Is AARP Bought and Paid for?

Michelle Malkin notes that AARP offers the only health coverage that under "ObamaCare" would be exempt from having to accept clients with medical pre-conditions. Their Medigap program rakes in $400 million a year and will not be required to incur the expense of insuring those whose medical conditions make it a near certainty that the insurer will have to pay out huge sums for treatment. What did AARP do to get this favored status?

The intrepid Jason Mattera chases down an AARP officer to get an answer to that question and others. He wonders whether the exemption has anything to do with AARP's support of the health care reform bill currently before Congress. Needless to say, he doesn't get much satisfaction:

RLC

Evolutionary Ethics (Part III)

This post concludes our discussion of Marc Hauser's essay Biology (Not Religion) Equals Morality in which he attempts to argue that morality can be, and should be, based upon our biological nature. You can read Parts I and II here and here.

Mr. Hauser's essay continues by presenting us with examples of moral dilemmas from which he draws the wrong conclusion:

... if five people in a hospital each require an organ to survive, is it permissible for a doctor to take the organs of a healthy person who happens to walk by the hospital? Or if a lethal gas has leaked into the vent of a factory and is headed towards a room with seven people, is it permissible to push someone into the vent, preventing the gas from reaching the seven but killing the one? These are true moral dilemmas - challenging problems that push on our intuitions as lay jurists, forcing us to wrestle with the opposing forces of consequences (saving the lives of many) and rules (killing is wrong).

Based on the responses of thousands of participants to more than 100 dilemmas, we find no difference between men and women, young and old, theistic believers and non-believers, liberals and conservatives. When it comes to judging unfamiliar moral scenarios, your cultural background is virtually irrelevant.

Well, maybe, but it shouldn't be. I would be among the last to say that moral choices are never excruciatingly difficult, but, in the cases that Hauser cites, not so much. The Christian is guided by one overarching principle: Always do the act which maximizes compassion and justice. In the scenarios that Hauser constructs it would be manifestly unjust to take organs from an unwilling passerby and equally unjust to push someone into the vent to save others, even if the others were children, even if they were your own children (surely an individual should jump into the vent himself rather than push another into it).

Hauser assumes, apparently, that everyone thinks in utilitarian terms which require of us that we produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number. A utilitarian could superficially justify sacrificing the happiness of one innocent person in order to maximize the happiness of many, but a Christian cannot.

What guides your judgments is the universal and unconscious voice of our species, a biological code, a universal moral grammar....If this code is universal and impartial, then why are there are so many moral atrocities in the world? The answer comes from thinking about our emotions, the feelings we recruit to fuel in-group favouritism, out-group hatred and, ultimately, dehumanisation.

Actually the answer is because atheism offers us no reason why we should not submit to our emotions, nor does it offer us any reason why we should care about anyone but ourselves, but that aside, on what biological or evolutionary grounds does Mr. Hauser condemn in-group favoritism or out-group hatred? These behaviors are as natural to our species as breathing. They've been encoded in our DNA by millenia of evolution. Why, in an atheistic view of things, are they wrong? What is the standard Mr. Hauser is smuggling in here in order to judge them as wrong?

It can't be that he finds warrant for disdaining them in our biological nature because these behaviors are fundamentally ingrained in that nature. It can't be that evolution gives him reason to condemn them because on his view evolution is responsible for their existence.

Mr. Hauser wants to say that out-group hatred is wrong but he can't tell us why. He wants to say, in effect, that there is a natural law written on our hearts that forbids such behavior, but no natural "law" rooted in our evolutionary development can be morally obligatory (see part II). Favoritism or hatred can only be wrong if the source of the natural law is a transcendent moral authority, and that's something Hauser's atheism does not allow.

Consider the psychopath, Hollywood's favourite moral monster. Clinical studies reveal that they feel no remorse, shame, guilt or empathy, and lack the tools for self-control. Because they lacked these capacities, several experts have argued that they lack the wherewithal to understand what is right or wrong and, consequently, to do the wrong thing. New studies show, however, that this conclusion is at least partially wrong. Psychopaths know full well what is right and wrong but don't care. Their moral knowledge is intact but their moral emotions are damaged. They are perfectly normal jurists but perfectly abnormal moral actors. For the psychopath, other humans are no different from rocks or artefacts. They are disposable.

In fact, if naturalism is true we should all be moral psychopaths. Remorse, guilt, shame, etc. are simply illusions that deceive us into thinking we've done something terribly wrong when in fact we haven't. Now that we're enlightened and realize, as atheist Michael Ruse puts it, that "morality is just an illusion fobbed off upon us by our genes in order to get us to cooperate," we should shed these emotions like a growing child sheds his fear of the dark and face the fact that we have nothing to feel guilty about because there's no such thing as guilt.

Guilt can only exist in a world in which our behavior stands condemned by a competent moral judge. In the world of the naturalist there are no moral judges, only, in Richard Dawkins' words, "blind, pitiless indifference."

RLC

Kiva

A while ago we made brief mention of the increasing popularity of microfinance as a great way to help poor entrepreneurs get enough capital to start or maintain their businesses. In the post we touted an organization called Kiva which is involved in this sort of work. I've since come across an article about Kiva in Christianity Today that some of you might like to check out. It's a wonderful way to do something truly meaningful this Christmas season.

RLC

Fat Lips, Fat Heads

In a post we did a week or so ago I mentioned the injustice of court martialing three navy SEALs who were accused of punching a terrorist and then trying to cover it up. In my opinion the people who ought to be court martialed are the Navy poobahs who are charging these men. Surely fatheadedness among the brass is a court-martial-worthy offense, and if it's not it should be.

Clifford May has a piece on this at National Review Online that's worth reading if you want to see how wimpish the higher echelons of our military have become. May writes:

Surely, these SEALs - like all American citizens - deserve the presumption of innocence. It's also worth recalling that the al-Qaeda manual recommends that all detainees complain of torture and abuse.

But what if it turns out that one of the SEALs did give the guy a shot? What if Abed was uncooperative, or spit at them, or bragged about how he slaughtered the Americans (one of whom was a retired SEAL) and how they begged for their lives and squealed like pigs as they died? I can imagine how a normal guy - even one as disciplined as a SEAL - might lose his temper for a moment.

In that case, I wouldn't expect a senior officer to turn a blind eye. I'd expect him to take the SEALs aside and say, "Let me be clear: You guys cut the John Wayne stuff or you're going to be peeling potatoes on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf for the next six months. Understood?" The reply would be: "Yes, sir! Understood, sir!" And that would be the end of that.

But a court martial? Maybe there's more to it than we know. But how much more could there be? Abed is alive. He has two eyes, two ears, ten fingers, and ten toes. This much is clear: If a single alleged knuckle sandwich is all it takes to remove three special operators from the battlefield, Abed won this battle.

A terrorist in American custody should be aware that he is in the presence of principled professionals. But he should not believe that he is untouchable or that he is entitled to the rights enjoyed by an American citizen under the U.S. Constitution - a document he'd gladly trample underfoot.

He should know that the troops who detain him are not like him: They won't chop off his head on video tape while chanting praise for a divinity pleased by the carnage. But he also should know that if he asks for a fat lip, he might just get a fat lip.

Read the whole article. The more I read about political correctness in the military the more convinced I am that our troops are made of far sterner stuff than are those who command them.

RLC

An Exact Science

Since the filched emails from East Anglia were released a month ago we've come to learn a lot about the scientific method, at least as it is practiced by some leading global warming enthusiasts. Consider this graph, for example, which shows temperature data at Darwin, Australia for the twentieth century:

The red line is alarming indeed. It shows temperatures in a runaway ascent, but there's a catch. Although the red line is what's usually cited when the global warming folk want to put a good scare into school children, it actually represents what is called "adjusted" data. In other words, the field measurements are deemed in need of adjusting to account for all sorts of factors like the implementation of new equipment or moving the recording apparatus to a different location, etc. So the climatologists throw into the data mix an eye of newt and a wing of bat and out comes adjusted temperatures that'll frighten the bejabbers out of you.

On the graph the black line represents the adjustment factor. The raw data, the measurements that were actually recorded by the instruments at Darwin, are in blue, and notice that these temperatures have been essentially flat throughout the twentieth century.

It's not until the global warming alchemists have applied their ministrations to the raw data that we get something that Al Gore can sell books about. In the meantime, it looks like the raw data show no real change occurring at all, at least not in Darwin.

Go to the link for a more thorough analysis.

RLC

Evolutionary Ethics (Part II)

This post continues our discussion of Marc Hauser's essay Biology (Not Religion) Equals Morality in which he attempts to argue that morality can be, and should be, based upon our biological nature. You can read Part I here.

Hauser writes:

None of my comments so far are meant to be divisive with respect to the meaning and sense of community that many derive from religion. Where I intend to be divisive is with respect to the argument that religion, and moral education more generally, represent the only - or perhaps even the ultimate - source of moral reasoning. If anything, moral education is often motivated by self-interest, to do what's best for those within a moral community, preaching singularity, not plurality. Blame nurture, not nature, for our moral atrocities against humanity. And blame educated partiality more generally, as this allows us to lump into one category all those who fail to acknowledge our shared humanity and fail to use secular reasoning to practice compassion.

But why should we care about our "shared humanity?" Why should we practice compassion? Hauser never tells us. He just assumes that this is the right thing to do, but we need to ask him what fact of evolution or our biology is he basing this assumption upon? Indeed, what fact of our biology tells us that we should not act in our self-interest? To such questions Hauser gives no answer.

He adds this:

If religion is not the source of our moral insights - and moral education has the demonstrated potential to teach partiality and, therefore, morally destructive behaviour - then what other sources of inspiration are on offer?

One answer to this question is emerging from an unsuspected corner of academia: the mind sciences. Recent discoveries suggest that all humans, young and old, male and female, conservative and liberal, living in Sydney, San Francisco and Seoul, growing up as atheists, Buddhists, Catholics and Jews, with high school, university or professional degrees, are endowed with a gift from nature, a biological code for living a moral life.

This code, a universal moral grammar, provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong. It is an impartial, rational and unemotional capacity. It doesn't dictate who we should help or who we are licensed to harm. Rather, it provides an abstract set of rules for how to intuitively understand when helping another is obligatory and when harming another is forbidden. And it does so dispassionately and impartially.

This is fascinating. It sounds exactly like what natural law philosophers and theologians have been saying for centuries. Indeed St. Paul writing to the church at Rome in the first century observed that everyone has a moral law "written on their hearts" (See Romans 2: 15).

But the question is not whether we have such a moral code or moral sense but rather where it comes from. This makes all the difference as to whether it is in any way incumbent upon us. If the code is inscribed on our hearts by God then it is presumably morally obligatory, but if it's the product of evolution then we're no more obligated to observe it than we are obligated to cover our mouth when yawning. If this law that Mr. Hauser thinks he has discovered is the product of blind chance and purposelessness which somehow conspired to fit us for life in the stone age then why should we live our lives by it today? It's merely an evolutionary vestige, like a man's beard, and can be ignored or removed with just as little moral consequence.

To argue that because we have a moral sense we are therefore bound to live by it is to commit the fallacy of deriving an "ought" from an "is" (sometimes called the naturalistic fallacy). It simply does not follow that because something is a certain way it therefore ought to be that way. Just because in some situations we feel compassion for others does not mean that if we didn't feel compassion we'd be in some sense morally wrong.

Moreover, evolution-based ethics are highly selective in what they deem right and wrong. On what basis, for instance, do we determine which of our evolved behaviors are morally good and which are not? Men are just as likely, perhaps more likely, to be selfish, cruel and violent as they are to be generous, kind, and peaceful. Both tendencies, according to Hauser's view, are part of our biological makeup and must result from our evolutionary development as a species. On what basis, then, does he prefer one behavior over the other? On what basis does he decide that we're required to do one and required to avoid the other? Why, exactly, should I care about the poor or care about the world my great-grandchildren will inherit? Why shouldn't I just live for myself and let the poor or future generations worry about their own survival? What answer based upon our biological make-up can Hauser possibly give to these questions?

The fact is that naturalistic, evolutionary ethics provide us no basis, other than one's individual feelings, for judging one behavior to be morally better than another and certainly no reason for thinking that we're in any way obligated to do one thing rather than its opposite. As a guide to moral behavior it is utterly useless.

More tomorrow.

RLC

Debunking the Shroud

I don't know what to make of the Shroud of Turin, the famous burial cloth that bears the scientifically inexplicable imprint of a man whose wounds appear consonant with those which Jesus is described as suffering during his execution.

The Shroud is believed by many to be the actual burial cloth of Christ and the imprint is believed to have been preternaturally impressed into the fabric. Perhaps. I'm not in a position to say. What I can say, however, is that arguments like the one below which purport to debunk the Shroud as spurious are risibly dumb.

According to an article in Science Daily another burial shroud has been unearthed in Jerusalem dating to the first century. The shroud is apparently that of a man who was a leper and who died of tuberculosis, all of which is pretty interesting, but then the article quotes the researchers as claiming that the leper's shroud proves that the Turin Shroud could not be that of Jesus:

This is also the first time fragments of a burial shroud have been found from the time of Jesus in Jerusalem. The shroud is very different to that of the Turin Shroud, hitherto assumed to be the one that was used to wrap the body of Jesus. Unlike the complex weave of the Turin Shroud, this is made up of a simple two-way weave, as the textiles historian Dr. Orit Shamir was able to show.

Based on the assumption that this is representative of a typical burial shroud widely used at the time of Jesus, the researchers conclude that the Turin Shroud did not originate from Jesus-era Jerusalem.

In other words, we can assume that the leper's shroud had a weave typical of the period and since the Turin Shroud had a more sophisticated weave it must have dated from a more recent era or a different place.

If the researchers are being accurately represented in the article theirs is a remarkably shallow argument. What reason is there for making the assumption that the weave of the leper's shroud is typical? How many such linens have we discovered that we can make such a determination? And even if it were typical of the common folk to use such shrouds do we know that the more expensive weave was not preferred by the well-to-do? Why could it not be that Jesus was buried in a fabric typically imported for purchase and use by the wealthy from outside Jerusalem? Why could it not be that the rich man who donated the grave for Jesus' burial also donated the shroud? It was also typical of that time that the garments people wore were stitched together from numerous strips of cloth and thus had many seams, but Jesus' garment was seamless and thus considered unusual enough by his executioners for them to gamble for it. Should we assume that this story is false because it suggests that Jesus wore a garment not typical of that worn in the region at the time?

Sometimes in their eagerness to discredit Christian belief skeptics resort to the most desperate reasoning and wind up saying the silliest things. The Shroud of Turin may not be what its devotees believe it to be, but it'll take a lot more than the reasons offered in this article to convince them of that.

RLC

Evolutionary Ethics (Part I)

The idea that our moral sense is a product of human evolution has been around ever since Darwin, but in all those years it has never managed to convince most philosophers that it's plausible. Marc Hauser at Edge takes another stab at it in an article titled Biology (Not Religion) Equals Morality. There's much to think about (and to criticize) in his essay so I'd like to offer an analysis over the next several days. This post will be part I of the series.

Hauser writes:

For many, living a moral life is synonymous with living a religious life. Just as educated students of mathematics, chemistry and politics know that 1=1, water=H2O, and Barack Obama=US president, so, too, do religiously educated people know that religion=morality.

As simple and pleasing as this relationship may seem, it has at least three possible interpretations.

First, if religion represents the source of moral understanding, then those lacking a religious education are morally lost, adrift in a sea of sinful temptation. Those with a religious education not only chart a steady course, guided by the cliched moral compass but they know why some actions are morally virtuous and others are morally abhorrent.

Actually, it's not so much a lack of religious education which casts one adrift, it's the lack of any objective ground for moral judgment and moral obligation. If morality is not rooted in the goodness of a transcendent moral authority then it's entirely rooted in human subjectivity and what's moral is simply a matter of whatever feels right to me. Any ethics that seeks to ground itself in something other than God ultimately founders on the shoals of subjectivity, and, as we'll see Hauser's attempt is no exception.

Second, perhaps everyone has a standard engine for working out what is morally right or wrong but those with a religious background have extra accessories that refine our actions, fueling altruism and fending off harms to others.

Well, at least those who understand Christianity do. The "extra accessories" that the Christian has at her disposal are the twin motivators of love for, and gratitude to, God. The reason why there are relatively few charities run by atheists is that motives rooted in evolution will almost always drive people toward egoism rather than altruism. Love and gratitude, especially when directed toward something or someone beyond ourselves, are the most powerful incentives anyone has for caring about others, and the atheist has denied himself access to these resources.

Third, while religion certainly does provide moral inspiration, not all of its recommendations are morally laudatory. Though we can all applaud those religions that teach compassion, forgiveness and genuine altruism, we can also express disgust and moral outrage at those religions that promote ethnic cleansing, often by praising those willing to commit suicide for the good of the religious "team".

The obvious question Hauser raises for himself here is what standard is he using to judge compassion, forgiveness, and altruism as laudatory and ethnic cleansing as outrageous? Where does he get the idea that the former are good and the latter is bad? What is he basing this evaluation upon? The answer has to be either evolution or his own feelings, but if so how can either of these tell us that something is good or bad?

Indeed, an ethic based on evolution should see ethnic cleansing as a natural expression of the survival of the fittest gene pool. It should view suicide bombers as altruists sacrificing their own lives to promote the survival of the genes of the larger group of which he is a part.

In other words, Hauser wants to ground morality in the evolution of humanity, but as soon as he starts making moral judgments he finds himself forced to import values that have their source elsewhere. This is a problem that many naturalists face. They simply cannot consistently reconcile their naturalism with their moral sense. They see where the train of naturalist morality is taking them, and they don't like it so they make an irrational leap onto the back of Christian morality, and hope no one will notice as they piggyback upon the very assumptions they wish to discredit.

More tomorrow.

RLC

Taxes

Jason sends along a cartoon that's both depressing and funny:

There's more than a bit of truth to this. President Obama insists he wants to create jobs, but nothing he's done so far has worked. The reason joblessness is still over 10% is that businesses won't hire when they fear their taxes, i.e. their costs, are going to go up in a few months. Yet the current Congress and administration seems unconcerned about this common sense impediment to job creation as they push legislation that will elevate taxes to levels that will be a disincentive for many businesses to increase their workforce.

If the President wishes to stimulate job creation, rather than throw money at programs that pay people to rake leaves, he should drop health care reform (at least in its current form) and cap and trade. If employers are confident that there won't be huge levies waiting for them down the road they'll be much more likely to hire workers today.

Unfortunately, the Democrats' solution to our economic woes has been to sink the nation further into debt, throw more money at pointless jobs, provide health care for those who don't have it, tax industry for using energy, and then raise taxes on everyone to try to pay for it all. The irony is that raising taxes simply means more people will be out of work and unable to afford health care so that more people will be dependent upon government to pay for their care, which means that taxes on everyone else will have to be raised even higher.

It doesn't make much sense.

RLC

Safe Schools Czar

Jim Hoft has been documenting the career of Kevin Jennings, President Obama's Safe Schools czar, and has the latest here. In 2000 Mr. Jennings apparently organized and led a conference for teenagers in which almost every imaginable sexual deviancy was promoted to the teens. Among these were ... well, you'll have to read it for yourself if you have the stomach for it.

That the administration would deem this man suitable to put in charge of children shows an appalling lack of judgment. The man is an embarrassment to the President, and the longer he's allowed to hang around the more unavoidable will be the conclusion that the President actually wants him around.

Read the article (or this one) and see if this is the sort of man you want supervising your children's safety.

RLC

More Complex Than Expected

Telic Thoughts directs us to an article which reports on a study that assesses how complex the simplest functional cell would have to be. What the researchers found is that the simplest biologically viable cell is still very complex indeed:

What are the bare essentials of life, the indispensable ingredients required to produce a cell that can survive on its own? Can we describe the molecular anatomy of a cell, and understand how an entire organism functions as a system?

...three papers published back-to-back today in Science, provide the first comprehensive picture of a minimal cell, based on an extensive quantitative study of the biology of the bacterium that causes atypical pneumonia, Mycoplasma pneumoniae. The study uncovers fascinating novelties relevant to bacterial biology and shows that even the simplest of cells is more complex than expected.

The rest of the article explains the complexity. The significance of this is that before the mechanisms of evolution could take over and generate, at least theoretically, all of the diversity of living things we see today, blind, purposeless chance still had to produce a structure which was highly integrated and organized and which possessed enormous information content (see video below).

Perhaps a non-biologist, uninitiated in the mysteries of the discipline, might be forgiven for thinking this is all a bit far-fetched. It seems rather like constructing a computer, together with its operating system, by shaking together a random assortment of its parts. It's not as if we see such prodigies happening every day, after all.

The irony is that those who believe that the feat of producing an information-rich, highly organized and functional systems like the one in the video requires the agency of an intentional mind - and who point to the fact that every time we see similar structures manufactured there's always a mind behind it - are nevertheless called superstitious. But those who claim that random chance and physical law can somehow create such a marvel, and have probably done so countless times across the cosmos - even though no one has ever actually observed chance or physical law producing information and no one knows how it could possibly have been accomplished - are said to be enlightened. It's pretty funny.

RLC

Heading for Default

This article that Bill passes along will fill you with hope for change. Here's the nut of it:

It's one of those numbers that's so unbelievable you have to actually think about it for a while... Within the next 12 months, the U.S. Treasury will have to refinance $2 trillion in short-term debt. And that's not counting any additional deficit spending, which is estimated to be around $1.5 trillion.

Put the two numbers together. Then ask yourself, how in the world can the Treasury borrow $3.5 trillion in only one year? That's an amount equal to nearly 30% of our entire GDP. And we're the world's biggest economy. Where will the money come from?

How did we end up with so much short-term debt? Like most entities that have far too much debt - whether subprime borrowers, GM, Fannie, or GE - the U.S. Treasury has tried to minimize its interest burden by borrowing for short durations and then "rolling over" the loans when they come due. As they say on Wall Street, "a rolling debt collects no moss."

What they mean is, as long as you can extend the debt, you have no problem. Unfortunately, that leads folks to take on ever greater amounts of debt... at ever shorter durations... at ever lower interest rates. Sooner or later, the creditors wake up and ask themselves: What are the chances I will ever actually be repaid? And that's when the trouble starts. Interest rates go up dramatically. Funding costs soar. The party is over. Bankruptcy is next.

When governments go bankrupt, it's called a "default." Currency speculators figured out how to accurately predict when a country would default. Two well-known economists - Alan Greenspan and Pablo Guidotti - published the secret formula in a 1999 academic paper. The formula is called the Greenspan-Guidotti rule.

The rule states: To avoid a default, countries should maintain hard currency reserves equal to at least 100% of their short-term foreign debt maturities. The world's largest money-management firm, PIMCO, explains the rule this way: "The minimum benchmark of reserves equal to at least 100% of short-term external debt is known as the Greenspan-Guidotti rule. Greenspan-Guidotti is perhaps the single concept of reserve adequacy that has the most adherents and empirical support."

The principle behind the rule is simple. If you can't pay off all of your foreign debts in the next 12 months, you're a terrible credit risk. Speculators are going to target your bonds and your currency, making it impossible to refinance your debts. A default is assured.

So how does America rank on the Greenspan-Guidotti scale? It's a guaranteed default.

Read the rest at the link, but make sure you're not near any open windows or sharp objects.

RLC

The Hockey Stick

Doc at The Autopsy has put together an interesting video that puts the global warming "hockey stick" into perspective. The "hockey stick" is the name given to the way a graph of temperatures over the past century or so stays fairly constant and then suddenly shoots upward like a hockey stick lying on the ground with its blade pointing up. What the video does is start with a graph that shows recent temperature changes and then keeps putting those changes into greater and greater historical context. The longer the reach of the data the less significant the hockey stick appears:

If this is accurate it makes all of the "sky-is-falling" panic about global warming seem rather melodramatic and overblown.

RLC

Stretching the Truth

Planned Parenthood continues to embarrass itself. This undercover video filmed in a Wisconsin PP clinic shows a counselor and doctor providing a young mother inaccurate information and even resorting to scare tactics to persuade her to terminate the pregnancy:

LiveAction.org observes that:

In the undercover video, when the two women ask a Planned Parenthood counselor if the pregnant woman's 10-week-old unborn child has a heartbeat, the counselor emphasizes "heart tones," and answers, "Heart beat is when the fetus is active in the uterus--can survive--which is about seventeen or eighteen weeks." On the contrary, embryologists agree that the heartbeat begins around 3 weeks. Wisconsin informed consent law requires that women receive medically accurate information before undergoing an abortion.

The counselor then says, "A fetus is what's in the uterus right now. That is not a baby." Dr. Prohaska, the abortion doctor, insists, "It's not a baby at this stage or anything like that." Prohaska also states that having an abortion will be "much safer than having a baby," warning, "You know, women die having babies."

Hey, what's a little truth-stretching when there's a boodle of money to be made? There's more on this at the link.

RLC

Buyer's Remorse

According to Ben Smith at Politico.com things are President Obama's popularity is in serious decline. For example:

...just 50% of voters now say they prefer having him as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they'd rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that's somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country's difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited.

Less than a year in office and President Obama is making the country wish George Bush was back. By this time next year he may be making the country wish Jimmy Carter was back.

I heard on the radio yesterday, though I haven't been able to find it documented anywhere, that 20% of Americans would support impeachment of the President. As harmful as I think the President's policies are, as much as I fear that he is deliberately driving us toward bankruptcy in order to fulfill his ambition of destroying capitalism and imposing socialism, I nevertheless find impeachment a ludicrous solution.

Like it or not, the President isn't doing anything that he didn't tell us he would do during the campaign. Voters had every indication that he was a radical leftist, that he favored a radical redistribution of wealth and that he would fundamentally change our economic structure, but, in a free and open election, the majority cast their ballots for him anyway.

His policies may be extremely harmful (though no moreso than those of the Congress whose lead he follows), but they are what the nation voted for. To now say that he deserves to be impeached because he's doing what anyone who was paying attention knew he would do is to make a mockery of our Constitution and to turn the U.S. into a banana republic.

The best way to stop the President is at the ballot box by voting progressives out of Congress in 2010, and voting for Mr. Obama's opponent in 2012. Maybe next time voters will take their franchise seriously, pay attention to what's being said and who is saying it, and not be so impressed by a candidate whose r�sum� is as empty as his speeches are stirring.

RLC

Microscopic Beauty

Here are some beautiful pictures of living things so tiny that most of us never see them.

Here's one of my favorites. It's a unicellular algae called Penium:

RLC

This Year's Daniel

Stephen Meyer has been awarded World magazine's "Daniel" award for 2009, presented to the man or woman who withstands intense opposition, often in the form of personal assaults, with grace and resolve:

This fall Meyer came out with a full account of what science has learned in recent decades: Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (Harper One, 2009) shows that the cell is incredibly complex and the code that directs its functions wonderfully designed. His argument undercuts macroevolution, the theory that one kind of animal over time evolves into a very different kind. Meyer thus garners media scorn for raining on this year's huge celebration of the birth of Charles Darwin 200 years ago and the publication of On the Origin of Species 150 years ago.

From his office Meyer has ventured forth to debate at least nine prominent Darwinians on CNN, NPR, FOX, the BBC, and other venues. In it he has written numerous newspaper and magazine columns in defense of Intelligent Design (ID), as well as an academic article that became notorious five years ago when Richard Sternberg, a Smithsonian-affiliated scientist, agreed to publish it in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Darwinian higher-ups demoted Sternberg for allowing the other side to have its say. They interrogated him about religious and political beliefs.

ID proponents regularly receive that type of harassment: No lion's den, but denials of tenure and media depiction as anti-science. Ironically, scientific advance is now backing ID, which starts with the idea that - in Meyer's words -"certain technical features in a physical system reveal the activity of an intelligence or a mind. A simple example might be Mount Rushmore: You drive into the Dakotas and you see carvings of the presidents' faces up on the mountainside, and you immediately recognize that you're dealing with a sculpture, an intelligence, rather than an undirected process like wind and erosion."

Our new ability to peer into cells also shows ID: Meyer says, "We don't see little faces but we do see other indicators of intelligent activity, such as the digital code that's stored in a DNA molecule, or the tiny little miniature machines, the nanotechnology, the sliding clamps and turbines and rotary engines that biologists are now finding inside living cells." Darwin did not know any of that and Meyer, 51, did not always know it. His career shows the four-stage pattern that is common among intellectual Daniels: Questioning, discernment, courage, and perseverance.

The article goes on to trace Meyer's journey through those four stages, and it's quite interesting. Also interesting is the note that the author, Marvin Olasky, appends to the end of the essay:

This year atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins refused my offer to schedule a debate in New York between Meyer and himself: Dawkins, who says that Darwinism makes for "intellectually fulfilled atheism," apparently does not want to lose his sense of fulfillment. But theistic evolutionist Francis Collins also attacks ID and is unwilling to enter into a public discussion with Meyer.

For all their bluster and bravado about slaying the dragons of superstition and exposing the ridiculousness of theistic belief the atheistic Darwinians, and even some of their theistic allies, really want nothing to do with the ID people (see the post below this one). They know such battles, especially if held in public fora, would be as hard on their scholarly reputations as they'd be on their egos.

RLC

Flincher

Bill Dembski at Uncommon Descent introduces the brief video clip below with these words:

William Lane Craig is not only one of the world's leading Christian apologists but he has actually made outstanding original contributions to philosophy. Yes, Craig publishes popular-level books. Unlike Dawkins, however, who in 20-years plus has been purely a popularizer (of Darwinian evolution, materialist science, and atheism), Craig continues to publish at the highest levels of the academy addressing scholars of the highest caliber (and gaining their respect). Dawkins, by contrast, increasingly appeals to the lowest common denominator. It's in this light that Dawkins glib dismissal of Craig should be viewed:

This is another example of how the smack-talkers among the new atheists would prefer to attack straw men in the comfort of their study rather than venture out to wage face-to-face combat with a real opponent. One wonders what rank and file atheists must think when they see their champions eager to embarrass liberal bishops who don't know what they believe or why they believe it but flinching from encounters with formidable Christian thinkers like Craig.

RLC

Who's to Say?

Richard Weikert, the historian who wrote the excellent study (From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany) of how the Darwinian worldview prepared the intellectual and moral ground for eugenics and eventually the Holocaust, writes about a conference he attended recently at San Diego State. The convocation was given to celebrating the theme, "150 Years of Evolution: Darwin's Impact on the Humanities and the Social Sciences." At the event he had a couple of disconcerting conversations. Here's his account:

A young man was performing rap songs on evolutionary themes that he had been commissioned to write and perform for the Darwin celebrations in Britain. He told us between his songs that in some species, such as praying mantises and black widows, the females kill their mates after procreating. This is an evolutionary adaptation. The rapper then continued by saying that it is only chance-like the flip of a coin, he said-that our own species does not exhibit such a behavior. He then stated that if we did act this way, our moral systems and religions would revolve around females killing their mates. (Take-home lesson: Morality and religion are contingent products of mindless processes).

This view may sound bizarre, but it is actually very similar to a statement Darwin made in the Origin of Species, where he mentioned that some species commit infanticide. He then stated that if we as humans had been raised with their instincts, infanticide would then be moral. Darwin's own moral relativism was even more apparent in Descent of Man, where he argued that sexual morality had evolved over human history. At one point in the human past, he argued, "promiscuous intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world." Polygamy and monogamy were later evolutionary adaptations, he thought. Similar ideas are commonplace today in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, both influential movements in intellectual circles.

At a dinner at the close of the conference, I spoke with a philosophy graduate student who told me that because empathy and thus morality were traits produced by evolution, he was convinced that morality was relative. When I asked him if he then thought Hitler was not evil, he told me that even though he personally finds Hitler repugnant, that repugnance has no objective validity, so, he stated, "Hitler was OK." He then told me that he doesn't want his rational belief in relativistic morality to influence his own moral standards, but he still considered his moral standards evolved traits that are purely subjective. I told him that I thought the reason his "instincts" and rationality about morality were at odds was because morality really is objective, but he didn't see it that way.

This was not the first time I had heard someone defend moral relativism-even to the point of claiming Hitler was neither right nor wrong, but still I am horrified by this display of moral blindness. However, if one buys into the relevant presuppositions, I'm not sure his position is so philosophically outlandish....If evolution produced morality, as many Darwinists think, what fulcrum could possibly exist to condemn Hitler objectively for pursuing his ideals?

Weikert's conversations illustrate a crucial moral problem that faces us in the 21st century: How can subjectivism be avoided in a secular society? If there's no God then there's no ground for moral obligation, no ground for moral judgment of right and wrong other than one's own personal feelings. For now most people are unaware that when they make a moral judgment they're really not talking about anything other than their own tastes. They simply assume that there's an objective right and wrong, that they're just stating t6he obvious when the say we should help the poor or that Hitler was evil, but they've never really asked themselves how this could possibly be. Once it begins to dawn on society at large that moral talk is just a bunch of hocus pocus if we reject the existence of a transcendent moral ground, once we find that there's no real basis for saying that the Adolf Hitlers of the world are evil men, society will lose whatever cohesion it has and begin to unravel. It will start with the elites first. Indeed, it's already well along the way.

RLC

Imploding Justice

You might recall the voter intimidation carried out by a group called the New Black Panthers at a Philadelphia polling place during the 2008 election. The Department of Justice attorneys brought several charges against the thugs involved in this illegal activity, but last spring they were instructed by higher ups to drop the case. This has apparently had a demoralizing effect on the Holder Justice Department, as it should, and three top attorneys have resigned. The Washington Times has an editorial claiming that the Attorney General's department is actually imploding as a result of what some see as an attempt to protect political allies from prosecution.

The Times story on this can be read here. This seems to be just another example of how justice seems to be undergoing a redefinition in the age of Obama. A young couple surreptitiously videotape Obama's old friends at ACORN counselling them how to break the law, and it's the videotapers who face a lawsuit. Three Navy SEALS are facing a court martial because the terrorist who planned and carried out the kidnapping, torture, and murder of several American security personnel in Iraq claims one of them punched him in the stomach after they captured him and that the others lied about it to cover it up. Hackers uncover damning emails on the computers of the world's leading climate-change scientists and Senator Barbara Boxer wants the hackers hunted down and prosecuted. I wonder if back in 1971 she demanded that Daniel Ellsberg and the others who leaked the top secret Pentagon Papers be prosecuted. I'm sure she would have because Ms Boxer is nothing if not fair and consistent.

This is not to say that the SEALS shouldn't be disciplined or the hackers should be allowed to go unpunished (Though I do say that the young couple who videotaped the ACORN sleaziness should be given a Pulitzer instead of being slapped with a lawsuit), but surely there are reprimands for military personnel that fall far short of court martial, and surely Ms Boxer should at this point in time be more focussed on what the emails reveal than how we came to be in possession of them, particularly since it's not even clear that a crime was committed or if it was that it was committed in the U.S.

The people we should be praising and thanking for the service they're performing to the country and to truth are being turned somehow into the bad guys and the people who really are the bad guys are made to look like victims. What's happening to us?

RLC

Ethical Question of the Day

Listen to this 911 call and discuss with your friends (or yourself if you have no friends) whether this woman, who exhibits a calm and courage that seems quite remarkable, should be prosecuted. She lives in New York so it's iffy. If you're a pacifist what do you think she should have done?

According to Hot Air, the intruder may have been under the influence of some potent pharmaceutical products. That would certainly explain his behavior.

RLC

Clarification

Byron writes to clarify that contrary to the impression our post on the Manhattan Declaration may have given, Ron Sider did sign it and does support it. My point was that Sider thought it should have included other issues as well as those it did include, but I may have given the misleading impression that for this reason he didn't sign it.

RLC

Faith Commitments

In his very fine book on the Argument from Reason for God's existence (C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea), Victor Reppert invites us to imagine the reaction of the intellectual world should a proponent of the inerrancy of the Bible say something like the following:

Our willingness to accept biblical teachings that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between faith and unbelief. We take the side of Scripture in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the existence of unsubstantiated just-so stories in Scripture, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to Scripture's inerrancy. It is not that the methods and institutions of biblical study somehow compel us to accept only interpretations that are in accordance with the Bible's inerrancy, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to biblical inerrancy to create a method of biblical study that produces explanations that are consistent with inerrancy, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, our commitment to inerrancy is absolute, for we cannot allow doubt to get its foot in the door. For anyone capable of doubting the Word of God in any respect will wind up doubting it in all respects.

Such a defense of the doctrine of inerrancy would render the opinion of any individual who mounted it irrelevant in any setting outside the church. Certainly such a person would be treated with derision in the secular academy. Critics would reasonably charge that such a belief is based solely upon religious faith, and blind faith at that. It is religious fideism - the idea that we should just believe regardless of the evidence arrayed against our belief or, for that matter, the evidence in favor of it - and fideism is an abdication of our intellectual responsibility to submit our beliefs to the evidence.

Yet this is exactly, mutatis mutandis, what atheistic evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin once said about his commitment to materialism. His commitment, and that of those for whom he speaks, is simply scientific fideism based on blind, irrational faith. Here are Lewontin's words:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community of unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material causes, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.... anyone who believes in God can believe in anything.

This is from the pen of the same man who has criticized Creationists for a prior commitment to the truth of Genesis and who has said that that commitment disqualifies creationism as science and makes creationists irrelevant to the discussion of origins. But how is an unfalsifiable, apriori faith commitment to Genesis any different than an unfalsifiable, apriori faith commitment to materialism? If creationists are not credible because they will believe Genesis no matter what the evidence how is their view different from Lewontin's position that he will cling to materialism no matter what the evidence against it? How is the creationist any more closed-minded, any more anti-intellectual than is Lewontin?

The answer is that he is not. Lewontin, and many other Darwinians, are just as religious as any creationist except that their religion is materialism. They hold to it with a tenacity that is impervious to argument and immune to evidence.

Reppert goes on to quote atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel who makes this faith commitment even more explicit:

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I am right about my belief. It's that i hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

Nagel's materialism is based on his wish that God not exist. A Christian's theism is based, let's just say for argument's sake, on his desire that God does exist. Why is the latter considered somehow more intellectually disreputable than the former? Why is one kind of faith considered unacceptable in the public square when the other kind is not?

RLC

A Lot of Eggs

Do you get weary of hearing what a terrible train of death and destruction the Christian Church has wreaked upon the world? Me too.

To be sure, there have been black spots in the history of the Church, the most infamous, perhaps being the inquisitions in which several thousand people died over several centuries. But as bad as they were the inquisitions were scarcely a drop in the ocean of atrocious behavior compared to the legacy bequeathed us by state atheism in the eighty years from 1920 to 2000.

The Black Book of Communism documents the carnage wrought by atheists in pursuit of the millenial kingdom they tried to usher into the world under the banner of Marxist-Leninism. Here's the tally:

• 65 million in the People's Republic of China
• 20 million in the Soviet Union
• 2 million in Cambodia
• 2 million in North Korea
• 1.7 million in Africa
• 1.5 million in Afghanistan
• 1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe
• 1 million in Vietnam
• 150,000 in Latin America
• 10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international communist movement and communist parties not in power."

The statistics of victims includes executions, intentional destruction of population by starvation, and deaths resulting from deportations, physical confinement, or through forced labor. It's quite a record - 94 million people - all in the space of a single lifetime.

When the Church has engaged in murderous behavior it was acting contrary to the principles upon which it was founded. There is no justification in the teaching of Christ or the apostles for persecuting and murdering those with whom one has theological disagreements. In fact, quite the opposite is true.

When atheists engage in mass murder on a scale almost impossible to imagine, however, there is no contradiction whatsoever with the basic assumptions of their worldview. If atheism is true might makes right, and whatever those who have the power do to achieve their goals is simply the way things are.

Lenin put it this way:

We repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas....Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order....(emphasis mine)

Lenin also observed once that in order to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs. Ninety four million is a lot of eggs. Remember that number the next time someone harangues you about the terrible atrocities committed by the Christian Church.

RLC

Who's the Man in 2012?

Who in the Republican party has the experience, the seriousness, the respect, the gravitas, the intelligence and the worldview to run for president in 2012? Right now there's only one person who comes to mind - Dick Cheney. Will he run? No. At least he says not, and his heart condition makes it doubtful that he's being coy. Could he win if he did run? Depends. If Obama fails to get health care reform it's doubtful that he'll get much else. It's hard to imagine that after flopping on health care that he'd get cap and trade or immigration reform or a restructuring of the financial industry.

Moreover, our economic woes show no signs of abating any time soon and almost certainly will be made far worse than they had to be by the extraordinary indebtedness into which the current administration has pushed us. Add to this a sense that our foes around the globe are taking the measure of Mr. Obama and finding him unthreatening, and it's likely that we'll begin soon to suffer some foreign policy challenges that could haunt the administration into 2012.

Given all that voters in 2012 will be looking for a man with a proven record of strength, maturity, experience and seriousness and of all the people on the current scene, Dick Cheney is the man most closely associated with those virtues.

As things are shaping up almost any Republican who projects competence could win in 2012. Unfortunately, there are few who have the national name recognition and a record of accomplishment to capture the nation's attention. Dick Cheney is one who does [Haley Barbor, governor of Mississippi, is another], and there may be such a clamor for him to throw his hat in the ring that he finds it difficult to demur.

If Obama continues to flounder, and especially if we come under another terrorist attack on our soil, look for Republicans to pressure both Cheney and Barbor to consider running next time around. It would certainly be an impressive ticket.

RLC

Tale of Two States

Jason sends along a link to a Weekly Standard article that makes an interesting comparison between Texas and California as widely disparate economic models. The two states have followed quite different paths in developing (or devastating) their economies:

From the Great Depression on, California was a dream destination for Americans. Now it looks more like a nightmare, taking on new debt at a rate of $25 million a day."

Texas, on the other hand, boasts unemployment lower than the national average, a budget surplus, no state income taxes, and low rate of repossession on mortgage defaults, Trends writes.

In other words, Texas is economically ascending, while California is in a nosedive.

Texas by itself accounted for 70% of the new jobs created last year. How? Why? The article gives four reasons:

First, Texans believe in laissez-faire markets with an emphasis on individual responsibility. California, on the other hand, has favored central planning solutions and reliance on a social safety net for the past two decades.

Second, California treats environmentalism as a "religious sacrament," rather than just one component in people's quality of life. Texans take a more balanced approach.

Third, California elevates "ethnic diversity" above "assimilation," while Texas has done the opposite.

Finally, while Texas has emphasized streamlining regulatory and litigation burdens, California has used the government to transfer wealth from its creators to special interest groups.

In other words, California has pursued a policy of massive spending and high taxes and the result is that productive citizens and businesses are either crushed or have fled the state. Texas is much more business friendly and is consequently in much better fiscal shape with much better employment numbers.

So, which of the two models are the Democrats in Washington determined to impose on the country? Silly question.

RLC

The Other Shoe

The other shoe appears to be ready to drop:

The fight over global warming science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding release of the same kind of climate data that has landed a leading British center in hot water over charges it skewed its data.

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.

"I assume that what is there is highly damaging," Mr. Horner said. "These guys are quite clearly bound and determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this."

There are more details at the link. Maybe there's nothing to NASA's refusal to comply with Mr. Horner's FOIA request, but if they have nothing to hide it sure makes one wonder why they appear so resolved to hide it.

RLC

The Irrepressible Law of Unintended Consequences

One need not be a philosopher to appreciate the irony of this:

The APA (American Philosophical Association) strives to establish an anti-discrimination policy that, as Alexander Pruss points out, winds up protecting the very behavior it sought to do away with. The policy seeks to prevent philosophy departments from discriminating in their hiring practices against anyone on the basis of:

...race, color, religion, political convictions, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation, gender identification or age, whether in graduate admissions, appointments, retention, promotion and tenure, manuscript evaluation, salary determination, or other professional activities in which APA members characteristically participate. This includes both discrimination on the basis of status and discrimination on the basis of conduct integrally connected to that status,

Pruss observes that such a policy is ironic in that the very conduct which the policy was intended to eliminate becomes protected by the policy:

Suppose George is a member of Westboro Baptist Church (for those who don't know about it, it's a virulently anti-gay congregation--and that's by far an understatement, as is indicated by their URL which I shall not reprint but which you can see if you google for them). George applies for the position of chair of a philosophy department at a state school, and expressly states during the interview that if appointed he would, under all possible circumstances, do his utmost to block the hiring of any gay faculty. It is clear that he ought to be dismissed as a candidate there and then, since he is committed to conduct that is unprofessional in the institutional context he is a candidate for. However the APA policy appears to prohibit dismissing George from one's list of candidates.

Thus, the policy prohibits discriminating against George for his adherence to the tenets of Westboro Baptist or acting in ways that are "a normal and predictable expression" of his adherence. But it is extremely plausible that doing one's best to block the hiring of gay faculty is "a normal and predictable expression" of being a Westboro Baptist .... Therefore, the committee cannot discriminate against George on the basis of his unwillingness to comply with university policies that, we may suppose, prohibit discrimination against gays.

There's more on this at the link. Pruss takes the matter pretty seriously, and I suppose he should, but it amuses me that the more people try to formulate codes to articulate their tolerance of every difference imaginable, the more the law of unintended consequences rises up to bite them. Wouldn't it be easier to simply state that hiring will be based primarily on the candidate's qualifications and character, and let it go at that?

RLC

Manhattan Declaration

A coalition of 150 Catholic, Orthodox and evangelical leaders have recently signed their names to a manifesto declaring their rejection of any attempt by secular authorities to impose laws which would force them to accept abortion, same-sex marriage and other ideas that conflict with their religious beliefs or that would force them to mute their criticism of either the abortion culture or gay marriage.

The 4,700-word document is called the "The Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience," and signatories include many well-known evangelical leaders (though there are some notable omissions) in company with a number of Catholic leaders. The Declaration calls on Christians to engage in civil disobedience, if necessary, to defend their right to proclaim and practice their faith.

Charles Colson, one of the drafters of the document, says that abortion, marriage, and religious liberty are the three most important issues facing believers today.

The Declaration proclaims that "We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them." It goes on to list the "fundamental truths" as the "sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife, and the rights of conscience and religious liberty."

The document also declares that "Throughout the centuries, Christianity has taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required," and cites as an exemplar Martin Luther King and his willingness to go to jail for his beliefs.

Not all Christians agree with Declaration's emphasis, however. Some, such as Ron Sider, argue that these three issues, though crucially important, are no more important than fighting poverty and racism, and promoting the dignity of women. Others take the Declaration to task for not offering more guidance on how best to respond to a secularized culture that seems bent on diminishing our rights and liberties.

Be that as it may, the Manhattan Declaration is an important statement of the concern that many are feeling at the erosion of the moral fabric of our nation and the threat to our First Amendment rights posed by our infatuation with political correctness.

You can find the document here, and you can read more about it here. If you'd like to express your support of the Declaration's principles you can sign it here.

RLC

Leaving the Right

Andrew Sullivan, who writes at the Daily Dish, offers us a manifesto explaining why he can no longer call himself a conservative. The wonder is, given what he says, that he ever did call himself one. Here are his reasons with some remarks interspersed:

I cannot support a movement that claims to believe in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal, extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced by the system to return to the rule of law.

Not only does Mr. Sullivan not enumerate the dictatorial powwers of which he speaks he makes no attempt to explain how conservatives are implicated in such treasonous activity. In fact, he uses this rhetorical device several times in his manifesto. He levels an accusation at conservatives and thereby gives the impression that conservatives are actually guilty of something, but he never explains precisely how they're guilty of the errors for which he faults them.

I cannot support a movement that exploded spending and borrowing and blames its successor for the debt.

This, of course, is specious. Conservatives did not explode spending and borrowing. Republicans started the practice under Bush and the Obama folks escalated it by orders of magnitude. Conservatives have consistently opposed the spend and borrow regime under both parties.

I cannot support a movement that so abandoned government's minimal and vital role to police markets and address natural disasters that it gave us Katrina and the financial meltdown of 2008.

Once again he conflates conservatives with Republicans. This is both naive and misleading. Most conservatives, it is true, vote Republican, but only because the alternatives are so much worse.

I cannot support a movement that holds torture as a core value.

"Core value"? What on earth is he talking about?

I cannot support a movement that holds that purely religious doctrine should govern civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.

Perhaps Mr. Sullivan would favor us with an example to illustrate what he's talking about here. It's hard to imagine any civil political decision that is not informed by one's religious views, whether theist or secularist, but perhaps Mr. Sullivan can think of one.

I cannot support a movement that is deeply homophobic, cynically deploys fear of homosexuals to win votes, and gives off such a racist vibe that its share of the minority vote remains pitiful.

It gives off a racist vibe because its opponents relentlessly accuse it of being racist. It's a defense mechanism employed by the left because they know that if minorities actually knew what conservatives stood for they'd leave the Democratic party in large numbers. Better to keep the blacks on the plantation by making them think that the alternative is full of racists and bigots. Unfortunately, the strategy works.

As for homophobia, Mr. Sullivan levels the charge at conservatives because conservatives don't agree with his conviction that marriage should be an option for gays, a point, by the way, upon which most minorities agree with conservatives. Conservatives also don't believe that polygamy should be an option. Does that make conservatives polygaphobic? Is that bad? Why?

I cannot support a movement which has no real respect for the institutions of government and is prepared to use any tactic and any means to fight political warfare rather than conduct a political conversation.

This is another instance of that neat, if dishonest, rhetorical trick I mentioned above. By stating his inability to support such a movement he gives the impression that conservatism is such a movement. The charge stands unsupported, of course, because he offers no examples of how conservatives actually engage in this sort of skullduggery. And while he's at it maybe he ought to take a look at how the other side plays politics. It's not conservatives who sought to ram "stimulus" legislation through Congress without allowing for serious debate. It's not conservatives that support organizations like ACORN and others that corrupt the political process. It's not conservatives that have been lying about the need for climate change legislation nor conservatives who keep deceiving us about what's really in the health care reform bill.

I cannot support a movement that sees permanent war as compatible with liberal democratic norms and limited government.

Well, what's the alternative when Muslims around the world have declared war on us and do not quit the fight just because we say we're tired of fighting? Should we just ignore them as they fly their hijacked planes into our skyscrapers so we can bask in the glory of our "liberal democratic norms"? What does Mr. Sullivan recommend as an alternative to a protracted war on Islamist terrorism?

I cannot support a movement that criminalizes private behavior in the war on drugs.

Specifically, how do conservatives do this? Many legislatures, including our federal legislature, are in the hands of liberal Democrats. If conservatives are the bogeymen in this regard why don't these legislatures simply decriminalize private drug use?

I cannot support a movement that would back a vice-presidential candidate manifestly unqualified and duplicitous because of identity politics and electoral cynicism.

No? Would he support a movement that would back a presidential candidate who was "manifestly unqualified and duplicitous because of identity politics and electoral cynicism." Which unqualified candidate did Mr. Sullivan vote for in 2008? The Democrat or the Republican? We might also ask Mr. Sullivan how we would be worse off today had McCain/Palin been elected last year rather than Obama/Biden.

I cannot support a movement that regards gay people as threats to their own families.

!?

I cannot support a movement that does not accept evolution as a fact.

Well, here again Mr. Sullivan needs to be much more clear. What does he mean by the "fact" of evolution? I wonder if he even knows. Conservatives are all over the map on this question, but most of them agree that whatever the explanation for how life developed, it didn't just happen as a result of blind, mechanistic processes acting solely by chance. If this position grieves Mr. Sullivan so then I'd like to ask him how he knows it to be a fact that this belief is wrong.

I cannot support a movement that sees climate change as a hoax and offers domestic oil exploration as the core plank of an energy policy.

Ooops. Perhaps he's been away the last week or so and hasn't been following the news out of East Anglia.

I cannot support a movement that refuses ever to raise taxes, while proposing no meaningful reductions in government spending.

Now he's clearly gone over the edge. Conservatives have been nothing if not adamant that we must reduce spending and the size of government. It's been liberal Democrats who have blocked consistently blocked attempts to accomplish this every time it's tried.

I cannot support a movement that refuses to distance itself from a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.

I wonder if Mr. Sullivan is a little jealous because he's not as popular as the demagogue or the nutjob. What he needs to do is to tell us not what he thinks of the character and sanity of these men but what it is about what they say that's wrong. Just calling them names doesn't make them wrong.

I cannot support a movement that believes that the United States should be the sole global power, should sustain a permanent war machine to police the entire planet, and sees violence as the core tool for international relations.

I'm beginning to wonder what planet Mr. Sullivan's living on. No one wants to be, or thinks we can be, the world's policeman, but conservatives do think that if you're going to fight terrorists it's better to fight them over there than over here. Assuming Mr. Sullivan believes we should continue to wage the war against terrorists what alternative to fighting them overseas would he like to see us implement?

Does this make me a "radical leftist" as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not. But it sure disqualifies me from the current American right. To paraphrase Reagan, I didn't leave the conservative movement. It left me.

I doubt that Mr. Sullivan can show that the principles of the conservative movement have changed much at all over the past fifty years. If he was attracted to those principles in the past and is no longer attracted to them today then it really is he who has changed, not the principles.

I also doubt that Mr. Sullivan was ever a part of the conservative movement to begin with. He's a libertarian and has been one at least for the last decade when I've been reading him. To allege that conservatives have somehow betrayed him is disingenuous. He's like an Episcopalian who spends years in a Baptist church and who finally decides to leave because he can't persuade the Baptists to become more like Episcopalians. On his way out the door he allows as how he's not really leaving the church, the church is leaving him. It's pretty silly.

RLC

Mencken's Way

Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is just plain tired of civil discourse between believers and unbelievers and thinks it's time to "try H. L. Mencken's way" of dealing with Christian theists:

The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.

True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge.

I had to laugh as I read this quote a second time through because the first time I read it I thought Mencken was talking about Darwinians. The description in the second paragraph, especially, certainly fit.

Anyway, it's an odd bit of advice that Coyne is urging upon his atheist confreres, given that it's the atheistic Darwinians who so often refuse to engage creationists or intelligent design advocates in open debate. Their reluctance is warranted, perhaps, by the fact that when one of their number, like Christopher Hitchens, does sally forth to do battle with the unwashed dolts, he often gets trounced.

So, to Mr. Coyne I say I hope you're successful in convincing your brethren to engage the best Christian theists in debate, but I caution you to be careful what you wish for.

RLC

Hitler and AGW

From Uncommon Descent:

Back in 2004, the German-Austrian film 'Downfall' was released. The film depicted Hitler's last days in his Berlin bunker. Since then, the portion of the film where a detached-from-all-reality Hitler goes on a tirade - lashing out and finally conceding all is lost - has been modified to poke fun at everything from Chicago Cubs personnel moves to Hillary Clinton's failed presidential campaign. Here it is in the context of the recent damning evidence of outright global warming fraud:

Pretty funny. I'll bet Al Gore isn't laughing, though.

RLC

Death Rates

The next time someone tells you that people are better off under socialized health care plans you might cite some statistics to them:

As the Congress prepared to vote to let us enter the world of waits for doctors, waits for specialists, waits for testing and waits for surgery, radiation and chemo, we should pause to consider the relative records of the private medical care system in the United States with the socialized system in the U.K.

In 2008, Britain had a cancer death rate 0.25% while the United States had a rate of only 0.18%. The UK cancer death rate was 38% higher than in the United States.

The Guardian, the UK's left wing daily, estimated that "up to 10,000 people" are dying each year of cancer "because their condition is diagnosed too late, according to research by the government's director of cancer services." While many people die because of late detection due to their own negligence, there is no reason to believe this self-neglect is more common in the UK than in the US.

In Canada, the cancer death rate is 16% higher than in the United States.

So, why is Congress and the White House pushing a health care reform bill that would essentially make us more like Britain and Canada? Go figure.

RLC

Incoherence

There's been a lot of controversy over President Obama's Afghanistan speech Tuesday night. Lefties fault him for agreeing to send more troops, and conservatives fault him for setting a deadline after which the troops will be pulled out. There's even more controversy about how sincere the president was with his deadline, given that he's been notorious for setting deadlines which he promptly proceeds to ignore (Iraq, Guantanamo Bay).

My problem with the speech, other than it seemed as if his heart wasn't really in it, is that the whole idea of a deadline strikes me as foolhardy. I don't see the point in telling the enemy how long you're prepared to fight, nor do I see how it can avoid having a negative impact both on the morale of the troops who know that as the deadline approaches they're putting their lives on the line for a mission that will be ending in a couple of weeks, and on that of Afghans who will be very reluctant, knowing that the Americans will be leaving, to be seen being friendly or helpful to U.S. troops. Who wants to go on a dangerous mission when soon none of it will matter? What Afghan wants to be seen helping the Americans when after they leave the Taliban will be free to seek retribution?

Nor do I see the logic in saying that we'll begin to withdraw on a date certain but that the withdrawal will be based on conditions on the ground. What does that mean? If the conditions don't permit a withdrawal will we stay there? If so, what's the point in setting the deadline in the first place?

My biggest objection to setting the withdrawal date, though, is this: If Afghanistan really is crucial to our national security then we should be there as long as it takes to pacify the place. If Mr. Obama is not going to stay until the task is successfully completed then, we can reasonably assume, he believes the war is not really critical to our security. And if that's what Obama believes then it's absolutely reprehensible that he doesn't pull out immediately before one more serviceman or woman is killed or maimed.

Either Afghanistan is crucial to our national security, and we should be prepared to be there for as long as it takes to end the threat, or it's not crucial, and we should be getting out ASAP. By setting a deadline, Mr. Obama is tacitly revealing that the latter is the case so for him to nevertheless spill more blood and waste more treasure there is unconscionable.

Mr. Obama's speech Tuesday night was a muddle of conflicting messages and incoherent ideas. Like the administration's baffling defense of its decision to bring Kalid Sheik Mohammed to New York to be tried in federal court, it reflects a White House more concerned about the political impact of what is said and done than with doing what is right.

The best I can say of the President's Afghanistan policy is that it seems amateurish, and his speech certainly wasn't the sort of effort one would expect from a President whose brilliance his admirers never tire of extolling.

RLC

The Logical Mind

It's hard to keep up with all the terrible arguments being introduced into the public square by today's atheists, but one does what one can. I recently came across a particularly unfortunate example in the British DailyMail by Andrew Alexander. He begins his column with this lede:

With Rome and Canterbury at loggerheads over doctrinal trivialities - in reality over power - now is a good moment to make a heartfelt plea for atheism. For those of us who embrace that view, it seems the only position for the logical mind.

Mr. Alexander then goes on to explain that because Charles Darwin sailed to the Galapagos, because there are exegetical problems with the Gospels, because some popes did bad things, and because pagans had stories about gods coming back to life, therefore we may safely conclude that Christianity is false. Perhaps that's how a logical mind works, I don't know, but Mr. Alexander's conclusion seems to me to be far grander than his premises warrant.

But let's pause for a moment to ask Mr. Alexander how he happens to come by the logical mind which he is so pleased to put on display for our benefit.

Presumably by "logical mind" he is referring to the ability to draw rational inferences, but I wonder if it ever occurred to him that if naturalism (the view that nature is all there is) is true then rationality is not only inexplicable, it's pretty much untrustworthy.

If naturalism is true then our minds are the product of non-rational processes that shaped us to survive life in the stone age, but, we should ask, how do non-rational processes like chance, natural selection, genetic mutation and the laws of physics produce a rational mind? How does the rational arise from the non-rational? Regrettably, Mr. Alexander doesn't even seem to be aware of the problem, much less offer an answer to it.

Suppose, though, that rationality somehow did manage to appear among early Homo sapiens. If so, our minds would have been selected for by evolution to aid our survival, not necessarily to discover truth, particularly metaphysical truth. Our minds are just as likely to hold false beliefs as true ones as long as the false beliefs have survival value.

Thus we have no reason to think that our beliefs, especially those which do not lend themselves to empirical verification, like our belief in naturalism, for example, are true, or that our reason is trustworthy. Indeed, in order to argue that reason is trustworthy we have to employ our reason, and thus we have to assume that reason is trustworthy in order to argue that it is trustworthy. This may seem perfectly sensible to Mr. Alexander's logical mind, but it sounds like a circular argument to me.

Mr. Alexander goes on:

Atheism is scepticism in its highest form; and without scepticism you cannot properly understand the way of the world.

If it is true that atheism is the highest form of skepticism wouldn't it be the case, then, that to be skeptical of atheism would be the greatest form of skepticism of all? Is Mr. Alexander skeptical of atheism? If not, why not?

Naturally enough, devout Christians find atheism shocking.

No, I don't think that's true. Christians find atheism sad, perhaps, or pathetic, or desperate, or intellectually destitute, but I doubt many thoughtful Christians are shocked by it. We see it too often to be shocked.

Without religion, the human race, being what it is, will work out its own rules for right and wrong. The Greeks were doing it rather well before Christ.

Well, maybe, but many Greeks rooted their morality in the will of the gods. Their moral authority was something beyond themselves. Others, like Aristotle, embraced a kind of virtue ethics which reduces essentially to subjectivism. He believed we should behave virtuously, but not only could he give no satisfactory answer to the question why the virtues are obligatory upon us and the vices are not, he couldn't even give us a principle by which we can reliably identify the virtues. It turns out that what is virtuous is relative to what a society, or individuals in a society, think it is, but if this is so morality is purely a matter of social consensus, like women's fashion.

The fact is that any attempt to develop an ethics rooted in a naturalistic worldview is doomed to founder on the shoals of subjectivism: What's right is what feels right to me. What's right is what works for me. What's right is whatever makes me happy. Those are the rules that the human race works out for itself when it rejects God. "Look out for #1" is the common expression of the rules, and concern for others at the expense of oneself makes no sense, either in ethical or evolutionary terms.

It may be that there is no God, but if one such as Mr. Alexander really believes this then let's have no flummery from him about how we can all be moral anyway, as if we had any idea at all what that means in a world without God.

I'm surprised someone as logical as Mr. Alexander doesn't see the problem.

RLC

Will We or Won't We?

Now that Honduras has held an election, and the winner has been declared we wonder whether the U.S. will recognize the new government.

Earlier, Brazil and Argentina said they would not recognize the election results. Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica said they would accept them.

U.S. officials have indicated the election is a key step forward for Honduras, but they have not said whether they will accept the outcome.

Perhaps the better question is how the Obama administration can not recognize the new government in Honduras, even if he thinks that the whole process was unjust. After all, he offered congratulations to the thugs in Iran following their sham of an election and the popular uprising it ignited. Why would he scruple to withhold his imprimatur from the freely-elected new Honduran government? Will President Obama now side with the people of Honduras as he clearly failed to do in Iran? Or will he continue to express his dudgeon over the Hondurans' removal from office of a man, Manuel Zelaya, whose leftist proclivities Mr. Obama finds congenial?

The new President of Honduras is Porfirio Lobo a wealthy rancher who narrowly lost to Zelaya four years ago. Zelaya, a leftist in the mold of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, was removed from office on charges of treason and abuse of power. The removal precipitated international condemnation of what was incorrectly portrayed, even by our own state department, as a military coup.

Zelaya is currently living in the Brazilian embassy to avoid arrest by the Honduran authorities, but now that the people of Honduras have spoken perhaps Mr. Obama will invite him to take up residence in the White House.

RLC