secure himself in office indefinitely and aggrandize his power? Would the State Department be demanding that the right-winger be returned to office? Take as much time as you like to formulate your answers.

RLC

Thought for a Sunday

This article at www.mises.org is well worth reading.

Every variety of tyranny rests upon the belief that some persons have a right - or even a duty - to impose their wills upon other people. Tyranny may be fastened upon others by the mere whim of one man, such as a king or dictator under various names. Or tyranny may be imposed upon a minority "for their own good" by a democratically elected majority. But in any case, tyranny is always a denial - or a misunderstanding - of the mandates of an authority or law higher than man himself.

Liberty rests upon the belief that all proper authority for man's relationships with his fellow men comes from a source higher than man - from the Creator. Liberty decrees that all men - subject and ruler alike - are bound by this higher authority which is above and beyond man-made law; that each person has a relation to his Maker with which no other person, not even the ruler, has any right to interfere. In order to make these conceptions effective for liberty, they must be deeply ingrained in the fundamental values of a people. That is to say, they must be part of the popular religion. There was one people of antiquity for whom this was true, the people who gave us our Old Testament. It was among the ancient Israelites that the conviction took hold and emerged into practice that there was a God of righteousness whose judgments applied even to rulers.

...

An experiment based on those principles was launched on these shores less than two centuries ago. It was the result of a conscious effort to forge an instrumentality of government in conformity with the higher law, based on the widely held conviction that God is the author of liberty.

Our political liberties were not born in a vacuum, but among a people who had a sense of their unique destiny under God. Our religious foundation has been alluded to in a Supreme Court decision (1892, 143 U.S. 457):

This is a religious people. This is historically true. From the discovery of this continent to the present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation.

Surely there was a unity of the people in their religious beliefs at the time or some other basis would have been used as the foundation for Liberty in this country. Those that espouse Diversity as being good and necessary for the health of our country are dangerous indeed. They mistakenly use the "melting pot" concept of the early immigrations to this country by Europeans to demonstrate the supposed positive effects of Diversity. The fact of the matter is these diverse groups assimilated into the culture of the U.S. within a generation. Their children were strongly encouraged by their parents to speak English to facilitate their acculturation. Their children were not hyphenated Americans (German-American, Italian-American, etc.), they were "Americans" and proud of it. Diversity is divisiveness - and it's a classic strategy employed by the Liberals to fragment our society and generate discord. Run when you hear the Liberals spewing their toxic venom of "diversity" for the Liberal is truly the axe at the Roots of our Liberty today.

Dean Tells the Truth

DNC chairman Howard Dean gives an honest answer to a question at a town hall meeting and it doesn't make his fellow Democrats look good. In fact, it amounts to calling them cowards:

The gentleman who raised the original question is absolutely correct. Calling any legislation that ignores malpractice a "comprehensive reform" is like calling prisons institutions for behavioral reform.

The Democrats don't want to offend a major contributor - The Trial Lawyers Association - so instead they try to reduce the cost of health care by demonizing insurance companies and instituting policies that are almost guaranteed to raise costs, ration care, and result in fewer people wanting to go into the medical profession. And then they want us to believe that they're doing this to benefit the American people. No wonder people are angry.

RLC

<i>1984</i> in 2009

Victor Davis Hanson looks at the pages of George Orwell's 1984 and sees a lot that reminds him of 2009. For instance, in 1984:

Perceived enemies are everywhere - supposedly plotting to undo the benevolent egalitarianism of Big Brother. Citizens assemble each morning to scream hatred for two minutes at pictures of the supposed public traitor Emmanuel Goldstein. The "Ministry of Truth" swears that the former official Goldstein is responsible for everything that goes wrong in Oceania.

Former president George W. Bush - our new Emmanuel Goldstein - remains a daily target of criticism. Diplomats continue to discuss the need to hit a "reset" button that will erase the past. Last week, the president said those in the past administration caused our present problems - and so should keep quiet and get out of his way. Bush is somehow culpable for the newly projected $2 trillion annual deficits. Bush caused the new unemployment levels to soar to nearly 10 percent. Bush's war on terrorism failed. Bush is responsible for the most recent trouble abroad with Iran, the Middle East, North Korea, and Russia.

Doublethink is common. Presidential sermons on fiscal responsibility tip us off that deficits will soar. Borrowing an additional trillion dollars to manage health care is sold as a cost-saving measure. Racial transcendence translates into more racial-identity politics, reflected both in rhetoric and in presidential appointments.

Despite the absence of another 9/11-like attack, we are still told by the new terrorism czar, John Brennan, that the old war was largely a Bush failure. Administration officials keep inventing euphemisms. Some have dubbed the war on terror "an overseas contingency operation." [And acts of terrorism are labelled "man-caused disasters"].

We were once told that military tribunals, renditions, the Patriot Act, and Predator drone attacks in Pakistan were George Bush's assault on the Constitution rather than necessary tools to fight radical Islamic terrorists.

Not now. These policies are no longer criticized - even though they still operate more or less as they did under Bush. Guantanamo is still open, but no longer considered a gulag. The once-terrible war in Iraq disappeared off the front pages around late January of this year.

If you've read Orwell's 1984 you'll enjoy Hanson's application of its themes to what we see happening in our current politics.

Thanks to Sarah for passing along the link.

RLC

Do Illegals Qualify?

President Obama has been very much put out by what he calls the distortions and myths perpetrated and perpetuated by critics of his health care reform proposals (or at least those of the House Democrats). One such set of "misrepresentations" devolves around whether illegal immigrants would be eligible for tax-payer funded health care. Defenders of the Democrats' plan insist that of course, they wouldn't, but as this piece by Mark Krikorian at NRO explains, the correct answer is that, indeed, they would. The following is taken from a press release by Rep. Lamar Smith whom Krikorian cites:

HR 3200 contains no provisions preventing illegal immigrants from participating in the Health Insurance Exchange that is to be created, including the government-run "public plan" that will be available through the federally-run and federally-subsidized Exchange.

According to CRS [Congressional Research Service]: "Under H.R. 3200, a 'Health Insurance Exchange' would begin operation in 2013 and would offer private plans alongside a public option...H.R. 3200 does not contain any restrictions on noncitzens-whether legally or illegally present, or in the United States temporarily or permanently-participating in the Exchange."

Democrats point to language in the House bill that says illegal immigrants cannot get benefits. While that may be technically accurate, it is far from the truth.

The fact is that the statement is meaningless because the bill contains no verification mechanism to ensure that illegal immigrants do not receive benefits. Democrats defeated amendments in two congressional committees to close this loophole, including amendments that would use the very same verification mechanism that already exists in statute for other federal programs. Why not include the same verification mechanisms in this bill as already exist for other federal benefits programs? Without the requirement that there be a verification mechanism, or a specific verification mechanism provided in statute, the Commissioner could determine that the eligibility requirements could be met either without verification or with as little as a signed attestation.

Moreover, as Smith's release goes on to explain, if one member of a family is eligible for benefits the entire family is eligible. There are millions of illegals in this country whose children or spouses are citizens and who would thus be eligible for tax-payer subsidized health care even though they are here illegally.

The piece is pretty informative. Check it out.

RLC

Evil and Open Theism

Open Theism (OT) is the view that God does not know in advance what people will freely choose to do in the future. One of the reasons some find OT attractive is that it offers a potential solution to the problem of why, if God knew the evil that this world would contain, He didn't create some other world instead that had less evil. That is, there must be an indefinite number of possible worlds God could have created, some of which would contain less evil than this one. If God knows everything that will transpire in any world He creates and if He is perfectly good then He would be expected to create the least evil world it would be possible for Him to have created, so either this world is the least evil world possible, which seems hard to believe, or God is not perfectly good, or God does not know in advance the free choices that people will make.

OT has been advanced by some philosophers as the least objectionable way out of the problem (See here for more discussion on Open Theism).

Alexander Pruss, however, doesn't buy it and offers an objection to OT at Prosblogion. Here's his criticism:

It seems to me that some folks--perhaps not philosophers--think that Open Theism (OT) somehow significantly helps with the Problem of Evil. But I do not think it does. The natural reason to think OT helps is to say that if an omnipotent God foreknows that George will freely do some evil E, then God can prevent George from doing E, and OT means that God can't foreknow it, so we can't blame God for failing to prevent E. But this is confused. For it would be impossible for God to both foreknow--or even forebelieve--E and prevent E. Foreknowledge does let God put plans for an event into effect before the event happens, but for actual prevention of foreknown evils, what would be needed is Middle Knowledge, not foreknowledge.

Pruss is arguing, I think, that God knows the choices we will make but cannot prevent them because if He does then God wouldn't know that we would make that choice because, in fact, we wouldn't make it. I don't think Pruss is right about this, though. Under most views of omniscience God knows all of the choices which would be made in every possible world, but He, presumably, creates only one. Thus, by creating only one, He prevents a myriad of choices from being made. So, under the traditional view, God both foreknows the choices made in possible worlds He doesn't create and prevents those choices by not creating those worlds.

In other words, God could have foreknowledge of the evil that would exist in this world and prevent it by not creating this world. So why did He create this world when He could have created another in which people were free to choose but more often, or even always, chose to do right? The open theist argues that in fact, the traditional view of omniscience is wrong. God doesn't know what choices free beings would make in whatever world God placed them in, and therefore, He didn't know that man would sin in this world. He knew it was possible, He knew what His response would be if man did sin, but He didn't, the open theist claims, know that it would actually come to pass that man would fall.

God created, in this view, the best possible world He could create for Man and placed Man in it with the freedom to requite God's love or reject it. When Adam underwent the temptation in the Garden all of heaven held its breath because the outcome was uncertain and when Adam succumbed all of heaven and earth was devastated by his failure. In this view, the world's evil is entirely Man's responsibility. God could have prevented it only by either not creating a world or not creating mankind with libertarian freedom. Both alternatives would have defeated the whole purpose of creating Man in the first place which was to have beings with which He could live in a significant love relationship.

At any rate, OT is not without its problems, but I don't think Pruss's concern is one of them.

RLC

Government-Run Maternity Care

If you're a young woman planning on having a family in the next ten years and you're not sure what to make of the debate swirling around nationalized health care you may find this article from the British Daily Mail Online helpful:

Thousands of women are having to give birth outside maternity wards because of a lack of midwives and hospital beds.

The lives of mothers and babies are being put at risk as births in locations ranging from lifts to toilets - even a caravan - went up 15 per cent last year to almost 4,000.

Health chiefs admit a lack of maternity beds is partly to blame for the crisis, with hundreds of women in labour being turned away from hospitals because they are full.

It shows the incredible waste that has taken place that mothers are getting this sort of sub-standard treatment despite Gordon Brown's tripling of spending on the NHS. Labour have let down mothers by cutting the number of maternity beds and by shutting down maternity units.

The NHS employs the equivalent of around 25,000 full-time midwives in England, but the Government has promised to recruit 3,400 more. However, the Royal College of Midwives estimates at least 5,000 more are needed to provide the quality of service pledged in the Government's blueprint for maternity services, Maternity Matters.

At the same time almost half of all midwives are set to retire in the next decade.

There are more details at the link. When government controls the health care system women give birth on toilets. What a metaphor.

RLC

Somali Pirates

We haven't heard as much about piracy off the coast of Somalia lately. Part of that may be due to the fact that three pirates were killed by U.S. Navy SEALS when they took an American ship captain hostage, and some of it is due to measures that merchant crews are taking to thwart piracy. Strategy Page fills us in:

Off Somalia, 136 ships have been attacked so far this year, and 28 (21 percent) have been taken. Last year, the pirate success rate was 40 percent. Moreover, 80 percent of the attacks defeated do not involve the foreign warships now patrolling the coast. The merchant sailors, and the ship owners, have adopted defensive measures that have become remarkably successful in defeating pirate attacks. For the captain himself, the best defense is knowing what speeds and maneuvers his ship can use to keep the pirates away. Larger ships can create dangerous wakes for the pursuing speedboats, by zig zagging. Captains also have to learn how fast their ship can accelerate to escape oncoming speed boats. Normally, captains are more skilled at moving their ships at slower speeds. Putting the pedal to the metal and hot roding around the high seas is not normally part of their skill set. But that's how you avoid getting hijacked by pirates. Captains are learning, and so are their crews.

Ship captains are organizing and drilling their crews on things that can be done to keep the pirates from getting aboard. This ranges from stringing barbed wire around likely boarding points, to practicing the use of fire hoses and other tools (like long poles) to keep the ladders or grappling hooks from enabling the pirates to get aboard. These drills build confidence in the ability of the crew to defend their ship.

The sailors also now keep track of where the nearest warships are, and prepare a "safe room" (an area of the ship the crew can barricade themselves in, until help arrives.) This includes providing emergency communications in the safe room. All this takes advantage of the fact that the pirates cannot take control of the ship unless they have the crew. Usually this comes down to barricading the crew in the engine compartment. If the crew prepares for that eventuality (having a radio available to contact the warships, along with water, food and medical supplies there), just getting everyone into the engine room when it appears that the pirates are going to get on board, means that the pirates will be caught between the crew they cannot reach, and the approaching warship that can certainly reach the pirates.

This is all good as far as it goes, but it seems to me that it would be a lot easier to just let it be known that there are teams of armed guards on board these ships. Whether there are or not, it would certainly deter the dilletantes among the brigands and at least give pause to the more resolute careerists.

RLC

Lopsided Playing Field

Over at National Review Online John Pitney explains that contrary to what some might think, the President and his party enjoy every advantage a political party could hope for, yet they nevertheless may fail utterly to impose their agenda and to lead the country into the land of socialist milk and honey to which the leadership wants to take it.

The list of advantages is probably unprecedented in our political history. Here's Pitney:

Start with Congress. A few years back, House Democrats complained that the Republican majority was shutting them out of the legislative process. Now Speaker Pelosi and company are pulling tricks that Tom DeLay never dreamed of. A Brookings study concludes: "The number and percentage of restrictive rules used by Democratic leaders to control debate and amending activity on the House floor exceeded the degree of control and departure from regular order exercised by their Republican predecessors." The ruling party is even unfairly censoring Republicans' official mailings to constituents.

Senate Democrats have 60 votes, enough to close debate if they all hang together. Such strength is extraordinary. Democrats last crossed that line in the 95th Congress (1977-1979), and Republicans have not done so in more than a hundred years. Democrats claim that their majority is less decisive than it seems because they are more fractious than Republicans. But they aren't. In roll call votes during 2008, Senate Democrats scored higher in party unity (87 percent) than Republicans (83 percent).

Democrats do not exactly face a hostile media environment, either. The evening news broadcasts of the Obama-friendly Big Three networks have dropped in the ratings, but they still draw far more viewers than Fox News. That's why the Gibson and Couric interviews could do so much damage to Sarah Palin.

What of all-powerful talk radio? Rush Limbaugh reaches up to 25 million Americans, many more than other syndicated hosts. That's a big number, but it means that at least 80 percent of voters are not listeners. More significant, polls show that most Americans have a low opinion of El Rushbo. So the "Limbaugh Did It" theory works only if he can mesmerize millions who dislike him and/or don't even listen to him.

Liberals and Democrats also dominate the hot medium of our time, the Internet. During the 2008 campaign, the Obama campaign mastered social networking and other online technologies. By far the most popular political blog is The Huffington Post. Along with Talking Points Memo and others, HuffPo conducts a great deal of investigative journalism that advances liberal causes. As the Politico reported last year, the Right lags badly in this regard.

What about money? According to stereotype, the well-heeled GOP can bury the Democrats in campaign cash. That image is obsolete: Any Republican financial advantage is long gone. In 2008, Barack Obama smashed all fundraising records and got most of his money from large donors.

He raised twice as much as McCain from physicians and other health professionals, and three times as much from the health-service and drug industries. And listening to his attacks on the insurance industry, you would never guess that it supplied him with almost as much money ($2.3 million) as it did McCain ($2.4 million). No wonder Obama could co-opt business opposition to the health plan and strike a deal with Big Pharma: His corporate ties were a pre-existing condition.

The Democrats continue to hold the money edge. So far in the 2010 election cycle, Democratic national committees have raised $12 million more than their Republican counterparts.

And as in the past, liberals have the upper hand at foundations and universities. Research from these institutions has been especially important during the health-care debate. A Yale professor, for instance, devised the "public option."

So why is it proving so hard to get any more of their legislation passed? It's a testament to two things: the egregiousness of the legislation and the political incompetence of the leadership. Even so, they might still prevail by the sheer force of all that they have going for them.

RLC

Three Tips

Casey Luskin at the Discovery Institute offers students going back to school this fall three good suggestions if they're expecting to study evolutionary theory in their classes, but his advice is good regardless of the courses students might be taking.

Here are his tips:

• Never opt out of learning evolution. In fact, learn about evolution every chance you get.
• Think for yourself, think critically, and question assumptions.
• Proactively learn about credible scientific viewpoints that dissent from Darwinism on your own time, even if your classes censor those non-evolutionary viewpoints.

The real value of Luskin's advice is in his explanations of these three recommendations. Check them out at the link.

RLC

He Won't Do It

William McGurn writes in the Wall Street Journal that President Obama is on the brink of failure but that he can save his presidency by taking a lesson from Bill Clinton:

Back in 1994, Mr. Clinton faced pretty much the same problem. Though he too had won the White House promising to be a new kind of Democrat, his first two years had a distinctly liberal tenor: battling over gays in the military, promoting a new energy tax, turning a promised middle-class tax cut into a huge tax hike, and trying to push through universal health care. Though he continues to deny GOP contributions to his success, after his 1994 health-care defeat, Mr. Clinton did what all smart pols do: He appropriated the most appealing parts of his opponents' agenda.

The result was a new Bill Clinton, embracing everything from deregulation and welfare reform to the Defense of Marriage Act. In his 1996 State of the Union, he even struck a Reaganite chord by announcing that "the era of Big Government is over." From this newly held center, Mr. Clinton advanced his presidency and pushed, both successfully and unfairly, to demonize Mr. Gingrich. Mostly he got away with it.

In his book "The Pact," historian Steven M. Gillon puts it this way: "Ironically, Gingrich's revolution may have saved the Clinton presidency by freeing him from the control of his party's more liberal base in Congress, giving him the opportunity to return to the moderate message that helped him win election in the first place.

McGurn says that If Obama loses on health care he would be wise to follow Clinton's example and move to the right. The problem with this is that it assumes that Obama has no ideological principles. It assumes that he's just a politician who doesn't care about policy except insofar as it keeps him in office. I think this misreads the man. President Clinton was by nature a moderate. It was not difficult for him to wrest himself free of the leftists in his party and seek accomodation and compromise with the more conservative Newt Gingrich. Obama, however, is a left-wing ideologue. The Progressive agenda is his life-blood. It's the air he breaths. He can no more move to the right than Rush Limbaugh can move to the left.

If Obama doesn't get health care reform he will keep fighting for the liberal policies he believes in. He'll fight for big government, for cap and trade, for the fairness doctrine, for a private security force, for union card check, as long as he's president. He has surrounded himself with people who are as ideologically committed as he is. He can no more abandon all that than a fish could abandon water.

If President Obama does not get health care reform he will probably be severely weakened and unlikely to get much else. If so, he will probably be a one-term president, but he will never be a moderate.

RLC

Ted Kennedy (1932-2009)

We woke this morning to the news that Senator Ted Kennedy has succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 77. Much will be said about his political legacy, which will be substantial, having served in the U.S. Senate for 47 years, but I'm struck by a more prosaic thought. Senator Kennedy was one of four Kennedy brothers - all of whom seemed destined for political greatness - and all of whom except Ted died long before their time. In fact, their deaths spanned my lifetime. The oldest, Joe, was killed in WWII. John and Robert were both assassinated in the 1960s (The only time I ever saw Ted in person was when the train bearing JFK's body passed my house and Ted was standing on the back of the train as it passed).

Senator Kennedy's life was filled with scandal and tragedy, but he managed despite it all to become one of the most influential voices ever to serve in American politics. As a young man he seemed the least promising of the Kennedy brothers, but he managed to overcome personal shortcomings and inadequacies to become one of the most influential politicians of the last forty years.

He will be mourned by friends on both sides of the political aisle.

RLC

Apocalypto

Robert Cheeks at PostModern Conservative places Mel Gibson's Apocalypto on his list of ten best movies. I agree that it's quite worth seeing. It's one of the best "good versus evil" movies I've come across, and it does an excellent job, perhaps unintentionally, of exploding the Rousseuian myth of the goodness of man in the state of nature. The heart of man is desperately wicked, Jeremiah says, and Gibson certainly does a masterful job of reinforcing the prophet's sentiment.

Cheeks has some interesting things to say about the film in his review at the link.

RLC

Promises, Promises

President Obama, after having promised last February that he would cut the nation's deficit in half by the end of his first term - much to the astonishment of anyone who was paying attention - now informs us, on his way to Martha's Vineyard, that he'll actually be raising it another two trillion dollars. Hey, what are promises for if not to bamboozle the gullible?

The President is promising prosperity down the road while all many people can see out ahead is a looming economic cliff. But, in fairness to Mr. Obama, he does speak well, and his heart may be in the right place, and he's very smart, so we're told.

Perhaps we can cling to those comforts as we hurtle over the precipice.

HT: Moderate Voice

RLC

Whither Lutherans?

Rod Dreher sees three possibilities for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America now that they have decided to permit gays to serve as pastors in ELCA churches:

1. A significant number of conservatives will depart, accelerating the steady membership decline of the mainline Protestant denomination -- which, according to its own record-keeping, has lost 10 percent of its membership since 1987. This is a dying church, not a growing church, and this departure from Scripture and tradition will only make things worse.

2. Many conservatives may depart, making the short term situation worse, but the ELCA is on the right side of history. Younger people are dramatically more accepting than their elders of same-sex marriage. As these people age, start families, and go looking for a church, they're going to want to affiliate with a church that accepts gays fully. There will the ELCA be. Long-term, these Lutherans will benefit from their decision.

3. Many conservatives will depart, further weakening the declining denomination. But those who remain and who anticipate a rebound because of demographic eventualities will be disappointed, but not because conservatives will post absolute gains in membership. Rather, overall church attendance will continue to decline slowly as more Americans identify as secular. America will track the European model somewhat: conservative churches/denominations will prosper relative to liberal ones, because they offer a clear alternative to mainstream culture. In other words, the Christians who stay active in churches will tend to be those who are more highly motivated to affiliate with churches that offer a clear alternative -- but overall, secularization will continue steadily, with fewer Americans interested in church at all, and the gay-clergy decision won't have proved to have mattered much in the overall scheme of things.

Unfortunately, I agree with Dreher that #3 is the most likely scenario. It's not what I'd like to see happen, but it's what I think will happen. Religious faith, at least the Christian sort, is simply becoming less and less relevant to an affluent, pleasure-oreiented society that has learned to live by its feelings, gratify its desires, and reject anything that would impose restraints on its appetites and inclinations.

RLC

Ugly in its Own Way

I realize that it's fashionable among properly educated people to insist that no culture or society is any better than any other, but, in my opinion, that's a lot like professing admiration for the naked emperor's fine haberdashery. In order to maintain the charade one has to ignore an awful lot of evidence that's right before our eyes.

Imagine, for example, that an American is convicted of murdering several hundred women and children in a foreign country as was, say, Lt. William Calley who led a murderous rampage on the village of My Lai in Vietnam in 1968 during which 500 women, children and old people were brutally gunned down. Imagine, too, that after serving a couple of years of his sentence the murderer was released and, upon returning home, was greeted by throngs of thousands of cheering admirers showering him with confetti and hailing him as a hero.

Having trouble picturing that? If so, you're tacitly acknowledging that cultures are not all "beautiful in their own way." Nor do all cultures deserve to be celebrated. A culture which would treat William Calley as a hero would be a very sick culture. Certainly ours wouldn't and didn't. People who did celebrate someone like that would justly be considered pariahs among civilized people everywhere. Yet something almost analogous to our scenario happened Friday in Libya when Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, who was convicted of murdering the 270 passengers on Pan Am 103 that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, returned home:

Libya, and any other Arab nation which glorifies such men as Al Megrahi, should be regarded as a moral cesspool fit only for the company of barbarians and savages. No nation or culture in which such men are lionized can be said to be anything other than degenerate and contemptible.

RLC

Time to Correct the Textbooks

Anyone who has taken 10th grade biology remembers that one of the most persuasive arguments for the theory of descent by modification is based on the existence of putative vestigial structures in organisms, and one of the most popular examples of an evolutionary vestige is the human appendix. Vestigial structures are the remnants of structures that at one time had some function but because of changing needs, no longer do. Other examples are arm hair, the coccyx, wisdom teeth, hip bones in whales, junk DNA, and so on. Charles Darwin himself cited the appendix as evidence that the human species changes and evolves because it was thought that the appendix was a structure which no longer served any purpose.

Well, whatever the status and usefulness of other vestigial structures to evolutionary theory, the human appendix is now being quietly retired.

Science Daily reports:

The lowly appendix, long-regarded as a useless evolutionary artifact, won newfound respect two years ago when researchers at Duke University Medical Center proposed that it actually serves a critical function. The appendix, they said, is a safe haven where good bacteria could hang out until they were needed to repopulate the gut after a nasty case of diarrhea, for example.

Now, some of those same researchers are back, reporting on the first-ever study of the appendix through the ages. Writing in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Duke scientists and collaborators from the University of Arizona and Arizona State University conclude that Charles Darwin was wrong: The appendix is a whole lot more than an evolutionary remnant. Not only does it appear in nature much more frequently than previously acknowledged, but it has been around much longer than anyone had suspected.

"Maybe it's time to correct the textbooks," says William Parker, Ph.D., assistant professor of surgical sciences at Duke and the senior author of the study. "Many biology texts today still refer to the appendix as a 'vestigial organ.'"

Jonathan Wells argued in his book Icons of Evolution that textbooks are filled with certain evidences of evolution which enjoy the status of classic proofs in the world of evolutionary biology but which are, in fact, based on false, and even falsified, data. The Piltdown man was an early example which comes to mind, as does the peppered moth, and Ernst Haeckel's fraudulent drawings of embryos that seemed to support the notion that embryonic development recapitulated evolutionary history. Junk DNA is no longer on the list because functions performed by this material are being discovered with increasing frequency.

Despite the fact that so many of these icons have been discredited some textbooks still present them to students as solid evidence for Darwinian evolution. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes before the appendix joins the expanding list of evolutionary vestiges that aren't really vestigial at all.

RLC

Charming Liar?

As you watch and listen to the embed keep in mind that it was taken from Air America, the leftmost radio network in the nation. The male voice you hear is that of Greg Palast a journalist so far to port that he's in danger of falling off the ship. The left is understandably upset that the man in whom they invested so much of their emotional and economic resources has broken several campaign promises in order to do a deal with "big pharma" that guaranteed they wouldn't have to lower the price of their drugs. This deal came after the President had promised on several occasions in the campaign that he would not do precisely what he has done.

Listen to the exchange between the host and Palast and note the promises Mr. Obama makes in the video clips:

The left is a long way from giving up on Mr. Obama - he is, after all, one of them - but the wind in their sails has faded to a zephyr. If he doesn't deliver on the public option in the health care reform bill the perception among the lefties will be that he's a sell-out, and internecine warfare will break out in the Democratic party.

HT: Hot Air.

RLC

ELCA Crosses the Rubicon

Delegates of the Evangelical Church in America (ELCA), meeting in convention in Minneapolis, voted Friday to permit homosexuals to serve as leaders, including pastors, in the church. The ELCA has for many years been moving ineluctably toward this position and it was just a matter of time before they could muster the votes to get it passed.

The resolution carried 559 to 451 and states that people in "publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships" will be allowed to serve as rostered leaders of the church, i.e. they'll be allowed to serve in pastoral ministry.

The fear among many Lutherans who believe that legitimizing gay relationships is a repudiation of the scriptural teaching on homosexuality is that this step will trigger a mass exodus from the ELCA. It remains to be seen whether it will in fact have that result, but it seems certain that the denomination will be forever changed by this vote.

RLC

Political Cynicism

The Wall Street Journal Online has a piece that illustrates the cynicism with which democracy is viewed by some of our public servants in Congress:

Senator Ted Kennedy, who is gravely ill with brain cancer, has sent a letter to Massachusetts lawmakers requesting a change in the state law that determines how his Senate seat would be filled if it became vacant before his eighth full term ends in 2012. Current law mandates that a special election be held at least 145 days after the seat becomes available. Mr. Kennedy is concerned that such a delay could leave his fellow Democrats in the Senate one vote short of a filibuster-proof majority for months while a special election takes place.

"I therefore am writing to urge you to work together to amend the law through the normal legislative process to provide for a temporary gubernatorial appointment until the special election occurs," writes the Senator.

What Mr. Kennedy doesn't volunteer is that he orchestrated the 2004 succession law revision that now requires a special election, and for similarly partisan reasons. John Kerry, the other Senator from the state, was running for President in 2004, and Mr. Kennedy wanted the law changed so the Republican Governor at the time, Mitt Romney, could not name Mr. Kerry's replacement. "Prodded by a personal appeal from Senator Edward M. Kennedy," reported the Boston Globe in 2004, "Democratic legislative leaders have agreed to take up a stalled bill creating a special election process to replace U.S. Senator John F. Kerry if he wins the presidency." Now that the state has a Democratic Governor, Mr. Kennedy wants to revert to gubernatorial appointments.

When it looked as if a Republican governor would get to appoint a senator Mr. Kennedy wanted the law changed to prevent that. When it looks like a Democrat governor will get to appoint a senator Mr. Kennedy wants the law changed to allow that. It's all about power and whatever works to get it and keep it. No wonder the folks at town halls are showing such contempt for their elected representatives.

RLC

Taking Fire from the Left

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes a column to express his dismay and that of his fellow leftists' with President Obama. As far as he and his progressive amigos are concerned President Obama is betraying them, not because his policies are too socialist, but because they're not socialist enough. This is fascinating. The most left-wing president in history is insufficiently left to suit progressives like Krugman:

According to news reports, the Obama administration - which seemed, over the weekend, to be backing away from the "public option" for health insurance - is shocked and surprised at the furious reaction from progressives.

Well, I'm shocked and surprised at their shock and surprise.

A backlash in the progressive base - which pushed President Obama over the top in the Democratic primary and played a major role in his general election victory - has been building for months. The fight over the public option involves real policy substance, but it's also a proxy for broader questions about the president's priorities and overall approach.

That the President is not as radical as his supporters would have him be is modestly good news, I suppose, if you're a conservative, but it raises an interesting question: If conservatives who criticize Mr. Obama and his proposals are motivated by racism, as many liberals have claimed, either explicitly or implicitly, are Krugman et al also racists? Just wondering.

RLC

The Euthyphro Dilemma

Is kindness right because God commands it or does God command it because it's right? Thus runs the ancient dilemma posed by Socrates to Euthyphro some 300 years B.C. Philosophers have come down on both sides of the question with most atheistic philosophers arguing that if God commands it because it's right then we don't need God's command and thus we don't need God. Theistic philosophers argue that an act is right not because it's commanded by just any deity but because it's commanded by an omniscient, morally perfect Deity.

I think the theist has the better reply. If the moral authority is ab defino all-knowing and perfectly good then anything It commands would be necessarily good and It wouldn't command anything that wasn't good.

God commands certain behavior for the same reason that a car manufacturer puts a maintenance manual in the new car. Just as failure to operate the car properly ruins the car, certain behaviors - like cruelty - are harmful to human beings and certain other behaviors - like kindness - enhance human existence.

God commands us to enhance human existence because he loves us. To mistreat others is wrong not because it's wrong in itself, but because God obligates us to refrain from hurting those He loves. It's wrong, and this is crucial, only because it violates the will of God. If there is no God, as the atheist maintains, then whether the atheist decides to be cruel or kind is of no moral moment. There's nothing which obligates us not to hurt others except our own subjective preferences.

Just as the sun generates light and heat which would not exist if the sun ceased to exist, so, too, goodness is ontologically dependent upon God. It's an attribute of His essence. If God did not exist neither would goodness and neither would any obligation to perform one act rather than another. We are obligated to do justice and kindness only because God demands it of humans. Take away God and human beings would be animals just like sharks and wolves for whom moral categories and moral obligation simply don't exist.

So, its not that atheists can't be kind. They certainly can. It's that, on atheism, kindness is neither right nor wrong. It's no different, morally speaking, than cruelty. It's simply a personal preference like one's preference for Pepsi rather than Coke. In a Godless world morality is just a matter of taste.

RLC

Shameful Racial Legacy

Damon Root at discusses the attempt by Chip Berlet to link the opposition to Obamacare to white, right-wing racism:

Chip Berlet, a senior researcher at the liberal think tank Political Research Associates, went even further than that, telling New America Media: "For over 100 years-more like 150, you've had these movements, and they came out of the Civil War. It is a backlash against social liberalism and it's rooted in libertarian support for unregulated capitalism and white people holding onto power, and, if they see themselves losing it, trying to get it back."

Root is having none of it, however. If Berlet wants to go back 100 years to examine the history of racism in this country what he'll find is that it was largely a phenomenon of the left. Root provides chapter and verse:

Perhaps Berlet should consider the career of South Carolina's Benjamin "Pitchfork" Tillman (1847-1914), a leading progressive who railed against the sins of "unregulated capitalism" while preaching the salvation of white supremacy. An ally of the agrarian populist William Jennings Bryan, Tillman supported antitrust laws, railroad regulations, the free coinage of silver, and a host of other progressive panaceas. He first entered politics as a member of the Red Shirts, a Klan-like terror group that "came out of the Civil War" to menace African Americans during the early years of Reconstruction. When President Theodore Roosevelt entertained the black leader Booker T. Washington at the White House in 1901, Tillman served as a de facto spokesman for the Southern opposition, declaring: "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again." It's hard to imagine a nastier threat of political violence than that-and Tillman is obviously nobody's idea of a libertarian.

In fact, as the historian David Southern has documented, the worst evils of the South's Jim Crow regime, including segregation, disfranchisement, mob violence, and lynching, all "went hand-in-hand with the most advanced forms of southern progressivism."

In a separate post, Root's review of Southern's book titled The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900-1917 provides excellent insight into the virulence of white racism during the Progressive era. Writing of Southern's book Root asks:

How did reformers infused with lofty ideals embrace such abominable bigotry? [Southern's] answer begins with the race-based pseudoscience that dominated educated opinion at the turn of the 20th century. "At college," Southern notes, "budding progressives not only read expos�s of capitalistic barons and attacks on laissez-faire economics by muckraking journalists, they also read racist tracts that drew on the latest anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology, eugenics, and medical science."

Popular titles included Charles Carroll's The Negro a Beast(1900) and R.W. Shufeldt's The Negro, a Menace to American Civilization (1907). One bestseller, Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916), discussed the concept of "race suicide," the theory that inferior races were out-breeding their betters. President Theodore Roosevelt was one of many Progressives captivated by this notion: He opposed voting rights for African-American men, which were guaranteed by the 15th amendment, on the grounds that the black race was still in its adolescence.

Such thinking, which emphasized "expert" opinion and advocated sweeping governmental power, fit perfectly within the Progressive worldview, which favored a large, active government that engaged in technocratic, paternalistic planning. As for reconciling white supremacy with egalitarian democracy, keep in mind that when a racist Progressive championed "the working man," "the common man," or "the people," he typically prefixed the silent adjective white.

Throughout the post-civil war era the greatest impediment to the advance of the black man, especially in the South, was the Democratic party and Progressive infatuations with social Darwinism and eugenics. It's one of the ironies of our times that modern liberals are so eager to identify themselves as Progressives and that approximately 95% of African-Americans who voted in the last election voted for the most Progressive Congress and White House since Franklin Roosevelt - maybe since Woodrow Wilson.

One wonders how aware either liberals or African-Americans are of the history of twentieth century Progressivism in this country, not only the ugliness of its racism but also of its links to European fascism. If they are aware then their willingness to identify themselves with people who push the Progressive agenda is really puzzling.

In any event, it's important that we learn the lessons of history, philosopher George Santayana famously admonished, because if we don't we're just doomed to repeat them.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

The Value of Argument

What use, we sometimes wonder, are arguments? People are rarely persuaded by them to accept something they're not already disposed to believe so why bother? People who disbelieve in God, for example, don't often change their mind because they've heard someone effectively argue the opposite position.

This is probably because disbelief is not usually a consequence of a lack of proof in, or evidence for, God's existence. More often it's due to either a bad experience with Christians or the church, an incredulity over the doctrine of Christian exclusivism, the prevalence of suffering and terror in the world, or a simple desire that Christianity not be true and that God not exist. As such it's not something that can be changed by appeals to a person's reason.

For most people, believers and unbelievers alike, faith is a matter of the heart, not the head. It's rarely arrived at, or decided upon, on rational grounds. People are drawn to faith through their hearts or they reject it because their hearts are closed to it. People are moved more by story, song, film, testimonial, and what they see in other people's lives than they are, say, by Anselm's ontological argument.

For a man to be convinced of an idea or a truth, his heart needs to be persuaded, and, it's important to note, the head will always follow the heart. But arguments are useless with the heart, they only appeal to the head. Since the heart is the gate to the head, if the heart is closed no argument will ever compel the head to accept it. On the other hand, if the heart is sold on an idea anyway, then arguments aren't necessary. In most human beings the heart is the master. The head is merely an advisor that submits to the will of the heart.

Thus arguments aren't of much use to people who are unwilling to accept the conclusion that God is real. A person who doesn't want a particular idea to be true, whose heart is closed to it, will not be persuaded no matter how compelling the argument. He'll always find some way to evade its force and reject the idea.

Yet arguments are not without value. Arguments can strengthen the faith of those who already believe and they can blow away intellectual smokescreens that skepticism often hides behind. Most importantly, perhaps, they can alter the intellectual ambiance of a culture so that the assumption that Christianity is intellectually disreputable is no longer prevalent among young people. Arguments can shape the culture so that whether people accept their conclusions or not they live and move in an environment in which they know that belief can no longer be credibly portrayed as irrational. Indeed, arguments can so influence the larger culture that people accept that belief is even the most rational option, even if they don't always submit to the realization.

There are good reasons to believe that God exists and that Christianity is true, but the person who doesn't want to accept those beliefs, whose heart is already dead set against them, will, like a man who can look at the sky at noon on a clear day and claim not to see the sun, fail to see those reasons.

Even so, most people who have watched the debates between William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens or have read the work of any number of Christian philosophers and apologists will, whatever conclusions they eventually draw for their own lives, have a very difficult time holding on to the notion that being a theist is somehow for fools, dunces, and old people.

RLC

Somethin's Happenin' Here

Did you ever notice how, at family gatherings, the older folks sometimes seem to just sit quietly while the conversation and activity swirls around them? I'm beginning to understand why older people sometimes just feel "out of it," and according to this video it's not going to get any easier for them:

As impressive as all this is, I can't escape the feeling that any medium which reduces communication to a series of single words or sentence fragments, as happens on Twitter, for example, is not a good thing. Banal and trivial dialogue where no real thinking is taking place can't be good for one's mental development.

Of course, it's reactionary notions like this which are sure to render people who hold them completely irrelevant, and not just at family gatherings.

RLC