In Search of the Conservative Intellectual

Steven Hayward at the Washington Post wonders about the intellectual vigor of today's conservatism. Along the way he makes some observations that are both interesting and puzzling:

During the glory days of the conservative movement, from its ascent in the 1960s and '70s to its success in Ronald Reagan's era, there was a balance between the intellectuals, such as William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman, and the activists, such as Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich, the leader of the New Right. The conservative political movement, for all its infighting, has always drawn deeply from the conservative intellectual movement, and this mix of populism and elitism troubled neither side. Today, however, the conservative movement has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas. The leading conservative figures of our time are now drawn from mass media, from talk radio and cable news. We've traded in Buckley for Beck, Kristol for Coulter, and conservatism has been reduced to sound bites.

The best-selling conservative books these days tend to be red-meat titles such as Michelle Malkin's "Culture of Corruption," Glenn Beck's new "Arguing with Idiots" and all of Ann Coulter's well-calculated provocations that the left falls for like Pavlov's dogs. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these books. Politics is not conducted by Socratic seminar, and Henry Adams's dictum that politics is the systematic organization of hatreds should remind us that partisan passions are an essential and necessary function of democratic life. The right has always produced, and always will produce, potboilers.

Conspicuously missing, however, are the intellectual works. The bestseller list used to be crowded with the likes of Friedman's "Free to Choose," George Gilder's "Wealth and Poverty," Paul Johnson's "Modern Times," Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind," Charles Murray's "Losing Ground" and "The Bell Curve," and Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man." There are still conservative intellectuals attempting to produce important work, but some publishers have been cutting back on serious conservative titles because they don't sell.

About the only recent successful title that harkens back to the older intellectual style is Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism," which argues that modern liberalism has much more in common with European fascism than conservatism has ever had. But because it deployed the incendiary f-word, the book was perceived as a mood-of-the-moment populist work, even though I predict that it will have a long shelf life as a serious work. Had Goldberg called the book "Aspects of Illiberal Policymaking: 1914 to the Present," it might have been received differently by its critics. And sold about 200 copies.

I think Hayward overstates his case here. He gives the impression that conservative books are all polemic and no ideas. This requires that he overlook the work of writers like Newt Gingrich, Thomas Sowell, Pat Buchanan, and Mark Levin. Their books are filled with ideas, but perhaps they don't qualify for Hayward since they're written to be comprehensible by the average person rather than just academics. If it's scholarly work he wants, however, he could find it at the Heritage Foundation and in more modest publications like Hillsdale College's Imprimus. The point is that there are plenty of ideas being generated on the right and it's surprising that Hayward seems to have missed them.

Yet it was not enough (for conservative intellectuals) just to expose liberalism's weakness; it was also necessary to offer robust alternatives for both foreign and domestic policy, ideas that came to fruition in the Reagan years. Today, it is not clear that conservative thinkers have compelling alternatives to Obama's economic or foreign policy. At best, the right is badly divided over how to fix the economy and handle Iran and Afghanistan. So for the time being, the populists alone have the spotlight.

I don't see the division on the right that Hayward apparently does. Conservatives seem to be pretty much in agreement as to how to fix the economy and manage foreign policy. The economy is like a beach ball, and taxes, debt, and burdensome regulations are like a weight pushing the ball under water. Remove the pressure and the economy will bounce back to the surface. Almost all conservatives agree with this prescription which is why they oppose Obama's plans to raise taxes, increase debt, and impose ever more onerous regulations on businesses.

In foreign affairs the most effective policy is to have a strong military and be prepared to use it when justice and our interests are at stake. Again, this is not the Obama view, but it is one upon which most conservatives are united.

The blend of entertainment and politics is not unique to the right (exhibit No. 1 on the left: "The Daily Show"). And it is perfectly possible to conduct talk radio at a high level of seriousness, and several talkers do well at matching the quality of their shows to their intellectual pedigree. Consider Hugh Hewitt (Michigan Law School), Michael Medved (Yale Law School), William Bennett (Harvard Law and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas) -- all three of these brainiacs have popular shows on the Salem Radio Network.

All three have written a number of books as well, it should be noted, in case Hayward has overlooked that fact.

With others -- Michael Savage and "Mancow" come to mind -- the charge of dumbing down is much more accurate. Rush Limbaugh adheres to Winston Churchill's adage that you should grin when you fight, and in any case his keen sense of satire makes him deserving of comparison to Will Rogers, who, by the way, was a critic of progressivism. Others among the right's leading talkers, such as Sean Hannity, seem unremittingly angry and too reflexively partisan on behalf of the Republican Party rather than the conservative movement (they are not the same thing).

This is actually, in my opinion, too kind to Hannity who to my ear comes off as a callow narcissist bully who doesn't have the faintest idea how to have a civil conversation with someone who disagrees with him. Ten seconds into his show he hits a vocal pitch that approximates the sound of a faulty blow dryer and maintains that level of stridency for the duration of his monologue. It's as much an assault on the listener's nerves as on the intellect, and I say this as one who thinks that in terms of substance Hannity is usually right.

Hayward goes on to discuss Glenn Beck. It's pretty interesting stuff, especially if you listen to talk radio at all. In fact the whole article is interesting, despite my misgivings about some of what he says. Give it a read.

RLC

Gary Cooper vs. Michael Jackson

People who study such things claim that over the last three or four decades women's preference in men has evolved. Whereas a couple of generations ago women were attracted to masculine men, that no longer seems to be the case. Today, a paper in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution notes, women seem to be partial to men who appear more boyish or even feminized. I don't pretend to have any idea whether this is true, but some of those who believe it is also believe that the culprit behind this development is The Pill.

The Daily Mail Online reports:

Scientists have long known that a woman's taste in men changes over her menstrual cycle. During the few days each month when women are fertile - around the time of ovulation - they tend to prefer masculine features and men who are more assertive.

On these fertile days, women are also more attracted to men who are 'genetically dissimilar', Dr Alvergne said. Picking a partner whose genetic make-up is unlike their own increases the chances of having a healthy child.

On days when women are not fertile, their tastes swing towards more feminine, boyish faces and more caring personalities, researchers have shown. However, if women are taking the Pill (which first became available in the 1960s) they no longer have fertile days.

That means they no longer experience the hormonal changes that make them more attracted to masculine men and those with dissimilar genetic make-up.

Whatever. I think the preference for boyishness, if it does in fact exist, is more likely to be a product of a trend toward androgeny in a culture which has for four decades derogated traditional masculinity. Two generations of men have grown up being encouraged in all sorts of ways to be more like women and women have been encouraged to favor men who are quick to display their softer side.

In other words, it would be frowned upon today to hold up John Wayne and Gary Cooper as role models for young males. They're too aggressive, too violent, too reserved and laconic. They don't show their feelings. They don't listen. They don't empathize. Instead, boys should emulate the Michael Jacksons of the world if they really want to win the lady's heart.

Guys can thank me for this advice through our Feedback page.

RLC

Afrocity

It's difficult for a liberal to convert to conservatism. The difficulty doesn't lie so much in the ideological transformation, rather it lies in the opprobrium a liberal apostate must suffer at the hands of his former friends. Liberal tolerance extends only marginally beyond those with whom they agree. There's little acceptance and well-wishing for those who come to the point in their lives where liberalism or progressivism is seen as a failed worldview. Such a realization is an indictment of the religion that other liberals hold dear, and they often revile the person who rejects the faith upon which they have staked their lives.

The conversion is particularly difficult for African Americans who are considered by their friends and families to be doubly traitorous. Not only do they reject the political ideology in which so many blacks have placed their hope and trust, but they're seen as rejecting their own people as well. It's like an Arab Muslim forswearing his family to become a Catholic Christian or a conservative Jew becoming a Baptist.

Such has been the experience of increasing numbers of blacks who think beyond the soothing blandishments and seductions of the liberal elite and recognize that liberalism is an ideological plantation for blacks and that the Democrat party is a false hope.

One black woman who had the scales fall from her eyes is Anita Moncrief who talks here about her sojourn with liberalism, her return to the faith and values of her youth, and the insults she's had to endure as a result.

Another fiesty former liberal calls herself Afrocity and writes a blog where she discusses her disillusionment with the left, her subsequent move to conservatism, and the bitter acrimony from black liberals that her perfidy has earned her.

One hopes that as the excitement of having an African American president begins to subside more African Americans will ask the questions Moncrief and Afrocity asked, that they'll have the strength to withstand the pressures exerted on them to remain faithful to their liberal sugardaddys, and that they'll reject the platitudes, dogmas, and failed nostrums with which the left has plied them for the last 70 years.

RLC

More on the Nobel Fatuousness

If any more evidence that the Nobel Peace Prize committee is motivated by purely political considerations this piece from the WSJ provides it. It points out that the nominations for the prize had to be submitted by February 1st, a mere two weeks after the President's inauguration. In other words, the committee evidently judged that of all the people in the world working for peace and the betterment of mankind, President Obama, in the first two weeks of his presidency, accomplished more than any of them.

A couple of our readers wondered why someone like Paul Farmer didn't get the prize. Probably for the same reason Irena Sendler didn't get it. Neither of these two heroes represent any political ideology, they just help people. Neither of them are/were glamorous celebrities and thus could hardly be expected to catch the notice of people who swoon at the thought of bestowing awards upon political rock stars like Al Gore and Barack Obama and possibly being permitted to touch the hem of their garments.

Jason, who sent me the link to the article, suspects that the Nobel Committee gave the award to Mr. Obama as a means of slapping George Bush in the face. If so, Alfred Nobel must be spinning in his grave at the way his legacy is being perverted.

RLC

Embarrassing the President

As you have probably heard by now President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ........ well, I don't exactly know what for, but anyway, the Nobel committee saw fit to give it to him. The prize has been awarded in the past to such peace-loving souls as Yassar Arafat so I don't know how much importance it carries.

I do hope, though, that President Obama is embarrassed by the honor. He knows that at this stage in his presidency he has done nothing to merit it and that accepting it makes him look silly. That's not his fault, of course, but I think that if the Nobel committee had wanted to make him risible in the eyes of the world they couldn't have done anything more likely to achieve that result than what they did.

And in the process they make themselves look ridiculous as well. In 2007 they had the choice of giving the prize to an elderly woman named Irena Sendler who had, as a young nurse, risked her life to smuggle dozens of Jewish children out of Nazi-occupied Europe or give it to someone who made a film about global warming. They evidently thought the film was more important because they gave the prize to its maker, Al Gore.

The Peace Prize, evidently, has little to do with peace and everything to do with left-wing politics. The prize committee has made themselves, their award, and its recipient, laughingstocks.

RLC

Moral Subjectivism (Pt. I)

It's one of the most perplexing and disturbing aspects of our age that so many people have adopted a relativistic or subjectivistic view of moral right and wrong. Moral subjectivism is the view that right and wrong are matters of one's own personal taste, preference or bias. Moral relativism is a form of subjectivism that says that right and wrong are defined by the time and/or society in which people live. Thus, when we hear people insist that "what's right for you isn't necessarily right for me" or that "what's right for one culture isn't necessarily right for another" we're hearing the verbal expression of these views.

Barry Arrington has a post at Uncommon Descent where he writes about the Roman Polanski rape of a thirteen year-old girl. The post elicited a comment from a reader that serves as a good example of the influence of moral relativism in our culture. Arrington writes:

Here are the facts concerning the Roman Polanski case: Polanski gave a Quaalude to a 13 year-old child, instructed her to get into a Jacuzzi naked, refused to take her home when she asked, performed oral sex on her as she asked him to stop, raped her (no, not the "statutory" kind, the "forcible" kind), and sodomized her. In a plea bargain Polanski pled to unlawful sex with a minor.

As is common knowledge, Polanski has his defenders because he has made some terrific movies. For example, critic Tom Shales says: "There is, apparently, more to this crime than it would seem, and it may sound like a hollow defense, but in Hollywood I am not sure a 13-year-old is really a 13-year-old."

Here's today's question: "Is it wrong in all times and at all places (even Hollywood) for a 44 year-old man to drug, rape and sodomize a 13 year-old girl?"

For our materialist friends who answer "yes" to the question (as I hope you will), I have a follow-up question: "How can you know that you are right and Polanski's defenders are wrong?"

It's at this point that things took a distressing turn. Here's Arrington:

At first the materialists dodged my second (and much more important) question. But then a brave soul who calls himself "camanintx" took up for the materialist side the gauntlet I had thrown down, and we had the following exchange:

Barry: How can you know that you are right and Polanski's defenders are wrong?

camanintx: Because the society in which I and Polanski (at the time) live in define it as such. Had Polanski lived in 6th century Arabia, he probably would have been treated differently, no?

Barry: Let's assume for the sake of argument that drugging, raping and sodomizing a young girl was considered moral behavior in Arabia between the years 501 and 600 AD [I by no means concede that, but will accept it arguendo]. On the basis of your response, camanintx, I assume you would say that the fact that it was considered moral behavior in the society in which it occurred, is in fact determinative of the morality of the behavior, and therefore if Polanski had done what he did in that place and time it would have been moral. Is that what you are saying?

camanintx: Since morality is a subjective term, yes, that is exactly what I am saying.

In other words, for camanintx, morality is simply a matter of personal taste or (a reflection of the taste of the consensus). Arrington will have none of this foolishness and does a good job of illustrating one of the half dozen or so fundamental errors of camanintx's position. I encourage you to read the rest of his post.

Because I think this is such an important topic I hope to have more to say on it tomorrow.

RLC

Promise Them Anything

President Obama is rapidly proving himself to be a serial promise-breaker. What he says often seems to be at variance with what his administration does. There are a host of examples - from his promise not to hire lobbyists, to his promise to insure adequate airing of any legislation before it becomes law, to his promise to have the most transparent administration in history. Here's another example from Hot Air's Ed Morrissey to add to the list:

When Barack Obama went to Notre Dame to speak at their commencement and accept an honorary law degree from the Catholic university, he attempted to quiet the outrage from conservative Catholics and pro-life activists by claiming to respect the religious teachings of Catholics and protect freedom of conscience on abortion. He insisted that he would do the same during a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI.

Well, it turns out that not everyone got the memo. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is demanding that a tiny Catholic college in North Carolina has to offer health care coverage for abortion and contraception to their employees. Gateway Pundit tells us that:

Belmont Abbey College is a small, private, Catholic college located in North Carolina. For 130 years, it and the Benedictine monks who run it have been dedicated to handing on the Catholic faith.

But the Obama Administration is now trying to force them to abandon that faith or go out of business.

[T]he Administration at Belmont Abbey College removed contraception, abortion, and voluntary sterilization from its faculty's health care policy after discovering it had accidentally been a part of existing plans.

Employees of the school who objected to this change in policy brought a complaint against the school accusing them of "gender discrimination."

At first, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) found no evidence of gender discrimination by Belmont Abbey College... After a few weeks, the EEOC mysteriously reversed course and announced, in effect, that the college had better toe the Administration's line, or else.

The President of the college has declared he will shut down the school rather than be forced by the government to violate Catholic teaching. It's good to know that at least one president in this sorry narrative is taking a stand on principle.

RLC

Sensus Divinitatis

Bradlaugh at Secular Right discusses an article that reports some very inconclusive evidence that somehow belief in God is linked to the evolution of the brain and vice versa. Brad then says that:

I'm curious to know how a religious person processes these news items from cognitive science.

Obviously the fact that the varieties of religious experience can be explained from brain phylogeny does not exclude the possibility that religious experiences are apprehending something that exists as other than brain events, something real in the world outside the skull. Binocular vision has an explanatory pathway from brain phylogeny, but the things we see are real (mostly).

Yet if the possibility isn't excluded, isn't it at least weakened? Do religious people feel this? Well, I'm sure they don't! - but what do they feel? Perhaps one of them could tell us.

I take Brad to be asking whether people who believe in God don't feel that their beliefs are discredited by evidence that religious belief is somehow a function of our cognitive apparatus. Brad evidently thinks that if a belief is a result of the brain's evolution then it is ipso facto less likely to be true.

But this cuts both ways. If belief in God is somehow an evolutionary adaptation then unbelief is also a product of the evolutionary process (either that or it's a degenerate mutant form of belief). If so, the skeptic has no reason to trust that his unbelief corresponds in any way to what's really true. If our beliefs, including our belief in the trustworthiness of our reason to lead us to truth, are simply adaptations that increase the survivability of the species, then we have no reason whatsoever to trust that our beliefs are actually true or that our reason will lead us to have true beliefs.

Survivability of the species may have little to do with what's true. Consider, for example, a belief in a primitive society that the more children one has the greater will be the reward in the afterlife. The belief could be completely false but having it confers a tremendous selective advantage since those who have it are likely to produce more offspring than those who don't.

Nevertheless, set all that aside. Why should it diminish the veridicality of belief in God if it turns out that we are cognitively predisposed to believe? If God exists it might be expected that He would design us to have some sense of His existence. Isn't this essentially what Paul said in the first chapter of his letter to the Roman church? Haven't Christians maintained for two thousand years that the knowledge of God is an a priori conviction inscribed in our consciousness? Why should it be troubling to learn that the predisposition to believe is located in a particular area of the brain?

Indeed, one who believes that life is the product of God's creative purpose and design would respond to Brad by asserting that the odd thing is not that our cognitive apparatus seems to predispose us to belief in God. The odd thing would be if it didn't.

RLC

Indecision

According to the New York Times President and Mrs. Obama actually have this painting hanging in the White House:

The painting is all about indecisiveness. If people select pets that look like themselves and which reflect their own personalities I wonder if the same is true of the paintings they choose for their homes and offices.

At any rate, this work seems a fitting adornment for the home of the man who voted "present" 130 times during his three terms in the Illinois state senate.

RLC

Uh Oh

ABC News reports that the U.S, is spending a lot of money on a weapons delivery system that would be useful only in places like Iran and North Korea. Not only is it spending $88 million on the weapons and the necessary alterations to the platforms which would deliver them, but the spending request was labeled "urgent." Here's the ABC report:

Is the U.S. stepping up preparations for a possible attack on Iran's nuclear facilities?

The Pentagon is always making plans, but based on a little-noticed funding request recently sent to Congress, the answer to that question appears to be yes.

First, some background: Back in October 2007, ABC News reported that the Pentagon had asked Congress for $88 million in the emergency Iraq/Afghanistan war funding request to develop a gargantuan bunker-busting bomb called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP). It's a 30,000-pound bomb designed to hit targets buried 200 feet below ground. Back then, the Pentagon cited an "urgent operational need" for the new weapon.

Now the Pentagon is shifting spending from other programs to fast forward the development and procurement of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. The Pentagon comptroller sent a request to shift the funds to the House and Senate Appropriations and Armed Services Committees over the summer.

The comptroller said the Pentagon planned to spend $19.1 million to procure four of the bombs, $28.3 million to accelerate the bomb's "development and testing", and $21 million to accelerate the integration of the bomb onto B-2 stealth bombers.

Why now? The notification says simply, "The Department has an Urgent Operational Need (UON) for the capability to strike hard and deeply buried targets in high threat environments. The MOP is the weapon of choice to meet the requirements of the UON." It further states that the request is endorsed by Pacific Command (which has responsibility over North Korea) and Central Command (which has responsibility over Iran).

The request was quietly approved. On Friday, McDonnell Douglas was awarded a $51.9 million contract to provide "Massive Penetrator Ordnance Integration" on B-2 aircraft.

This is not the kind of weapon that would be particularly useful in Iraq or Afghanistan, but it is ideally suited to hit deeply buried nuclear facilities such as Natanz or Qom in Iran.

That the Obama administration would actually go through with an attack on Iran is a thought that generates its own kind of shock and awe, but I have been arguing for several years that the only thing worse than the calamity that such an attack might bring upon the world would be the calamity that would almost certainly befall us were Iran to aquire nuclear weapons. A nuclear Iran would not only be an existential threat to Israel, it's almost a sure thing that terrorists would be supplied with the weapons and seek to smuggle them into the U.S. where they would be detonated in American cities.

An alternative possiblity is that a single nuclear-tipped missile would be launched from an innocent-looking freighter off our coast and detonated high over the nation's midsection. The blast would produce a pulse of electromagnetic energy (EMP) that could theoretically fry every device in the country that uses or produces electricity. We would in an instant be thrust back into the 19th century and the resulting chaos and upheaval would result in the deaths of tens of millions of Americans (You can read more about EMP here and here).

If the MOPs will prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, if war is the only way to prevent them from realizing their dream of precipitating Armageddon, then it seems to me that the Obama administration has no other choice.

RLC

Two More Quotes

The other day we featured some quotes from several famous and accomplished historical figures. Here are two more sent me by a reader from the pen of Ben Franklin:

"Idleness and pride tax with a heavier hand than kings and parliaments."

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Some things never change. One reason today's "kings and parliaments" levy taxes is to compensate for the anchor imposed on our society by those Franklin might have described as idlers. The second quote is one that should be kept in mind by those who believe that government should take over as much of our lives as possible in order to make us more economically secure.

RLC

World Famous

This will probably be of no interest to anyone but me, but my brother Bill informs me that, in the course of scanning through the arcana of our blog's software he discovered that in the last three weeks Viewpoint has been visited by individuals whose IP addresses are located in over 60 different countries and a couple dozen states.

I have no idea how these folks found us, what it means, or if they're even stopping to read anything on the home page, but it's still pretty surprising in any event.

Here's a list of the countries:

• Armenia
• Australia
• Austria
• Belgium
• Belize
• Brazil
• Brunei Darussalam
• Burkina Faso
• Canada
• Chile
• China
• Czech Republic
• Egypt
• Estonia
• Finland
• France
• Georgia
• Germany
• Ghana
• Greece
• Guatemala
• Hong Kong
• Hungary
• India
• Indonesia
• Iran
• Ireland
• Israel
• Italy
• Japan
• Kenya
• Korea, Republic of
• Latvia
• Malaysia
• Micronesia
• Moldova, Republic of
• Mongolia
• Netherlands
• Netherlands Antilles
• New Zealand
• Nigeria
• Norway
• Peru
• Philippines
• Poland
• Portugal
• Qatar
• Romania
• Russian Federation
• Saudi Arabia
• Serbia
• South Africa
• Sri Lanka
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• Taiwan
• Thailand
• Trinidad and Tobago
• Ukraine
• United Kingdom
• United States

Maybe somebody has launched a virus that causes computers around the globe to ring up Viewpoint, I don't know, but there you have it, for what it's worth.

RLC

Dueling with the Darwinists

Stephen Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell, and Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution gave a presentation recently at the University of Oklahoma. As is typical of these events there was lots of name-calling from the Darwinians and attempts to abort the program before it got off the ground, but evidently none of these tactics worked. Wells files an interesting report on the proceedings at Evolution News and Views. Here's an excerpt:

Darwinist blogger P.Z. Myers, who had scolded the museum for letting us show the film [Darwin's Dilemma], did not come all the way from the University of Minnesota, Morris, to attend. Yet he wrote afterwards about Steve's September 28 lecture:

"I knew ahead of time exactly what it was going to be: complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, therefore, DESIGN. It doesn't follow. The logic is nonexistent. It's the kind of thing you'd expect a competent person with a Ph.D. in philosophy to recognize, but no, it's the same ol' thing, trotted out every time they get up to speak."

Of course, Myers is absolutely correct: Complexity, therefore design, doesn't follow. And yes, "you'd expect a competent person with a Ph.D. in philosophy" to know this.

That's why Steve Meyer devoted an entire chapter to it in his book. In fact, it's the chapter from which the book takes its name (Chapter 4.). If Myers had bothered to read Steve's book, he would have known this. Indeed, you'd expect that a competent person with a Ph.D. who's paid by the taxpayers of Minnesota to teach their children would read a book before ridiculing it. But no, it's the same ol' thing, trotted out every time Myers blogs on the subject.

I was particularly interested in this statement made by an evolutionist professor on campus who gave a talk to balance that of Meyer and Wells:

[Professor] Westrop concluded by taking exception to J.B.S. Haldane's claim that finding a fossil rabbit in the pre-Cambrian would prove Darwin's theory wrong. If such a fossil were found, Westrop said, paleontologists would simply revise their reconstruction of the history of life. During the Q&A, one student asked him whether any fossil find could falsify Darwin's theory, and Professor Westrop said "No."

This is revealing inasmuch as Darwinians frequently argue that, unlike Intelligent Design, their theory is genuine science because it can be falsified, that is we can imagine a discovery that would prove their theory false if it were actually made. Often they cite the discovery of a mammal fossil in a layer of rock believed to have formed much earlier than mammals existed. Westrop is saying, however, that such a find would not disprove Darwinism at all. In other words, Darwinism is not falsifiable, at least by the fossil record, and is thus no more "scientific" than is ID.

Wait until Judge Jones hears this.

RLC

Should We Extend the School Year?

I've been eager to find something for which I can commend our President and have been disappointed that his first eight months have offered so few opportunities. Nevertheless, I've persevered and have recently stumbled upon something on which he and I agree. The President believes, and I think he's right, that if we're going to improve education in this country we need to extend the school year.

This will, of course, be a very unpopular proposal with students and even more unpopular with employers who utilize student labor during the summer months, but it makes no sense to build multi-million dollar facilities and only use them, at least at full capacity, for 180 days, or so. It also makes no sense to bemoan the sorry state of our students' academic achievement but only devote half the year to their education.

There are arguments against pushing the academic year deeper into the summer, some more compelling than others, but if the quality of our children's education truly is a high priority then doing all we can to get them that education should trump those arguments.

Our current school year is a vestige of a time when students were needed during the summer to work the family farm and also a time when school buildings became saunas in the summer months. With most school districts now sporting air conditioned buildings, and relatively few students working in agriculture neither of those circumstances obtains any longer.

The article linked to above offers two arguments, however, that are admittedly serious objections to implementing a longer school year: The economic effect on businesses that rely on student employees (and those which rely on students with cash in their pockets to buy their wares), and the cost to taxpayers of having to pay teachers for working more days.

I don't know how, exactly, those two objections could best be addressed, but I do think that, in principle at least, President Obama is on the right track in trying to get students, at least the better students, more hours in school.

RLC

The Invention of Lying

Here are excerpts of a review of a new movie hostile to Christianity called The Invention of Lying:

If you saw Ricky Gervais's delightful romantic comedy "Ghost Town" last year and were looking forward to his new comedy, "The Invention of Lying," be warned. The movie is a full-on attack on religion in general and Christianity in particular. It might be the most blatantly, one-sidedly atheist movie ever released by a major studio, in this case Warner Bros.

Gervais delights in what a faith-based society would call blasphemy, setting up an imaginary world in which no one ever lies. Except his character, who spreads what Gervais obviously sees as the biggest lie of all: Belief in God.

Gervais's character is the first man ever to think of lying. In order to comfort the dying, he randomly hits on the idea of telling them that they will go to a better place and enjoy an afterlife. Citizens who automatically believe what they're told (since no one, even advertisers, has ever told an untruth) start to spread the word, and soon Gervais is doing a gruesomely unfunny parody of Moses and the Ten Commandments. Except his rules are ten lies written on pizza boxes.

Gervais sighs and winces as he spins his absurd made-up stories to the ignorant peoples of the world: There is a "Man in the Sky," he says, who is looking down at all of us and is responsible for everything that happens. Yes, he explains to one woman, he gave your mom cancer - but he's also responsible for curing her. The people aren't happy that "The Man in the Sky" is behind all human suffering. "F- The Man in the Sky!" cries one citizen, and the crowd begins to get angry. A magazine cover exclaims, "Man in the Sky Kills 40,000 in Tsunami!" But Gervais's character insists that whatever damage the Man in the Sky causes, he eventually makes up for it all in the end by providing a beautiful mansion for everyone after they die, at least for those who don't commit three or more immoral acts, and by making it so that everyone can reunite with their loved ones in the next life. Later in the movie, Gervais will be outfitted like Jesus. The movie doesn't have a joke to offer at this point; it just thinks it's funny to show Gervais in long hair and a bedsheet. At the end, in a church, a minister is seen wearing a cross, so apparently somehow the Gervais character also came up with the Crucifixion story.

Gervais is an atheist, which is fine, but his mean-spiritedness (even before the atheism theme enters the movie, is sour and misanthropic) and the film's reduction of all religion to an episode of crowd hysteria are not going to be warmly received. Except maybe by critics.

I'm sure the movie will be lots of laughs for the same sort of people who guffawed at David Letterman's revelations that he'd been cheating on his family with some of his staffers. I'm sure the same folks who find jokes that mention moose hunting and Sarah Palin in the same sentence will hoot wildly and slap their knees at Gervais' humor. For those, though, whose intelligence has not been diluted by generations of incest the movie sounds more like something concocted by a bunch of seventh grade boys.

RLC

Pew Survey on Abortion

A recent survey on Americans' attitudes about abortion by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press has come up with some interesting results:

Polls conducted in 2009 have found fewer Americans expressing support for abortion than in previous years. In Pew Research Center polls in 2007 and 2008, supporters of legal abortion clearly outnumbered opponents; now Americans are evenly divided on the question, and there have been modest increases in the numbers who favor reducing abortions or making them harder to obtain. Less support for abortion is evident among most demographic and political groups.

The latest Pew Research Center survey also reveals that the abortion debate has receded in importance, especially among liberals. At the same time, opposition to abortion has grown more firm among conservatives, who have become less supportive of finding a middle ground on the issue and more certain of the correctness of their own views on abortion.

Another interesting finding (among many) is this:

The poll finds that four-in-ten Americans are unaware of Obama's position on the abortion issue. Conservative Republicans, however, are more likely than any other group to know Obama's position, with 75% correctly identifying him as "pro-choice" rather than "pro-life."

It seems to consistently surprise people to be told that the President is the most radically pro-choice individual ever to serve in that office. They are often incredulous when it is pointed out to them that he twice voted while in the Illinois state senate to allow babies born alive after a failed abortion attempt to be left to die.

The number of people who feel there should be more protections granted to the unborn is also growing:

The latest (August 2009) Pew Research Center survey also finds that four-in-ten Americans (41%) now favor making it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion, up six points from 2007 (35%) and the highest level of support in Pew Research Center surveys for increased restrictions since 1987. However, those who favor making it more difficult to obtain an abortion are still outnumbered by those who oppose making it more difficult (50% vs. 41%).

Support for putting up barriers to abortion varies substantially across political and religious groups. Fully 65% of conservative Republicans want to make abortions harder to get, but just 39% of independents and 19% of liberal Democrats say the same. Almost two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants (64%) back greater restrictions on abortion, but fewer than half as many white mainline Protestants (27%) and the religiously unaffiliated (23%) say the same. Catholics fall in between, with 44% in support of more restrictions on abortion.

There's much more at the link.

RLC

Copenhagen

The President is getting criticism from the left and derision from the right after his failed attempt to persuade the International Olympic Committee to grant the 2016 Olympics to Chicago.

The criticism from the left centers around the failure of the administration to really do their homework by learning in advance where Chicago actually stood in the minds of the IOC. His advisors and others wasted the President's time and risked his prestige in pushing him to go to Copenhagen only to have him rebuffed, and although the sting of the defeat will diminish, the debacle adds to the perception that this administration is fundamentally incompetent.

The derision from the right centers around the haughty presumption that led the administration to think that the President and First Lady could simply blow into town and sweep the IOC off their feet like they have done with Europeans in the past. I think the scorn that some of the talk radio people are heaping on the President for his flop seems shrill, strident, childish, and nit-picky, but I do think they have a point that it was unseemly of Mrs. Obama to claim that she was making "a sacrifice" to go to Copenhagen.

They also have a point that since the President has been bad-mouthing the U.S. ever since he first arrived in Washington, he can hardly expect now to convince the IOC that his city and his country are really not so bad after all. Even so, so much of the gloating on the right sounds as though some of these talkers care more that Obama look bad than that the U.S. be awarded the games.

This is just wrongheaded. The President did the right thing in campaigning on behalf of Chicago, even if he did ultimately fail, and all Americans should be disappointed that he didn't succeed. If he had persuaded the IOC to grant the Olympics to Chicago it could have been an economic blessing for a city that badly needs the help (what the city government would have done with the wealth that would flow into the city is a different question, of course). I commend him for going to Copenhagen and fighting for the games. Now I hope he'll continue to fight for and affirm his pride in the country at large just like he did for Chicago. I just hope he does it a lot more effectively.

RLC

Missing Link Still Missing

The popular idea that the close genetic similarity between humans and chimps is evidence of a close evolutionary relationship between them has been taking a beating of late. A new book by Jeremy Taylor titled Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find Genes That Make Us Human adds to the drubbing. Taylor pronounces the inference from genetic similarity to close relationship to be without any merit. The book is reviewed at New Scientist by Ewan Calloway who writes that:

[T]he former BBC producer [Taylor] synthesizes recent genetic, behavioural and neuroscientific research to argue that far more than a handful of genes divides humans from our evolutionary cousins, 6 million years removed.

Take that 98.4 per cent [the percentage of our DNA we share in common with chimps], an oft-repeated figure that has been used to argue that chimps deserve human rights. True, Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes share an extraordinary amount of genetic similarity - yet humans and mice share almost as much.

Complete genomes of both species are enabling researchers to map the chasm between human and chimp, which seems to deepen by the year. A good example is FOXP2, a regulatory gene linked to speech and language disorders in humans. FOXP2 in chimps has barely changed in the 130 million years since primates and mice diverged from their common ancestor. But after humans and chimps split, two key changes accumulated on the human line.

Even greater differences may lurk in the areas of the genome once discounted as "junk" DNA, which don't make proteins but instead determine gene activity. One recently discovered RNA-coding sequence that may be involved in cerebral cortex development was found to vary little between chimps and chickens, yet humans possess 18 unique changes.

Geneticists are right to home in on differences that affect brain development: nowhere is the gulf between humans and chimps wider than in their mental abilities. Psychologists suggest that the ability to infer the mental states of others may underlie language and culture. Children gradually acquire this capacity...but evidence for it in chimps is equivocal.

....Not a Chimp should be mandatory reading for journalists who often reinforce the general public's misconception that chimps are practically human.

It may be that chimps and man have a common ancestor, but the more we learn the harder it is to make that case without resorting to question-begging - e.g. The similarities in DNA between chimp and man result from their evolutionary kinship. This must be the explanation for the similarities because we know they are evolutionarily related.

Another recent development in this regard, bye the bye, is the mounting skepticism in the scientific community surrounding the proper interpretation of the fossilized remains of an early hominid named Ardipithecus ramidus (Ardi, for short) that was initially touted as a missing link between man and chimp. It's now beginning to look, however, like Ardi is not at all close to being a human ancestor.

I wonder how many more times we're going to be told by journalists on the front page of the newspaper that the "missing link" has been discovered only to learn six months later on page twenty that such claims were premature.

RLC

Do Your Job, Mr. Senator

Courtesy of Patterico we have a video of Democrat Senator Tom Carper telling us that it's unreasonable to expect legislators to actually read the laws they write. I am not kidding. The language, he says, is incomprehensible so lawmakers simply read the summary of the bill which is written in prose more befitting a congressman's reading comprehension skills. Carper says in the video:

I don't expect to actually read the legislative language, because reading the legislative language is among the more confusing things I've ever read in my life. . . . When you get into the legislative language, Sen. Conrad actually read some of it, several pages of it, the other day, and I don't think anybody had a clue, including people who had served on this committee for decades, what he was talking about.

This is inexcusable. If the language is so turgid that it cannot be understood, even by legislators who went to law school, then do what any sixth grader would realize you should do and change the language. Here's the video:

I have three questions: If the "English" version is an accurate summation of the "legislative" language why not just write the law in plain English? Second, if Senators like Carper, most of whom are lawyers, cannot understand the legislative language how do they know that the summation accurately represents it? Third, how can anyone justify voting for a bill that will revolutionize the American economy, as health care reform will do, if they don't understand the bill and haven't read it?

This strikes me as almost criminal malfeasance. We don't send these people to Washington to advance their social life and attend cocktail parties. We pay them a very handsome salary to read the legislation they foist on us. If this is how they operate these people should not be in office, they should be in jail.

RLC

Which Side Are We On?

Strategy Page reports on progress in Columbia:

The eight year offensive against leftist rebels and drug gangs has been a success, and this can be seen in economic performance. In the last ten years, GDP has gone from $90 billion to over $250 billion. Investments by foreigners went from $1.5 billion to over $10 billion. In the 1980s and 90s, foreign investors stayed away, and many Colombian entrepreneurs and investors fled the country.

The economic changes of the last decade have improved the lives of most Colombians, and, along with a sharp reduction in violence and kidnapping, led to many exiles, and their talents, returning home. The growing tyranny in neighboring Venezuela, has brought thousands of Venezuelan professionals and investors to Colombia. After three quarters of GDP contraction (about two percent overall) because of the global recession, GDP growth has resumed.

There's much more at the link. Since Columbia is a democracy and a neighbor of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez has tried repeatedly to destabilize it. So far he has failed. Given that Mr. Obama has aligned himself with Chavez against the Hondurans struggling to preserve their own democracy I wonder which side of the Venezuela/Columbia conflict our new administration is on.

RLC

New Coen Film

Those interested in the films of Ethan and Joel Coen (Fargo, No Country for Old Men) will be pleased to note that they have another movie coming out soon. Josh Hurst, movie critic at Christianity Today tells us a little bit about the Coen oeuvre:

The Coen brothers celebrate 25 years of filmmaking this month with the release of their 14th movie, A Serious Man. It's perhaps their most religious work, juggling existential and theological questions in a story that invokes a modern-day Job. As protagonist Larry Gropnik's world begins to fall apart, he consults three rabbis with his Big Questions, only to find that the answers aren't easy - if there are indeed answers.

That's a good way to describe the brothers' opus: a chronic search for truth. Some might argue that the Coens' world is amoral, but a discerning look reveals morality aplenty. Good and evil stand apart from one another as clearly as black and white - or red and white, in the case of their classic crime story, Fargo.

No Country for Old Men would not have been a bad example of the Coen brothers' fascination with good and evil either. Both movies portray evil in all of its stark, stunning ugliness, and unlike, say, the films of Quentin Tarantino, no one watching these two movies would find evil in any way attractive or appealing. The Coens seem to want to say as loudly as they can that this world is broken, shattered, and forlorn. The don't offer any remedies for this brutal fact but they sure do a good job of illustrating the need for one.

Caution: Neither Fargo nor No Country are easy films to watch. Both are gut-wrenching in their portrayal of man's inhumanity to man.

RLC

Attrition

Bill Roggio's Long War Journal has an analysis of the effectiveness of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) attacks on Taliban and al Qaeda targets in Pakistan. There's a lot of information at the link, but this graph shows the striking increase in tempo and effectiveness of the strikes in the past year:

Unfortunately, the Obama administration is reported to be drawing the conclusion from the success of these assaults that we can fight the entire war against the Taliban in Afghanistan in this fashion with a minimal commitment of troops on the ground. Few military people agree with him, but Mr. Obama knows that if he fights to win in Afghanistan he risks alienating his progressive base at a time when he needs them on board for health care reform and cap and trade legislation.

It would be a terrible disgrace if the military strategy in Afghanistan were dictated by the political exigencies of getting a dubious domestic agenda passed in Congress.

RLC

Quotes for Our Times

A few delectations to kick off your weekend:

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." --Edmund Burke

"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents..." --James Madison

"...the Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed in all its provisions. The man who wields power and misinterprets it is the more dangerous the more honest he is" -- attributed to Davy Crockett

"Our political way of life is by the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God, and of course presupposes the existence of God, the moral ruler of the universe, and a rule of right and wrong, of just and unjust, binding upon man, preceding all institutions of human society and government." --John Quincy Adams

Who follows in the train of such men today?

RLC

Prevarications

Rep. Joe Wilson was chastised by his colleagues in the House of Representatives for loudly expostulating with the President during a speech Mr. Obama made to a joint session of Congress on health care. The President averred that illegal immigrants will not be covered by his plan, and Rep. Wilson took umbrage, accusing him of lying.

It turns out that the congressman was right to feel that the President was playing fast and loose with the facts. After all, if the President was correct why do the Democrats keep voting down amendments to the various health care bills that would require anyone seeking coverage to present proof of citizenship? The Hill reports:

Senate Finance Committee Democrats [today] rejected a proposed requirement that immigrants prove their identity with photo identification when signing up for federal healthcare programs.

Finance Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said that current law and the healthcare bill under consideration are too lax and leave the door open to illegal immigrants defrauding the government using false or stolen identities to obtain benefits.

Grassley's amendment was beaten back 10-13 on a party-line vote.

If the Democrats don't intend to cover illegals why not write the legislation so as to guarantee that illegals can't game the system?

We've also been assured that the President's plan will not cover abortions, a matter of some concern to those taxpayers who believe, not unreasonably, that an abortion gruesomely snuffs out a child's life and shouldn't be subsidized by their tax dollars. Yet here we find the Democrats defeating GOP efforts to insure that the proposed health care reform bill contains unambiguous language to that effect:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) said the [prohibitions on abortion] in the current law could easily lapse. He called on Mr. Baucus to fold the language into the health bill, making it permanent law. "Let's codify it," he said.

Abortion-rights supporters said the rights of women were in danger. "This is not maintaining the status quo," said Sen. Maria Cantwell (D., Wash.). "It is a major, major change, and a poison pill."

The Hatch amendment failed 13-10 on a mostly party-line vote. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R., Maine) joined Democrats in opposing it, while Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota was the lone Democrat in favor.

The panel also rejected an amendment Mr. Hatch said was needed to ensure the government doesn't discriminate against health-care providers who refuse to perform abortion procedures for moral or religious reasons.

Again, the same question arises. Why oppose language in the bill that would accomplish what the Democrats say they want to accomplish?

And then there's President Obama's promise from early on that he wouldn't sign any legislation that the public didn't have a chance to read, but Republican efforts to have the health care bill put online for a mere three days prior to the vote so the public can study it - even if legislators won't - are meeting with stout resistance from the Democrats. Informing the public about what their elected representatives are up to is evidently asking more than what Democrats can be expected to bear.

In other words, the Democrats, both in the Congress and the White House, seem to be making it clear that they simply can't be trusted to tell us the truth about their intentions, and that they can't be trusted to govern in the best interests of the people they're supposed to be serving. It really is a shame.

RLC

Dawkins' New Book

Richard Dawkins, the atheist evolutionary biologist who wrote the best-seller The God Delusion, has a new book out, titled The Greatest Show on Earth, in which he discusses the evidence for evolution. Dawkins is interviewed by Newsweek's Lisa Miller who poses an interesting question or two:

Why were you motivated to write this book?

Well, it's about the evidence for evolution. Evolution is one of the most fascinating ideas in all of science. It explains your existence and mine, and the existence of just about everything we see. How can you possibly ask what motivated me? It's just a wonderful subject to write a book about.

Is this supposed to be the definitive refutation of creationist arguments?

Well, it's amazing that there needs to be a definitive refutation of them, but yes, if you put it like that, it is a propitious time from that point of view. Any time would have been a good time for this book.

Excerpts from the rest of the interview are at the link. I haven't read the book yet, but I have read The God Delusion (and wrote an extensive critique of it here). If the case for evolution in Greatest Show is as well-argued as was the case against God in God Delusion, those creationists won't have much about which to worry.

RLC

Hypocrisy Among the Glitterati

It is surely a symptom of a hopelessly decadent culture that a man in his forties, Roman Polanski, can drug a thirteen year-old girl, anally rape her as she pleads with him to stop, admit to the crime, flee the country, and then have much of Hollywood and even some feminists protest his arrest and extradition back to the U.S. to be held accountable for his crime.

Joan Z. Shore writes at HuffPo that she's outraged at the Swiss for arresting Polanski who, she tells us, is really very charming:

The 13-year old model "seduced" by Polanski had been thrust onto him by her mother, who wanted her in the movies. The girl was just a few weeks short of her 14th birthday, which was the age of consent in California. (It's probably 13 by now!) Polanski was demonized by the press, convicted, and managed to flee, fearing a heavy sentence.

I met Polanski shortly after he fled America and was filming Tess in Normandy. I was working in the CBS News bureau in Paris, and I accompanied Mike Wallace for a Sixty Minutes interview with Polanski on the set. Mike thought he would be meeting the devil incarnate, but was utterly charmed by Roman's sobriety and intelligence.

And this from a co-founder of Women Overseas for Equality. You've come a long way, baby.

The poor, maligned Mr. Polanski in a 1979 interview reflected on his crime and demonstrated the depth of his remorse by expressing his feelings about young girls. It's not pretty.

If you check the link just imagine that Polanski were not a celebrated filmmaker but rather a Catholic priest or even worse, a Republican. Do you think there'd be anyone in Hollywood not in favor of hanging the guy from the nearest tree? Why should this man get sympathy just because he makes movies?

One might be forgiven for thinking that the deep concern for the status of women in this country is, for at least some of those foremost among women's advocates, merely a pose struck by phonies who wish to be seen holding fashionable opinions. There's no conviction in their high-minded paens to women's rights and women's equality. This was clear during the nineties when women's groups which had flayed Clarence Thomas for having allegedly made an off-color remark in the presence of the delicate and sensitive Anita Hill completely ignored the credible allegations of rape and sexual abuse made by several women against President Clinton.

Now, because the rapist is one of their own, an artist of great talent, they think he should be permitted his perversions. These people give a whole new meaning to the term "double standard."

RLC

Vanishing Demographic

Bruce Feiler reports on a story at Fox News that will disturb some and excite others depending on whether one is a Christian or a secularist. A study called The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) reveals that:

Protestants now represent only half of all Americans, down almost 20 percent in the last twenty years. In the coming months, America will become a minority Protestant nation for the first time since the pilgrims settled Massachussetts.

Meanwhile, the number of people who claim no religious affiliation has doubled since 1990 to fifteen percent, its highest point in history.

Here are some other findings of the survey:

1) The number of Christians has declined 12% since 1990, and is now 76%, the lowest percentage in American history.

2) The growth of non-believers has come largely from men. Twenty percent of men express no religious affiliation; 12% of women.

3) Young people are fleeing faith. Nearly a quarter of Americans in their 20's profess no organized religion.

4) But these non-believers are not particularly atheist. That number hasn't budged and stands at less than 1 percent. (Agnostics are similarly less than 1 percent.) Instead, these individuals have a belief in God but no interest in organized religion, or they believe in a personal God but not in a formal faith tradition. People are leaving institutional religion but they're not leaving God, at least they claim not to be.

The fact that so many people are finding traditional religion inadequate comes as no surprise, but it should serve as an alarum for organized religious institutions. They simply aren't meeting peoples' needs, especially the need of young people to be offered a belief system that seems vibrant, powerful, and relevant to their lives.

Feiler says that catering to older believers, which many churches do because the old people are the big contributors, is a recipe for failure. Younger Americans feel excluded and are tuning out. This is precisely what Mark Kinnaman documents in his book Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity.

Feiler also observes that Americans are interested in God, but they don't think existing institutions are helping them draw closer to Him. This may be true of traditional denominational religion, much of which seems to have lost its way in seeking to ingratiate itself with Modernity. Traditional denominations like the United Church of Christ, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, etc. have been slow to recognize that forms, structures, and practices that were adequate for prior to the 1970s often seem alien and bizarre to people born after 1960. Even so, what is true of "mainline" protestantism is much less true of contemporary independent churches many of which have shown an admirable flexibility and adaptibility without compromising traditional Christian faith.

The column closes with a hope and a warning:

"Americans' interest in religion has not always been stable. It dipped following the Revolution and again following Civil War. In both cases it rebounded because religious institutions adapted and found new ways of relating to everyday Americans."

They need to do the same today or "risk becoming Europe, where religion is fast becoming an afterthought."

RLC

Michelle Malkin

Lloyd Grove at The Daily Beast gives us a little insight into Michelle Malkin who is one of the most influential people in the blogosphere:

So who is this softspoken, self-deprecating woman talking to me on the phone?

"I'm a human being," Malkin says from her home in tranquil Colorado Springs (tranquil, except for the shrieking of Air Force jets-"the sound of freedom," Malkin says), far, far away from the media-political complex. "I mean, every once in a while it might get under my skin. But I can't stop ad hominem attacks against me."

I've just asked if it ever bothers her that so many people dislike her - even worse, despise her. She did, after all, once write a book defending the World War II internment camps for Japanese-Americans, and calling for racial profiling of Arabs in the war on terror.

The recipient of occasional death threats, she has twice felt the need to move her family to undisclosed locations-and in recent years decamped from suburban Washington to the flyover wilds of Colorado. When she goes on book tour or lectures on college campuses, she is accompanied by a private security guard. "I limit the amount of traveling and speaking that I do, but you just never know," she says.

There's much in this piece that'll interest readers who want to see how one woman has made a difference in the way America is informed about its political leadership. It also gives a sense of the sort of vitriol the left seeks to throw in the face of anyone who challenges their dogmas and criticizes their apostles.

RLC

An Intelligent Debate on Intelligent Design

Telic Thoughts digs up an Uncommon Knowledge segment from a couple of years ago that's worth watching if you'd like to see a calm debate between two of the most prominent figures in the Darwinism/Intelligent Design controversy discuss the issue. The two are Massimo Pigliucci, a Darwinian, and Jonathan Wells, an IDer. The discussion is moderated by Peter Robinson who does an outstanding job of keeping the debate on track and focusing on some interesting issues. He manages to pack a lot into a twenty six minute segment. Give it a look:

RLC

Ignorance and Cowardice?

Very few people, at least among conservatives, put any confidence in candidate Obama's claim that Afghanistan was the war we had to fight, that this was the "good war," a "war of necessity." Many observers thought then that he was just using this rhetoric to prepare the country for a withdrawal from Iraq and allay fears among voters that he might be capitulating in the war against Islamic terrorism. Few conservatives believed then that his heart was really in fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan so few are now surprised that he seems to want to dither over General McChrystal's report that he needs 45,000 more troops to prevent defeat in that woe-begotten territory.

Columnist Ruben Navarette, who is certainly no knee-jerk Obama opponent, writes that:

According to McClatchy Newspapers, military officials in Kabul and Washington say that the White House and Pentagon over the last six weeks had issued directives telling McChrystal not to submit a specific request for an increase in U.S. forces; the general is said to want as many as 45,000 additional troops. The administration isn't ready to consider that option. Instead, McChrystal sent his 66-page report last month to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. As everyone knows by now, the general concluded that the U.S. effort in Afghanistan "will likely result in failure" without a new strategy and an urgent infusion of troops. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, both backed that assessment.

Obama's own arguments about what to do in Afghanistan have not been very persuasive. Not even to himself. In March, he declared that the United States would prevent the return of the Taliban and "enhance the military, governance and economic capacity" of Afghanistan in order to help prevent al-Qaeda from returning and once again using the country as a launching pad for further attacks against the United States. But now the president seems to be backing off from his own hard line. On CBS' "Face the Nation," Obama said that "the only reason I send a single young man or woman in uniform anywhere in the world is because I think it's necessary to keep us safe. ... We're not gonna put the cart before the horse and just think by sending more troops (to Afghanistan) we're automatically going to make Americans safe."

So no matter what Obama said in the spring, it is no surprise that many White House advisers, including Vice President Joe Biden, are looking for a way to leave Afghanistan. That would be a grave mistake, and an abdication of Obama's duty to keep Americans safe by preventing more acts of terrorism. More than a clumsy flip-flop on policy, it would also be an outright betrayal of the military leaders that he put in charge of the operation in Afghanistan.

According to McClatchy, some members of McChrystal's staff said they don't understand why Obama called Afghanistan a "war of necessity" but still hasn't given them the resources they need to do what is necessary.

McChrystal is in a tough spot. When he isn't fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, he has to combat ignorance and cowardice on the Potomac. The general might have to end his career over this. But he shouldn't back down -- not when strong leaders are in such short supply.

Ignorance and cowardice are strong words, especially when used to describe the President of the United States, and I don't want to judge whether they apply in this case. Nor do I want to parse Navarette's reference to the dearth of strong leadership and speculate on exactly who he had in mind, but I do think that Mr. Obama has been disingenuous with the American people on the matter of his committment to Afghanistan. The President, after all, is a man of the left, the left abhors our military involvements abroad, and everyone who understands this should have known prior to the election that Mr. Obama would vacillate on Afghanistan regardless of how resolute he sounded during the campaign.

Now the President is confronted with a choice, and he can't vote "present." He must either accede to General McChrystal's request or he must pull up stakes in Afghanistan and come home. If he does the former he will surely anger his progressive base. If he does the latter he risks being judged by history as feckless and irresponsible and will be roundly punished by historians for handing Afghanistan back to al Qaeda to be used as a base for further terror operations against the U.S. and this after the loss of hundreds of American lives on that barren soil.

Moreover, if he chooses to give up in Afghanistan it will be a demoralizing blow to the American military and our intelligence agencies and will greatly strengthen the resolve of our enemies who already believe that we lack the endurance to prevail in the generational war they're waging against us. The weakness Mr. Obama will project if he withdraws will haunt this country for decades in a myriad of ways, just as did our ignominious flight from Vietnam in the 1970s.

Mr. Obama is going to have to spurn his base once again or be seen by the world as weak, wobbly, and risible. The first step in doing the right thing would be to finally, eight months into his presidency, give a nationally televised speech on Afghanistan and Iraq and dispel the growing suspicion that he simply doesn't care very much about what happens there.

RLC

New Media Vs. Old

Reformed leftist Ron Radosh indicts modern journalism for dereliction of duty and blames it for the rise of the hyper-partisan talk shows that afflict talk radio and both MSNBC and Fox News:

Let us examine a few recent developments. First, the resignation of Van Jones. Jones's background and previous life as a far-left revolutionary was exposed by a blogger who writes under the name Gateway Pundit. Material about Jones was made available at David Horowitz's website DiscoverTheNetworks.com. The material was relevant to the public's right to know whether such a man should have ever been appointed to a White House position. The blogs were completely ignored, until Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck took up the case and nightly aired segments about him. But it was not until he resigned that readers of the "paper of record," the New York Times, ever heard one word about him. Clearly, liberal editors and reporters, knowing that conservatives were responsible for digging up the easily found data about Jones, thought it could be ignored. That decision further inflamed Fox's viewers, whose protests and ruckus forced the administration to ditch him.

Had they done their job, the placing of Fox News alone as the only media outlet concerned about Jones might not have taken place....[R]egular reporters were not interested; nor were their editors. Indeed, they probably decided to not look into it when they found out where the sources about Jones came from. It was a decision that seriously hurt their own credibility. At that point, the Jones case became a battle between Fox News and MSNBC; i.e., Beck and Hannity versus Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

A similar thing took place with ACORN. As we now know, the recent actions to defund them by Congress and for the IRS and Census Bureau to break their contracts with the group came after the independent videos made by the now famous duo of Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe were put up at Andrew Breitbart's Big Government website. After the Fox News regulars aired them repeatedly, they became major news - and eventually, one knew it was over for ACORN once Jon Stewart and Jay Leno both ran biting sequences ridiculing the community organizing activist group.

The traditional media, the big three networks, major newspapers, Time, Newsweek, etc. have two, perhaps fatal, handicaps. First, their key staff people are often committed to an ideological progressivism that induces them to suppress stories unfavorable to their committments and to run stories, like CBS did with the George Bush National Guard story, which would advance their goals were they true but which turn out to be fabrications. This sort of thing has seriously eroded their credibility.

Second, they operate under constraints of time and space which simply don't fetter the new media. If there's a story out there newspapers can report it at best once a day and they can only devote a limited number of column inches to it. Newsmagazines can't even report it that often. If there are updates to the story they have to wait in abeyance until the next edition is published a day, or even a week, later.

Blogs are free to give as much space to a story as they wish, and they can update throughout the day. A story spreads much faster across the internet than through any other medium. The most popular blogs can also rely on an army of competent readers with expertise in a diverse array of fields to comment on technical aspects of a story and to correct mistakes. In short, many blogs present more stories on particular subjects, more thoroughly, more often, in a more entertaining way, and contrary to what traditional media people like to think, just as accurately, as any other news vehicle. It's hard to compete with that.

The traditional news venues in this country are in trouble. Part of their woes are due to the fact that they simply are not structured to compete with the newer forms of media, and part is that too many of them are simply not trusted to objectively report the news. At least in the new media you know you're getting a conservative or liberal slant and you can easily check their competitors (except in talk radio which, for some reason, has not been favorable to liberal success)to see what they have to say about a matter. This is very hard to do if one relies purely on broadcast news, newspapers and magazines.

Anyway, check out Radosh's piece. It's pretty good.

RLC

Revolution in Higher Ed

Zephyr Teachout at the Washington Post offers up a disturbing augury of the future of higher education:

Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which "going to college" means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive.

The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. Community colleges and for-profit education entrepreneurs are already experimenting with dorm-free, commute-free options. Distance-learning technology will keep improving. Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree, making the education business today look like the news biz circa 1999. And as major universities offer some core courses online, we'll see a cultural shift toward acceptance of what is still, in some circles, a "University of Phoenix" joke.

Just as other dispensers of information, e.g. newspapers, are fighting an increasingly desperate battle to survive the encroachments of modern communication technologies so, too, will universities be forced to change or perish:

This doesn't just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of tenure are all threatened.

Both newspapers and universities have traditionally relied on selling hard-to-come-by information. Newspapers touted advertising space next to breaking news, but now that advertisers find their customers on Craigslist and Cars.com, the main source of reporters' pay is vanishing. Colleges also sell information, with a slightly different promise -- a degree, a better job and access to brilliant minds. As with newspapers, some of these features are now available elsewhere. A student can already access videotaped lectures, full courses and openly available syllabuses online. And in five or 10 years, the curious 18- (or 54-) year-old will be able to find dozens of quality online classes, complete with take-it-yourself tests, a bulletin board populated by other "students," and links to free academic literature.

Because the current college system, like the newspaper industry, has built-in redundancies, new Internet efficiencies will lead to fewer researchers and professors. Every major paper once had a bureau in, say, Sarajevo -- now, a few foreign correspondents' pieces are used in dozens of papers. Similarly, at noon on any given day, hundreds of university professors are teaching introductory Sociology 101. The Internet makes it harder to justify these redundancies. In the future, a handful of Soc. 101 lectures will be videotaped and taught across the United States.

When this happens -- be it in 10 years or 20 -- we will see a structural disintegration in the academy akin to that in newspapers now. The typical 2030 faculty will likely be a collection of adjuncts alone in their apartments, using recycled syllabuses and administering multiple-choice tests from afar.

There's more on this sad prognostication at the link. I don't wish to sound like a Luddite, but I think what Teachout envisions would be a terrible development. The classroom is more than just a space in which knowledge is imparted. It's a place where relationships are formed, where students get the chance, if they want it, to ask spontaneous questions and pursue lines of inquiry in ways that are hard to achieve through a computer screen. Teaching is more than just putting a syllabus online and emailing tests to students. It's also communicating a love and enthusiasm for the subject matter and an interest in one's students. Moreover, a campus is more than just a place where students go to attend class, it's a community where dozens of opportunities for growth and development present themselves to young people.

It's not that students can't learn by staring at a monitor for even more hours every day than they already do, it's rather that learning in isolation is one-dimensional and impersonal.

What Teachout is predicting is essentially the dehumanization of education, an impoverishment of the intellectual life that will make us more alienated, estranged, and less human. I hope she's wrong.

RLC

Eroding Freedom

According to a report at Politico.com another bit of our freedom will slide away if ObamaCare passes into law:

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) received a handwritten note Thursday from Joint Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Tom Barthold confirming the penalty for failing to pay the up to $1,900 fee for not buying health insurance.

Violators could be charged with a misdemeanor and could face up to a year in jail or a $25,000 penalty, Barthold wrote on JCT letterhead. He signed it "Sincerely, Thomas A. Barthold."

According to the bill currently before the Senate (Sen. Max Baucus' bill) you will be required to buy health insurance, regardless of whether you think you need it or not, and regardless of whether you want it or not. If you don't buy it you will be fined. If you don't pay the fine you will be put in jail. How's that for Hope 'n Change?

The argument is sometimes made that this is no different than requiring people to buy automobile insurance, but that argument is specious. You are not required to buy automobile insurance unless you drive. If you don't drive you don't have to buy it. Moreover, drivers are required to have coverage in the event they harm someone else in a traffic accident. If a driver could only harm himself there would be no need to require coverage.

If people wish to risk not having health coverage they should have that right, but then medical facilities should have the right, as a general principle, to decline treating those who accept that risk. Government should stay out of it.

The reason for requiring coverage, of course, is that it's hard to mandate that insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions if people can wait to buy insurance until they have a problem. By forcing everyone into the system, insurers will have enough capital to cover PEC patients they'd be unable to cover under the current system. The problem is that a lot of people are too well off to qualify for medicaid but too poor to be able to afford to buy insurance or to even pay the $1900 fine. These people should be free to decide how they wish to direct their meager resources without the nanny state coercing them into buying health insurance.

The idea that health care coverage is somehow a right is, in any event, a rather recent and dubious, invention. Millions of people alive today grew up with no "right" to health care coverage and chose to risk living without it until they were able to afford it or got a job that offered it.

The Baucus bill is an attempt to take away the freedom you have to manage your own affairs and to make your own choices in life. If, as we've been told with monotonous regularity since the 70s, the government should stay out of our bedrooms, then even more should the government stay out of our decisions about how to manage our finances and our health care.

RLC

Blinded by the Light

The web site Copyrights and Campaigns has an analysis of the prospects for the recent lawsuit filed by ACORN and two former employees against the two young filmmakers who videotaped employees of the group dispensing advice to a fake pimp and prostitute, as well as against Big Government, the blog that publicized the videos. The suit, which seeks monetary damages and an injunction against further broadcast of the videos, alleges that the filmmakers violated Maryland's law against surreptitious audio recording. It's unlikely, says C&C, that the suit will succeed.

Here's the nut of ACORN's problem:

Maryland's statute requires consent from all parties to record -- which the defendants clearly appear to have lacked. But, crucially, courts have interpreted the statute to apply only where the plaintiffs have a reasonable expectation of privacy ("REP") .... While the law in Maryland itself is scant, and the question is not entirely free of doubt, I think it unlikely that a Maryland court would find that ACORN and its employees had a REP in the circumstances here. Thompson and Williams (the ACORN employees)were speaking with complete strangers they had just met. They were meeting in an office open to any customer who happened to wander in off the street. Though the meeting itself appears to have occurred in a conference room, the door was open. And it appears likely that their voices could be heard outside the room; after all, in the video, we can hear children's voices carrying into the room where the recording occurred.

This is pretty ironic. ACORN employees are caught engaging in disreputable if not illegal behavior, and so ACORN sues the people who caught them doing it. That's like the burglar suing the homeowner because the homeowner shined a light in his face causing him to trip down the stairs and break his leg. To make it worse there are reports (though I don't vouch for their accuracy) that the left is scouring the internet trying to dig up dirt on the girl who played the role of the prostitute in the sting. It's not clear what, other than giving vent to their vindictiveness, they would hope to accomplish by destroying her reputation. Perhaps they simply wish to intimidate anyone who might be inclined to shine a bright light on the inner machinations of other left-wing organizations in this country.

The lawsuit may actually blow up in ACORN's face, however, since they may be forced in discovery to reveal exhaustive information about their operation. Wouldn't that be interesting.

RLC

The Secular Party

Secular Right offers an interesting graphic which shows that the Democratic party is becoming increasingly the party of secularists whereas the Republican party is becoming increasingly the party of the religious. As secularism increases in the U.S. (from 9% in 1990 to 15% today) those without any religious affiliation are finding a home in the Democratic party:

People like Glenn Beck often insist that there's no substantive difference between the two major parties but, as this graphic illustrates, such claims are misleading.

It might be interesting to speculate on why secular folk are drawn to the Democrats and religious folk are attracted to the GOP. One reason, surely, is that the Democrat party is seen, with some justification, as the party of abortion and libertinism and the party whose supporters pose the greatest threat to religious freedom in this country.

RLC

You Tell 'Em, Ed

This is Ed Schultz of MSNBC doing his best impression of a calm, reasoned, fair-minded assessment of the critics of the President's health care plan:

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air says: "I seem to recall that Republicans wanted to abolish the death tax, and Democrats objected. Which party wants to make money off of your dead corpse?"

Good question. Anyway, this clip is a fine example of something I mentioned yesterday. The less confident a man is in making his case the more prone he is to using this sort of ridiculous rhetoric. After all, when people have the facts on their side they'll argue the facts for the simple reason that it's the most persuasive type of argument. If they stoop to scurrilous and absurd smears, as Schultz does, that's a good indication that at some level they know they're trying to hold indefensible ground, and they try to compensate for the weakness of their position with an abundance of insults, name-calling and bluster.

RLC

See No Evil (On the Left)

Nancy Pelosi called them Swastika-sporting Nazis. Other Democrats accused them of being a racist mob. Harry Reid labeled them "evil-mongers" (Ooh, that must have hurt). They were mocked as "tea-baggers," a sleazy innuendo referring to a gay sex act. There was, we were told by gentle, peace-loving Democrats, the threat of imminent violence in their protests (despite the fact that the only violence was perpetrated by a union thug who beat up a black guy selling flags and another Obama supporter who bit off the finger of an elderly man).

Who were these disreputable individuals who posed such a serious threat to our public discourse? They were mostly retired grandfathers and grandmothers fed up with politicians who were about to foist upon them a revolutionary overhaul of American health care that most of the politicians hadn't even studied. To grind salt into the wound some Democrat politicians actually scoffed at the idea that they should read the legislation they were voting on.

When a million, more or less, of these angry but good-humored citizens descended on Washington, D.C. the other week to express their displeasure with Congress and the Obama administration they actually left the place cleaner than they found it. Nevertheless, they were maligned and deprecated by Democrats and their media allies.

Now we face another massive protest, this time by people who truly are violent and who certainly don't plan to clean up their mess before they leave. These are people who will destroy property and maim innocents who get in their way. They've done it before. But you'll hear nothing but the sound of silence from Pelosi and Reid about these people. That's because these demonstrators are seen by progressives as fellow-travelers. They're far-left anarchists and as such they incur sympathy for their cause and even, surreptitiously, perhaps, for their tactics among more main-stream leftists in our political class and media.

There will be few denunciations of these people emanating from leftist precincts this weekend when they converge on Pittsburgh to try to disrupt the G20 Summit that's convening there. No matter how much vandalism they commit, no matter what the cost to the taxpayers of their behavior, the left will be largely silent. No insults, no ridicule, no allegations of Nazism, no complaints about violence - none of the condemnations such as were directed at the obstreperous but otherwise peaceful town hall protestors and tea-partiers. What we'll hear from the Democrats in Washington will be the sound of silence.

Let me know about it if I'm not right.

RLC

Another Puzzle

The other day we talked about a couple of evolutionary puzzles - insect metamorphosis and the waggle dance of bees. Robert Deyes at Uncommon Descent offers us another: Animal migration.

Creatures as diverse as Monarch butterflies, Green sea turtles, Arctic terns, Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds, and salmon all must coordinate a complex series of factors - body mass, time of migration, food availability, weather, global position (without benefit of landmarks for pelagic migrants) - all, in the case of young of the year, without ever having done it before. How did such astonishing abilities evolve when the costs and risks to the organism are so high and the benefits so seemingly minor? Here's Deyes:

Those in favor of evolution's ways openly struggle to understand the selective advantage afforded by the migratory birds' seemingly deliberate draining of precious resources. By their own admission "Migration exacts a high toll [as] grizzlies wait in streams and gorge on exhausted salmon migrating home from the sea, and falcons feast on fatigued songbirds arriving at their winter home in Africa. Fuel used by muscles to propel wings, fins, and legs is unavailable for reproductive activities, and time spent on the move is time not spent gathering food." They counter their self-imposed quandary by assuming a priori that selection 'favors the brave' and that over time survival benefits must have outweighed such costs. Evolution is after all a 'fact' and so what must have happened must have happened. Such circular reasoning of course gets us nowhere and leaves the above functional challenges unanswered.

Migration is indeed a mystery - a mystery in terms of how it's accomplished and a mystery in terms of why and how it ever evolved. Of course, if the evolution of this amazing behavior were directed by an intelligent agent a big part of the mystery, though certainly not all of it (the question of how the agent did it, for example, would still remain), would be cleared up.

RLC

Huffing and Puffing

Michael Egnor at Evolution News and Notes writes that:

"The ID-Darwinism debate is rapidly eroding materialist credibility, not only because of the strength of the ID arguments, but because ID proponents have forced materialists to state clearly what they believe. Candor is incompatible with materialist ideology; Darwinists are angry in large part because they've been forced to explain themselves."

This is an interesting insight. Nothing irritates a man like having to defend what he just knows to be true, especially when the truth is obvious to him and he can't understand why it isn't obvious to everyone. Unfortunately, Darwinism is only obvious if one starts from the assumption that materialism, or naturalism, is true. If that's so then something like Darwinian evolution simply must be the case, but the problem is that it's by no means obvious that materialism is true, and there are lots of reasons to think that it's not.

The IDer who attacks Darwinism by attacking materialism is cutting to the heart of the matter. He's laying seige to fundamental core convictions and showing them to be little more than smoke and mirrors. Few approaches are more certain to arouse a man's anger than exposing the hollow pretensions of his presuppositions. Most intelligent people sense when the philosophical ice is cracking under their feet and they often seek to mask their alarm and insecurity by throwing up clouds of anger and hostility, as if huffing and puffing were an adequate substitute for rational explanation.

It's a good rule of thumb, I think, that the angrier and nastier someone gets in an argument the less sure he is of the strength of his case.

RLC