Most Ethical Administration Ever

We can add yet another of President Obama's cabinet appointees to the list of those associated with possible scandal. First it was Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (Tax Cheating), then came Attorney General Eric Holder (Fast and Furious, inter alia), followed by Energy Secretary Steven Chu (Solyndra), now it's Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius implicated in a scandal being dubbed "Shreddergate."

Kathleen Sebelius is the former governor of Kansas whom President Obama named as his Secretary of HHS. When you read this column by Jack Cashill you might wonder why she isn't in jail. If she were a Republican she doubtless would be.

You should read the whole of Cashill's report, but the quick summation is that as governor of Kansas Sebelius was implicated in an attempt to cover-up wrong-doing in her administration related to a criminal investigation of local Planned Parenthood personnel:

In 2002 Republican Phill Kline was elected attorney general of Kansas, and Democrat Kathleen Sebelius was elected governor. They had different agendas.

Kline wanted to know how Kansas, despite tough laws he had helped write as a legislator, had emerged as the world capital of late-term abortions. Sebelius did not want to know or want anyone else to know, either.

Kline quickly discovered that abortions performed on under-aged girls were not being reported to the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, or SRS, as mandated by law.

The purpose of the mandatory reporting laws is to remove a child from a situation in which the abuse is likely to happen again.

To track the reporting failure, Kline needed the abortion records kept by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, or KDHE, which, like the SRS, was now being run by Sebelius appointees. Although these records are kept for law-enforcement purposes, both agencies resisted in every which way they could.

It took Kline years of legal haggling to get the records. They showed that in the years 2002 and 2003, 166 girls under 15 had abortions at Kansas clinics, the great majority of them at George Tiller's clinic in Wichita or Planned Parenthood's in suburban Kansas City. Only two of them were reported to SRS, and both of those stories were already in the news.

Unable to stop Kline legally, Sebelius persuaded a popular Republican district attorney to switch parties to run against Kline in 2006. Through various cut-outs, Tiller invested nearly $2 million in the anti-Kline effort. And the Star won Planned Parenthood's top editorial honor for its virulent campaign against "Snoop Dog" Kline. Kline lost.

In a wonderful twist, Republican precinct captains elected Kline to take the DA spot vacated by Sebelius' new attorney general. Planned Parenthood just happened to be in that county. In October 2007, Kline charged Planned Parenthood with committing 107 criminal acts, including 23 felonies for manufacturing documents – the first criminal charges ever brought against Planned Parenthood anywhere.

Although the usual suspects saw to Kline's re-election defeat in 2008, new Johnson County DA Steve Howe continued the case Kline had launched. Last week, however, Howe had to ask that the felony charges be dropped. As he had just learned, the evidence had been destroyed.

As the Star reported on Thursday, "All copies of key documents needed to support those charges no longer exist." Sebelius's hand-picked attorney general, Steve Six, destroyed the certified copies in 2009, and the Sebelius-run KDHE destroyed the original records in 2005.

There's much more on Shreddergate at the link.

Mr. Obama promised us the most ethical, the most transparent administration in history. What he's delivered is certainly something less than that.

Thanks to Byron for passing the story along.

A Movie Running Backwards

There is a universally accepted principle of thought which says that given a choice between multiple explanations for a phenomenon the preferred explanation is the one which is simplest and fits all the facts.

Mathematician Granville Sewell at Evolution News and Views invites us to imagine a scenario which illustrates this principle:

A high school science teacher rents a video showing a tornado sweeping through a town, turning houses and cars into rubble. When she attempts to show it to her students, she accidentally runs the video backward .... [T]he students laugh and say, the video is going backwards! The teacher doesn’t want to admit her mistake, so she says: “No, the video is not really going backward. It only looks like it is .... and she proceeds to give some long, detailed, hastily improvised scientific theories on how tornadoes, under the right conditions, really can construct houses and cars.

At the end of the explanation, one student says, “I don’t want to argue with scientists, but wouldn’t it be a lot easier to explain if you ran the video the other way?”

That's the simplest explanation for the phenomena in the video, certainly simpler than the teacher's contrived explanation, and thus it should be preferred.

Sewell wants to relate this to the problem of Darwinian evolution.

Imagine, he writes, a professor describing the final project for students in his evolutionary biology class. “Here are two pictures,” he says. “One is a drawing of what the Earth must have looked like soon after it formed. The other is a picture of New York City today, with tall buildings full of intelligent humans, computers, TV sets and telephones, with libraries full of science texts and novels, and jet airplanes flying overhead.

Your assignment is to explain how we got from picture one to picture two .... You should explain that 3 or 4 billion years ago a collection of atoms formed by pure chance that was able to duplicate itself, and these complex collections of atoms were able to pass their complex structures on to their descendants generation after generation, even correcting errors.

Explain how, over a very long time, the accumulation of genetic accidents resulted in greater and greater information content in the DNA of these more and more complicated collections of atoms, and how eventually something called “intelligence” allowed some of these collections of atoms to design buildings and computers and TV sets, and write encyclopedias and science texts....

When one student turns in his essay some days later, he has written, “A few years after picture one was taken, the sun exploded into a supernova, all humans and other animals died, their bodies decayed, and their cells decomposed into simple organic and inorganic compounds. Most of the buildings collapsed immediately into rubble, those that didn’t, crumbled eventually. Most of the computers and TV sets inside were smashed into scrap metal, even those that weren’t, gradually turned into piles of rust, most of the books in the libraries burned up, the rest rotted over time, and you can see see the result in picture two.”

The professor says, “You have switched the pictures!” “I know,” says the student, “but it was so much easier to explain that way.”

That's the problem with Darwinian evolution. The idea that blind chance and the laws of chemistry alone could have conspired to create a living cell, or produce a process as extraordinary as butterfly metamorphosis, or create a structure as unimaginably complex as a human brain requires so many assumptions and ad hoc explanations, so much suspension of incredulity, that it's far simpler, and much more in keeping with our everyday experience, to posit that these things were the intentional product of an intelligent mind.

Otherwise, Sewell concludes, the process is like a movie running backward. The whole of biological history is as improbable as assuming that purposeless, undirected forces like tornadoes could actually cause scattered debris to assemble into complex, well-integrated structures.

Of course, if a mind was somehow directing the process that would change everything.

Mind v. Matter

Raymond Tallis reviews a couple of books on mind and materialism for the Wall Street Journal. One of the books is titled Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter by Terrence Deacon the other is by Michael Gazzaniga titled Who's In Charge? Tallis begins his column with this:

The world of academe is currently in the grip of a strange and worrying epidemic of biologism, which has also captured the popular imagination. Scientists, philosophers and quite a few toilers in the humanities believe—and would have the rest of us believe—that nothing fundamental separates humanity from animality.

Biologism has two cardinal manifestations. One is the claim that the mind is the brain, or the activity of the brain, so that one of the most powerful ways to advance our understanding of ourselves is to look at our brains in action, using the latest scanning devices. The other is the claim that Darwinism explains not only how the organism Homo sapiens came into being (as, of course, it does) but also what motivates people and shapes their day-to-day behavior.

These beliefs are closely connected. If the brain is an evolved organ, shaped by natural selection to ensure evolutionary success (as it most surely is), and if the mind is the brain and nothing more, then the mind and all those things we are minded to do can be explained by the evolutionary imperative. The mind is a cluster of apps or modules securing the replication of the genes that are expressed in our bodies.

Many in the humanities have embraced these views with astonishing fervor.

Indeed. Materialism is the reigning religion in academe today, but judging from what Tallis writes in his review, that may be changing. Setting aside his curious insistence on making it clear that he himself is definitely not an apostate from Darwinian orthodoxy he makes many interesting observations. Some are those of the authors he reviews and some are his. Here's a sample:

A brain in good working order is, of course, a necessary condition of every aspect of human consciousness, from basic perception to the most complex constructed sense of self. It does not follow that this is the whole story of our nature—that we are just brains in some kind of working order. Many aspects of everyday human consciousness elude neural reduction.

Biologism commands acceptance in the humanities because it is promoted or endorsed by scientists whose prowess in their chosen field seems to qualify them to pronounce on what are essentially philosophical questions. Thus it is notable when two books written by neuro-biologists of the greatest distinction are nonetheless critical of the simplifications—both scientific and philosophical—of biologism. Both authors look outside the conceptual frameworks upon which biologism depends.

"Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter"... does not deliver on its subtitle ... is long, slow-moving and peppered with neologisms, but it is infinitely preferable to the flashy tomes of the Professors of Legerdemain who assure us that the mind could emerge from matter in the brain "just like that" simply because "the brain is the most complex object in the world."

Along the way, Mr. Deacon demolishes fashionable computational theories of the brain. Anyone in the future who is tempted to assert that "the mind is the software of the brain" should reflect on Mr. Deacon's observation that the apparent agency of a computer "is just the displaced agency of some human designer." The use of simplistic analogies to make the mind look machine-like and machines mind-like and thereby solve the mind-brain problem should never again pass unchallenged.

One of the founding fathers of cognitive psychology, Jerry Fodor, has argued that to solve the puzzle of conscious experience "there's hardly anything we may not have to cut loose from." Mr. Deacon has not cut loose from quite enough yet—in particular from the notion that matter organized in a certain way must be mindful—but he has started to reframe the terms of the discussion. His 500 densely argued pages testify to his awareness of the intractability of the problem.

Having considered Deacon's book in far more detail than I have suggested here, Tallis turns to Gazzaniga's work:

Unlike many in his profession, Mr. Gazzaniga is philosophically sophisticated. He believes that, while the brain "enables" the mind, mental activity is not reducible to neural events.

If the mind really were identical with activity in individual brain-bits, which were themselves machines causally wired into the material world, free will would be an illusion. One purpose of Mr. Gazzaniga's book is to reveal the implications of this mistaken notion for one of the most sinister of the neuro-prefixed pseudo-disciplines: "neuro-law." Neuro-law aims to replace the untidy processes of the current judicial system with something more biologically savvy. Isn't criminal behavior the result of (abnormal) brain function? If so, the brain, not the defendant, should take the rap.

Mr. Gazzaniga will have none of this, and he deplores "neuroscience oozing into the courtroom." The author savages the uncritical use of neuro-technology in court and laments that juries and judges have little idea of the shakiness of the connections between minor abnormalities on brain scans and the commission of a particular crime. Neuro-law is not merely premature; it overlooks the fact that, as Mr. Gazzaniga says, "we are people, not brains," and brain scans tell us little about our personhood.

Mr. Gazzaniga's incomparable knowledge, along with his mastery of the art of making things clear without oversimplifying them, means that "Who's in Charge?" is a joy to read. Is his book, along with Mr. Deacon's, an indicator that the mighty edifice of philosophically naïve conventional neuroculture is starting to fall apart? Are these books harbingers of a better future in which the task of trying to make sense of what we are is not hampered by a reductive scientism that identifies us with the activity of brains evolved to serve evolutionary success? I hope so. While we are not angels fallen from heaven, we are not just neural machines. Nor are we merely exceptionally clever chimps.

One may be forgiven for thinking that even Darwinians are bailing on strict materialism. Matter and force, it is coming to be recognized, simply leave too much about the world unexplained. The mysteries of human consciousness as well as the mysteries of quantum physics point to not only the existence of mind, but also, perhaps, its ontological pre-eminence.

Where's the Honor in This?

A young man, his father and his mother are charged in Ontario with having murdered the young man's three sisters and the man's first wife in an "honor killing." Evidently, the girls were dating guys. That can get you killed if your father's a Muslim. MacLean's is following the trial:

Hamed Shafia wants to look at the photographs of his dead sisters, their drowned bodies freshly extracted from an underwater car. Sgt. Michael Boyles tries to convince him otherwise, but Hamed is nothing if not determined. He wants to see the corpses.

“Please,” he says quietly.

“Alright,” Boyles answers.

It is July 23, 2009, almost 3 o’clock in the morning, and the 18-year-old Afghan immigrant is sitting in a police interrogation room in Kingston, Ont. A video camera is rolling. He has just been arrested—along with his beloved mom and dad—for the alleged “honour killing” of four family members: three sisters (Zainab, 19; Sahar, 17; Geeti, 13) and his father’s first wife in the polygamous clan, Rona Amir Mohammad. The doomed foursome was found, nearly a month earlier, at the bottom of the Rideau Canal, the victims of what investigators say was a mass execution meant to look like a freak car accident.

For three hours, officers presented Hamed with clue after damning clue, including their smoking gun: shattered pieces of a Lexus headlight found at the midnight crime scene. (The victims were discovered in a submerged Nissan Sentra, but prosecutors allege that the family’s other car, a silver Lexus SUV, was used to ram the sedan over the edge of the Kingston Mills locks.) As Hamed flips through the full-page photos, his eyes fixated on the departed, Boyles urges him to finally come clean. “They deserve to know the truth,” he says. “They deserve better than this.”

It's hard to understand how people can think that a loving and merciful God condones the murder of young girls, but evidently, many Muslims do. It's also very difficult to see how anyone could think that murdering one's family somehow restores honor to the family.

Read the rest of this riveting account at the link.

He Wouldn't Do That, Would He?

Victor Davis Hanson believes that an attack on Iran is far more likely in an Obama administration than it would have been under President Bush. The reason, he opines, is the Left's inconsistency:

In terms of the Obama presidency, there is now no anti-war movement. It simply vanished in January 2009. Former outrages like Guantanamo, renditions, and Predator-drone assassinations almost magically became A-okay. The left-wing base dared not continue its old Bush slurs, given its support for Obama’s liberal domestic agenda. Quiet conservatives were perplexed over whether to be outraged that Predator-in-Chief Obama proved to be such an abject hypocrite, or relieved that, better late than never, he had morphed into a Bush-Cheney national-security disciple.

The result is that for the next year or so, Obama can more or less do whatever he wishes abroad. If he chooses to bomb a country that poses no direct threat to the U.S. without congressional authority, like Libya, or to assassinate a U.S. citizen-terrorist, like Anwar al-Awlaki, the Left will keep mum. And the Right, for different reasons, probably will, too.

If we get to the scary point of Iran’s going nuclear in 2012, expect the Obama administration — up for reelection and without much of a domestic record to run on in these hard times — to consider a preemptive strike. Be assured that if it does, there will be no outrage in the Democrat-controlled Senate, no campuses on fire, no ad hominem Moveon.org ads in the New York Times — all the sorts of anti-war hysteria that once sought to turn a moderate like George W. Bush into a caricature of some trigger-happy yokel from shoot-’em-up Texas.

And conservatives? Again, they would mumble that an Obama “wag the dog” strike would cynically be all about the president’s reelection. Or they would at least note the irony, given the Nobel Laureate–in–Chief’s prior demonization of Bush’s use of military force. Nonetheless, Republicans would largely grow silent if — a big if — a strike were successful and ended Iran’s nuclear threat.

This is an extraordinary charge Hanson is making here. He's telling us that President Obama is not above risking a massive war with Iran just to extend his tenure in office. If Hanson is right, a prospect I deeply doubt and find hard to accept, it would require the president to be a far more contemptible man than even his most implacable political foes think him to be.

Heretofore, Mr. Obama hasn't shown much of an appetite for military risk. Killing terrorists with Predator drones and bombing Libyan mercenaries are, after all, relatively risk-free ventures. Bombing Iran, on the other hand, would be cataclysmic.

It would almost certainly result in a massive assault by Hezbollah, Syria, and Hamas against Israel. It would also trigger terror attacks throughout the Western world. Oil supply lines would be sabotaged and chemical and biological agents might well be unleashed in Western cities.

Does Hanson suggest that President Obama might be the sort of man who would risk all this just to remain in the White House? Does he believe Mr. Obama is willing to accept massive civilian casualties, a possible nuclear war in the Middle East, and the reproach of his Left-wing, anti-war base just to avoid political defeat?

It's troubling to think that serious people have such a view of the president and it's also troubling that the fate of the world could hinge on Mr. Obama's poll numbers next Fall. Would he be willing to roll the dice if it looks like he's headed for electoral ignominy and gamble that a successful strike against Iran would win him the acclaim of the American electorate who might temporarily forget about the miserable economy in the afterglow of a military operation that relieved the world of the threat of Iranian nukes?

Taking out Iran's nukes may turn out, for strategic reasons, to be the right thing to do, but to do it for political reasons would be reprehensible. As much as I disagree with our president I don't believe, pace Hanson, that he's a man who'd sacrifice many thousands of lives for his political career.

The rest of the world better hope I'm right and that Hanson's wrong.

Stiffing the Pipeline, Squandering Jobs

There are good reasons, perhaps, for delaying the decision to construct the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring oil from Alberta to Texas, create twenty thousand jobs, and go a long way toward making us energy independent, but do they outweigh the benefits of constructing the pipeline?

The proposed path of the pipeline was feared to threaten Nebraska's water table, but the pipeline's environmental impact has been studied for 39 months with no compelling evidence that the water would be affected. Nevertheless, President Obama has decided that it needs to be studied some more, until, well, until after the 2012 election.

The Globe and Mail has some details and adds this:

But the delay, which will very likely place a final Keystone decision well after the presidential election a year from now, was the culmination of a remarkable few weeks that saw the president take an increasingly personal interest in the issue. That interest, many observers believe, makes it clear this was a political decision, made by a White House eager to hold on to a base of young environmental-minded voters who were instrumental in handing Barack Obama the presidency.

“It’s blatant politics,” said David Wilkins, former U.S. ambassador to Canada, in an interview Friday. Mr. Wilkins lobbied for Keystone on behalf of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. “It’s politics at its worst. It was a move by the president to placate a certain wing of his party and I think it was a real travesty.”

Mr. Wilkins pointed out that Mr. Obama had passed up 20,000 Keystone jobs to “protect one job, his own.”

Canadian officials have declared that they're now prepared to build a pipeline to their west coast where the oil will be shipped to China. In other words, the oil is going to be mined. It's going to be shipped, it's going to be burned, and it's going to help the economy of a rapidly growing nation, but that nation won't be the U.S. Moreover, the nation that burns it has far fewer regulations controlling emissions than does the U.S. Thus, environmentalists who oppose the pipeline because they don't want more carbon being spewed into the atmosphere are about to receive a lesson in unintended consequences.

This is not to say that there aren't legitimate concerns about shipping the oil across the United States, but every major project carries with it environmental risks. Building the interstate highway system or dams that harness the energy of moving water or digging a coal mine all create hazards, but the jobs they create and the improvements they make in the quality of life of every American have made those hazards worth risking.

It's hard to believe Mr. Obama sincerely wants to put Americans back to work when he declares a drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico that costs tens of thousands of jobs and devastates economies of towns all along the Gulf coast and follows that moratorium with an order to delay a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline that curtails the creation of tens of thousands more jobs.

Would he really play games with peoples' livelihoods just so he can keep his own job? I want to believe that he's a better human being than that, but I'm mystified as to why he's doing the things he's doing when it comes to developing oil resources and energy independence.

Note: The first two paragraphs have been revised since they were posted yesterday.

Lines in the Sand

Satellites orbiting the earth have recently discovered some interesting markings in the Chinese desert. New Scientist makes a convincing case that, given what one can see when the photos are blown up, they're designed by the Chinese military to serve as an artillery range.

Even so, suppose we were unable to magnify the pics. What would you attribute these patterns to:

Would you think them to be the products of purely natural causes, like wind, water, and chemical activity? If not, why not? Most of us doubtless ascribe these lines to intelligent agency, but why? It's not as if they showed some regular geometric pattern. The lines appear random except for their borders, but I suspect that even if the borders were irregular most of us would still think the lines to be intentionally constructed, even if we didn't know who did it, or why, or how.

This recognition of intelligent agency is precisely the intuition that underlies the believe that life is not solely the product of random natural processes. The probability of blind, natural processes being able to produce the Chinese lines is far higher than the probability of natural processes producing by chance a living, reproducing proto-cell. Yet, despite the sheer improbability of the latter, many folks nevertheless immediately assume it happened even as they would scoff at the notion that the lines in the desert were produced in the same way.

Why is that? The only way it makes any sense is if the existence of an intelligent designer of some kind is ruled out apriori, but that would be to reject the conclusion of the argument before the argument is allowed to make its case. It begs the question to assume there is no designer and then dismiss any evidence which might establish that a designer exists.

This, however, is what the materialist (or more precisely, the physicalist) does. He's certain that there's nothing to reality other than matter, energy, and force, and thus he excludes any explanation for any phenomenon that relies on a purposeful mind. There's no room in his worldview for any kind of God, and so he has no trouble imputing to intelligent human agents the Chinese lines but imputing to chance and the laws of physics the almost infinitely less likely emergence of life and biological information.

Your GPS

Ever wonder how your GPS works? Here's a one minute animation that explains the basics compliments of New Scientist:

The Global Warming Debate

This pretty much covers all the talking points. It's amusing.

Well, some won't find it amusing, but others will. It depends upon what side of the debate you're on, I guess:

HT: Evolution News and Views.

Ten Best Bio Pics

This is a magnified cluster of stink bug eggs the photograph of which placed in the top ten biological photographs of 2011:

I'm sure that many readers have found the adult stink bugs endearing over the last couple of years.

The other nine winners can be viewed at MSN.com.

Who Says They Had a Moral Obligation?

One of the interesting aspects of the Penn State case, at least for me, is the way in which people are tossing around the term "moral obligation." The coaches and administrators, we're being told, had a "moral obligation" to intervene to protect children from a man they knew to be a sexual predator.

So, we might ask, where does such an obligation come from? Who imposes it? Why is it wrong to just mind one's own business in such situations? The secular man simply has no answers to these questions. In order to make a moral judgment of the behavior of Jerry Sandusky he has to parasitize the Christian world-view and talk as if his moral sentiments were actually grounded in something beyond his own subjective predilections.

This morning I heard on the radio a story about the recently resigned president of PSU, Graham Spanier. Penn State had sponsored a "sex fair" on their campus a couple of years ago, at taxpayers' expense, which amounted to a festival given to pornography and sexual licentiousness. When President Spanier went later to the state legislature to ask for funding for the university he was grilled about this. He waffled, ducked and weaved and never really answered any of the legislators' questions. Finally, one exasperated lawmaker asked him point blank whether he thought the sex fair was wrong. Spanier replied that he really couldn't answer the question because he didn't know what the legislator meant by "wrong."

That, in a nutshell, explains what the problem is at Penn State and many other universities in the country. Academics can no longer talk about right and wrong because, having jettisoned the traditional Judeo-Christian ground for morality, they no longer possess the categories necessary to give those words meaning.

Indeed, I don't see how a secularist can even say that Jerry Sandusky's behavior with young boys was morally wrong. If a secularist wanted to say it was wrong because children are harmed by it they simply move the question back one step. Why is harming children wrong? It won't do to respond, as so many of the New Atheists do, that most people feel it to be wrong. If this were the standard then if people's feelings were changed then child rape would become right. Moreover, if the consensus determines right and wrong what if the consensus supports genocide or slavery, would that make these horrors right?

Harming children is not wrong because people have a subjective aversion to it. It's either wrong objectively or it's not really wrong at all, and it's only wrong objectively if it violates the law of an objective, transcendent, moral authority.

Graham Spanier and Jerry Sandusky give us a glimpse into the world as it will be when the secular tide is completely successful. It's not only not pretty, it's thoroughly ugly. Indeed, it looks a lot like Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Omen

A lot of attention was been showered on the success of Issue 2 in Ohio which was a repudiation of the efforts of the Republican governor, John Kasich, to limit the power public employee unions wielded over the state's taxpayers. The failure of the Ohio GOP to turn back the unions on this ballot initiative was seen as a massive setback for the GOP and a favorable augury for President Obama in this pivotal 2012 state.

Almost lost in the media excitement over this single hopeful reed to which the administration is clinging was the news out of Virginia which is a far more unfavorable augury than Ohio is hopeful. Despite extraordinarily heavy investments of time and resources in Virginia the Democrats were trounced.

Kim Strassel at the Wall Street Journal fills in the details:

Virginia Republicans added seven new seats to their majority in the House of Delegates, giving them two-thirds of that chamber's votes—the party's largest margin in history. The GOP also took over the Virginia Senate in results that were especially notable, given that Virginia Democrats this spring crafted an aggressive redistricting plan that had only one aim: providing a firewall against a Republican takeover of that chamber. Even that extreme gerrymander didn't work.

Every Republican incumbent — 52 in the House, 15 in the Senate — won. The state GOP is looking at unified control over government for only the second time since the Civil War. This is after winning all three top statewide offices — including the election of Gov. Bob McDonnell — in 2009, and picking off three U.S. House Democrats in last year's midterms.

Elected state Democrats — who form the backbone of grass-roots movements — couldn't distance themselves far enough from Mr. Obama in this race. Most refused to mention the president, to defend his policies, or to appear with him. The more Republicans sought to nationalize the Virginia campaign, the more Democrats stressed local issues.

According to Strassel many Democrat candidates even tried to identify themselves with the state's Republican governor in a desperate bid to separate themselves in the voters' minds from a president whose policies are growing increasingly unpopular in a state he won easily just three years ago.

Virginia may not be a bellwether for 2012, but it's certainly an omen and, viewed from the Oval Office, it's can't be a happy one.

One More Word

The Penn State scandal continues to receive attention from both the media and readers of Viewpoint. One theme that keeps popping up among those commenting on the discovery by Mike McQueary of coach Jerry Sandusky with a young boy in the locker room shower is that McQueary was morally obligated to do something to stop the assault on the boy, and that he failed this duty. I agree and have tried to offer over the last two days an explanation of why he didn't meet that obligation that doesn't call him a coward or impugn his moral character.

There is an obvious possibility, however, that has oddly been overlooked by many of the commentators, including me, that sounds very plausible and which anyone should consider who wants to give McQueary the benefit of the doubt rather than just revile him, like some of the people I've heard and read in the media seem wont to do.

In the narratives of this awful episode it's been assumed by McQueary's detractors that when he chanced upon Sandusky raping the boy in the shower that he quickly left without saying or doing anything to stop the crime, but how does anyone know that when Sandusky saw McQueary the whole thing didn't end right then? It might well have happened that when Sandusky realized that he'd been discovered he released the boy. Indeed, it's hard to imagine that the brutality continued after Sandusky, perhaps mortified that a former player and now a coaching colleague had witnessed him engaging in his disgraceful, disgusting and criminal behavior, realized that he'd been found out.

If Sandusky did stop when he and McQueary saw each other what more do McQueary's critics think he should have done other than taking the boy with him, an action which again presupposes that McQueary was able to think calmly and clearly at a moment when his whole world had been turned upside down?

This is what disturbs me about the media hostility to McQueary. There are a number of possible, at least partially exculpatory, explanations for what happened that night that people don't seem to be willing to concede.They seem instead to want to fulminate against McQueary, heaping opprobrium upon him, calling him a moral idiot and coward who had to "run to daddy," when it could easily have been the case that, in the very act of discovering what was going on, he brought the crime to a halt.

Parenthetically, others have pointed out that calling McQueary a coward is another example of the extraordinary judgmentalism that has surrounded this particular aspect of the case. It has come to light that this "coward" once intervened to break up a dining hall knife fight between two football players. I wonder how many of his despisers, happy to call him a coward from the safety of their arm chairs, would have had the guts to do that.

I don't know what all the facts are, but until we do know more I think it's reprehensible to burn McQueary at the stake, as so many people in the media and elsewhere are eager to do. It's especially reprehensible in my view to commit McQueary to the flames for allegedly failing to do what, in fact, he may actually have done. It may turn out that he's a much better man than a lot of his most hurtful critics think and a much better man than they are themselves.

More on the PSU Scandal

A couple of friends have written to ask me to clarify remarks I made in yesterday's post on the Penn State scandal. Specifically, there was concern about what was seen as an attempt by me to justify the failure of Mike McQueary to stop the assault on the boy in the locker room.

I should say first that I didn't try to justify McQueary's failure to act. I tried to explain and understand it. It may be that none of what I said about his possible mental state at the time was the case. He may have known very well what was happening and chose to ignore it and let the boy be raped. The point is that we don't know what he was thinking, and until we do, I think the chorus of condemnation in the media of this man is completely premature and cruel. I believe he should be given the benefit of the doubt until we know more about what happened.

I think those who condemn McQueary for not stopping Sandusky are being judgmental about a situation that probably few, if any of them, have ever been in themselves. I don't even know for sure what McQueary saw. He might've not even realized that he was seeing a child being raped until after he had a chance to reflect on it later. It's easy for people who've never been in a situation so shocking that they were completely disoriented by it to imply that were they in McQueary's shoes they would have taken action. It's easy but it's a claim rather lacking in humility.

There are lots of armchair heroes. We can all agree on what McQueary should have done at the time, and no one thinks he did the right thing at that moment, no one is excusing him, but to condemn him for failing to do what we wish he would have done in a circumstance for which nothing in his life had prepared him strikes me as deeply uncharitable and smacks of moral posturing, as if the critics are using McQueary's failure to assure their audience how righteous and macho they themselves are.

We'd all like to think that if we were faced with such a scenario we'd do the right thing, but none of us knows until we're in that spot - confronted with something so awful that we can't even process it, so foreign that we can't believe what we're seeing - what we would actually do. In such situations people often freeze up, they don't realize what's happening, they're so repelled that they can't think straight, and I think it's shameful that people who've never been confronted with such a horror themselves have been so quick to judge McQueary for failing in his moment of decision. It's like people who've never been in combat condemning those who have been for not behaving more valiantly under fire than perhaps they did.

Of course, having had time to reflect and put it all together, and after seeing that the Athletic Director wasn't going to do anything about Sandusky's crime, McQueary should have gone to the police. That he didn't makes him culpable and complicit, and should have, unless there are other considerations of which I am unaware, cost him his position on the coaching staff.

He Said, She Said

You won't hear this from most major media sources, and I confess I don't know how much weight to place on it, but a lawyer in Atlanta, using voice analysis technology often used by police departments to tell whether people are lying, has concluded that Herman Cain is telling the truth about his encounter with Sharon Bialek. In fact, it turns out that, according to the analysis, she herself appears to be the one prevaricating about what happened in their much celebrated meeting:

Private investigator TJ Ward said presidential hopeful Herman Cain was not lying at a news conference on Tuesday in Phoenix.

Cain denied making any sexual actions towards Sharon Bialek and vowed to take a polygraph test if necessary to prove his innocence.

Cain has not taken a polygraph but Ward said he does have software that does something better. Ward said the $15,000 software can detect lies in people's voices.

CBS Atlanta's Mike Paluska played Cain's speech for Ward into the software and watched as it analyzed Cain's every word.

If he is hiding something this thing would have spiked way down here," said Ward. "He is being truthful, totally truthful. He is a man with integrity and he talked directly about not knowing any incident he is accused of."

The software analyzes the stress level and other factors in your voice. During the speech, when Cain denied the claims, the lie detector read "low risk." According to Ward, that means Cain is telling the truth.

There's more at the link, including a video of the analysis of Cain's speech in which he claims innocence.

The Penn State Scandal

I'm reluctant to write about the Penn State mess because not everything is known yet about why people didn't go to the police with the information they had about assistant coach Jerry Sandusky's monstrous behavior. Even so, it's very hard to believe that there might be some exculpatory information still floating around out there.

It's also very hard to believe that Joe Paterno was the only member of the coaching staff who knew what was going on. Mike McQueary knew, he's the grad assistant who saw Sandusky raping the ten year old boy back in the late 90s, and he's still on the staff. I can't believe he never told anyone other than Paterno about what he saw.

Indeed, it almost has to be the case, the way such news carries, that the entire Penn State athletic department and much of the college administration was to some extent aware of this and yet no one went to the police. It really is astounding. It's likely to keep psychologists busy for the next hundred years spinning out explanations for it.

It's also unbelievable that students have rioted on the State College campus, not over the silence of their coaches and administrators in the face of the sexual abuse of young boys, but over the firing of Paterno. I don't know how the university could do otherwise. In fact, I don't know how they can not fire every coach who was on the football staff when this first happened because they all must have known about it. Indeed, the entire NCAA must have known about it because Sandusky was being touted as a future coaching star and yet when he left the PSU staff at age 55 he never got another coaching position. People must have known that he was a bad investment.

One thing about the media reaction to this, though, that I find disgusting is their willingness to condemn McQueary for not stopping it when he saw Sandusky in the shower with the boy. Unless someone has himself been in the position of seeing something so shocking, so alien, that he can't even process it, unless one has been in the position of being so completely stunned and confused by what he's seeing that he can't believe it and all he wants to do is get out of there, and those critics who were in that position nevertheless did the right thing, they should be very wary of condemning a young man who found himself in that position and didn't react the way, in retrospect, he should have.

It's a shame that JoePa is going out like this, but I see no other way around it than to acknowledge that he has no one else to blame. I don't want to second-guess him, but if he had a decent reason for not going to the police when he realized that the Athletic Director wasn't going to do anything about Sandusky's behavior I sure wish he'd tell us what it was.

See here for more on this awful episode. It looks like it may get even worse, if that were possible.

You Just Don't Understand My Religion

Julian Baggini one of the editors of The Philosopher's Magazine has initiated what promises to be an interesting and helpful series of columns at The Guardian on the conversation between the defenders and detractors of religious belief.

Baggini is himself a religious skeptic and his first installment addresses the inadequacy of the claim sometimes made by those religious folk who, in the course of defending their beliefs, say that "You just don't understand my religion." Baggini finds this somewhat less than compelling, at least in many contexts, and discusses how religious apologists have to do better than that:

Terry Eagleton's quip that reading Richard Dawkins on theology is like listening to someone "holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is The British Book of Birds" is a funny and memorable contribution to a debate that is rarely amusing and frequently forgettable. Whether you agree with the charge or not, the complaint is of a kind we have become very familiar with: disputants in the religion debate are talking past each other because they do not have a sufficiently rich understanding of the positions they stand against.

I might add here, parenthetically, that they also have an insufficiently rich understanding of the positions they stand for. Baggini continues:

I'm very much in sympathy with this view, and this series is largely an attempt to try to find more constructive points of engagement that can only emerge if we ditch lazy and tired preconceptions about those with whom we disagree. At the same time, however, I'm all too aware that "you just don't understand" is a card that is often played far too swiftly and without justification.

I agree with Baggini on this. Resorting to the dodge that the other guy is just too ignorant of one's religion to make a legitimate criticism of it is often a tacit admission of one's inability to defend his beliefs against the critic's animadversions.

It has become evident to me, however, that many people, especially the religious, suffer from a kind of conceptual claustrophobia. Their beliefs are of their essence somewhat vague and they are terrified of being pinned down.

Baggini goes on about this, instructively, I'd say, for several paragraphs, but the assumption seems to be that the fuzziness to which he alludes is an affliction of those who defend traditional religious beliefs while skeptics are lucid, precise, and logical.

Anyone who has read the recent works of the atheistic despisers of religion will have found that not only their antireligious arguments, but also the naturalistic Darwinism that they propose as an alternative, suffer from precisely the malaise that Baggini describes. Over and over we are soothingly assured by these scribes that the scientific illuminati have proven beyond doubt that science has all the answers to any question worth asking and that there's no need to resort to anything like God.

If, however, one were to impertinently ask a skeptic to explain how blind, purposeless forces and laws could have plausibly produced life from non-life and to have generated biological information, or if one were to ask them to explain how the impersonal can give rise to consciousness, or how something like butterfly metamorphosis or sexual reproduction could have evolved by purely non-teleological processes, one often hears the same vague appeals to mystery that Baggini deplores when they come from the traditionally religious. The inquirer is frequently told that his lack of scientific understanding impedes his comprehension of the Truth.

I hope that in future columns in the series Baggini brings out the fact that "You just don't understand my religion" is not just a dodge of the traditionally religious but also of those whose religion is scientific materialism.

The Illusion of Free Choice

My brother Bill, who is, I must say, a bit of a pessimist, offers the following philosophical commentary on the futility of placing one's hopes for the future in either of our political parties:

I try to assure him that it's not as bad as all that, but I must admit that I often think he has the better of the argument.

Who Will it Be?

In a couple of months the primary elections will begin and from that grim process a Republican challenger to Barack Obama will emerge. Who will it be? Currently there are eight major candidates vying for the honor: Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachmann, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, and John Huntsman.

Romney is holding steady as the favorite of around 25% of Republican voters. The other seven candidates are splitting the remaining 75% of the vote. However, those 75% are pretty much united in their opposition to Romney. If, say, Michelle Bachmann were to retire from the race her supporters would not go to Romney. Most of them would likely go to one of the remaining six more conservative candidates. Likewise, for any of the other "non-Romneys" in the campaign.

It seems to me, then, that the Republican nominee will be the candidate, other than Romney, who can outlast all the others. Right now that looks like it will be either Rick Perry or Newt Gingrich.

I think it will be Gingrich for the following reasons:

• Newt is clearly the brightest, most well-informed candidate in the field. No one comes close to him in their grasp of the issues or their ability to articulate them.
• GOP primary voters will soon ask themselves which of the three top alternatives to Romney - Perry, Cain, or Gingrich - they want to see on the debate stage against Barack Obama, and the answer to that will almost certainly be Gingrich.
• Gingrich has government experience that Herman Cain lacks, and, in any event, the allegations against Cain have, I think, mortally wounded his candidacy.
• Gingrich has an ability to enthrall an audience that neither Romney nor Perry has.

The bad news in this for Gingrich is that once he becomes a contender the media will dig up every bit of dirt on him that's out there or that they can make up and get away with. Indeed, the process will doubtless begin as soon as they finish wiping Herman Cain's blood off their daggers.

Gingrich does have baggage - he comes across on occasion as prickly and petulant, although the story about him telling his wife that he wanted a divorce while she lay dying of cancer in a hospital bed is completely apocryphal - and that baggage will weigh him down some, but he's surely aware of that and must have calculated that he can weather it.

Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal has written a good piece on why she thinks Newt is the dark horse in the race. You can check it out here.

Personhood in Mississippi

All but ignored in the media fascination with the Herman Cain soap opera are several ballot initiatives to be decided in today's elections.

It's too early to tell how they have fared, but one that has profound consequences for contemporary abortion ethics and jurisprudence is a measure in Mississippi that seeks to define a person as existing from the moment of conception.

No court has ever defined a person this expansively before. Ezra Klein writes this in the Washington Post:

A new poll underscores just how close Mississippi is to passing the country’s first “personhood” law, which would define life as beginning at conception. Public Policy Polling finds that, hours before tomorrow’s vote, 45 percent of voters supported the amendment, while 44 percent opposed it.

Actually, Klein is mistaken here. He repeats a canard that has plagued the abortion debate ever since the 1970s. It's clearly not a debate about when life begins. No life scientist or medical doctor would ever claim otherwise. Life doesn't "begin," it's a continuum going back to the first life forms appearing on the planet. The ovum and sperm are living cells produced by living men and women. When they fuse they form a conceptus which is itself a living entity, and it continues to live throughout its development.

The question the personhood law is really designed to address, however it might be worded, is the question of when this living organism becomes a person. This is significant because under our constitution persons have a right to life. The Fifth Amendment states:

No person shall .... be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

If this ballot issue passes it will have enormous ramifications not just for abortion but a number of other practices as well:

“Things can definitely go either way tomorrow,” said Public Policy Polling director Tom Jensen. “The stakes here are huge. This is really the most interesting thing on the ballot tomorrow anywhere in the country.”

The Mississippi ballot has incredibly important legal implications: no state has ever given an embryo constitutional rights and, legally, it’s not quite clear what happens when you do. There is a lot of speculation that it could outlaw infertility treatments and birth control, while almost certainly banning abortion. If passed, the Mississippi law would near certainly bait a legal challenge that could wind its way up to the Supreme Court.

We'll know soon enough whether it passes.

Hypocrisy of the Feeding Frenzy

I don't know what, if anything, happened between Herman Cain and the women who are accusing him of various levels of sexually inappropriate behavior.

I do think, though, that anyone who, on the basis of these charges, criticizes Cain should be required to tell us whom they voted for in 1994. If it was Bill Clinton they should be dismissed with a wave of the hand and a shake of the head. They have absolutely no credibility.

No one who supported Bill Clinton or Ted Kennedy or John Edwards has any business criticizing Herman Cain for his alleged indiscretions. Yet the lefties at MSNBC, NBC, CBS and elsewhere are attacking Cain like Piranha attacking a luckless cow that wandered into the river.

The hypocrisy of this feeding frenzy is, in my opinion, the most significant aspect of this whole sordid episode.

I could hardly believe my ears this morning watching MSNBC's Morning Joe and later listening to Martin Bashir and others on the Dylan Ratigan show on the same network.

Morning Joe featured a fine interview with former president Clinton on his ideas for rousing us from our economic malaise, at the end of which Joe Scarborough lamented that people like Mr. Clinton cannot again run for the presidency. This, after his own show and others on the network have ceaselessly made the point, both implicitly and explicitly, that the behavior alleged to have been indulged in by Mr. Cain, behavior no worse than that of Mr. Clinton, by itself disqualifies him as a serious candidate for that office.

The panel on the Dylan Ratigan show was uniformly adamantine that Mr. Cain's indiscretions were beyond what a decent American polity should be expected to tolerate, and yet every one of these folks would, I am willing to bet, vote for Mr. Clinton today were he to run again for the White House.

It never seems to occur to any of these people how hypocritical they look. Or maybe it does, but they don't care.

Nature Red in Tooth and Claw

Watch this drama play out among three species of African animals and choose which of the animals is behaving morally and which immorally. But, you might object, morality is an inappropriate category when talking about animals. True enough, but if Darwinistic naturalism is correct then animals is all we are, so why do we think moral categories apply to humans?

If these were three groups of human beings involved in this episode which group would, on the Darwinian view, be behaving morally and which immorally?

If Darwinism is correct, if we are simply animals that have evolved bipedalism, then whence comes right and wrong? From where do we get the notion that we are duty-bound to refrain from cruelty and violence?

It will do no good to claim that humans have evolved a moral sense and other animals haven't. If our moral sense is a product of blind, impersonal forces then what obligates to pay it any heed? Just because we have it doesn't mean we need it or should value it. Evolution has equipped us with hair on our faces, but it doesn't follow that we should have it.

Moreover, just as we have evolved the sense that we shouldn't be selfish we have also evolved the desire to be selfish. Why should one of these be privileged over the other? By what standard do we decide which behavior is "right"?

Moral obligation can only exist if it is imposed by a personal, transcendent moral authority. Natural selection and random mutation can't obligate anyone to do anything.

Thus, the naturalist has to either give up his naturalism in order to keep his belief that moral duties exist, or he has to give up his belief in moral duties in order to hold on to his naturalism. What he can't do, and claim to be living rationally, is hold onto both of them.

Approaching Armageddon

Debkafile reports that signs are pointing to an imminent NATO attack on Iran's nuclear installations. Debkafile is not always reliable, but other sources corroborate their story that something is afoot. Here are some key excerpts:

The sudden rush of military news Wednesday, Nov. 2, is part of an orchestrated Western performance to convince Tehran that the US, Britain and Israel are on the verge of a military operation against its nuclear installations. Directed from Washington, it is meant to warn Iran that the play could become a reality show if it refuses to give up the drive for a nuclear weapon. President Barack Obama may then decide to strike Revolutionary Guards Corps targets, the bulwark of the Islamic regime, and its strategic infrastructure, thereby knocking over the key props holding up the regime of the ayatollahs.

Contributing to the menacing climate hanging over Iran were four headline events involving Israel – all on the same Wednesday: Israel conducted a successful test launch of a new intercontinental ballistic missile, Jericho 3, which foreign sources report is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead 7,000 kilometers.

After that, the IDF released photographs of Israeli Air Force squadron leaders reporting from Italian air base runways to the media on joint exercises they had conducted in long-range maneuvers with the Italian air force "and other NATO nations," to familiarize the IAF with NATO military tactics.

Next, the IDF's Home Command announced a large-scale anti-missile exercise in central Israel starting Thursday morning, Nov. 3.

There are more indications of impending military action at the link. One of the interesting points was this:

A potential US-British strike to pre-empt this move would also be timed for the run-up to America's next presidential election in November 2012.

Could it be that this attack would be used for political manipulation? By a Nobel Peace Prize recipient? Let's hope that if war happens the timing was established by the military and not by Mr. Obama's campaign managers.

Debkafile's military sources report that if the US, Britain and other NATO nations, such as France, Italy and Germany, participate in the attack, Israel will not. Its army, air force and navy will defend the home front, be available to engage Iran's allies to prevent them from striking the assault forces from the rear, and act as a strategic reserve. The danger would come from Syria, the Lebanese Hizballah, and the Palestinian Hamas and Jihad Islami in the Gaza Strip.

If, however, NATO decides not to go through with the assault Israel will have to decide whether to try to slow down Iran's nuclear weapons program on its own.

There is not much time for contemplation. Syria and Hizballah are reported by debkafile's military sources to be in the throes of separate preparations for attacking Israel if their respective grips on power are shaken. For now, those sources rate the chances of Israel facing a military clash with Syria and/or Hizballah much higher than a NATO-Israeli showdown being mounted against Iran.

I'll repeat what I've said on numerous previous occasions: War with Iran would be cataclysmic for the Middle East, probably Europe, and maybe the U.S. Violence will not be confined to the theater of combat. Terror attacks and assassinations will occur worldwide. Attacks on oil supplies and shipping will doubtless also be attempted. The only thing worse than attacking Iran would be to let Iran get a nuclear weapon. If that were allowed to transpire the world would truly be facing Armageddon.

Silenced

"Must-read" is an over-used adjective when talking about books, but sometimes I think it captures my feelings about a book perfectly. Such is the case with an enormously important work written by Paul Marshall and Nina Shea, titled Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide. In 331 pages of text and another 100+ pages of documentation the authors compile a powerful warning to the West and a chillingly informative narrative of exactly what's going on in the Islamic world today.

Marshall and Shea take the reader on a sight-seeing tour of a dozen or so countries in the Islamic world, describing in calm, dispassionate reportage the brutal stifling of thought and the horrific consequences of even the most innocent criticism of Islam. It's not only non-Muslims who are the victims of this oppression. Any member of a minority group, even of another Muslim sect, is subject to fall afoul of Islamic blasphemy codes. The dominant religious group seeks to impose strict uniformity of belief wherever they can, and any criticism, no matter how trivial, is seen as blasphemy against Allah or his Prophet or as "insulting Islam," either of which will get the person jailed, tortured, or murdered.

Moreover, anyone who converts from Islam to another religion or no religion is considered an apostate and is subject to death, not just by courts of law, but by anyone who happens to have the opportunity to take the apostate's life.

Even criticizing such draconian laws can get one killed. In Pakistan in January of this year, Salman Taseer, a Muslim and governor of Pakistan's wealthiest province was murdered by his own bodyguard because he had repeatedly called for the repeal of blasphemy laws and also for the pardon of Asia Bibi, a woman who was sentenced to die because she had been accused (not convicted) of insulting the Prophet.

On March 2nd of this year Shahbaz Bhatti, the highest ranking Christian in the Pakistani government was murdered while visiting his mother because he "was an infidel Christian" and had devoted his life to the causes of religious freedom and human rights.

Lest one think that these crimes are perpetrated by a small number of extremists, Pew Foundation research shows that 78% of Pakistanis approve of killing apostates and "blasphemers".

The murders of Taseer and Bhatti were two prominent cases, but there have been thousands of lesser known victims of religious violence throughout the Islamic world over the last twenty years.

A nun was murdered in Somalia and dozens of churches set afire after Pope Benedict gave a speech in Germany in which he made a statement that Muslims considered insulting.

Several hundred people were killed in riots in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere, after a Danish cartoonist drew a picture of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban.

In an example of almost incredible irony several Muslim reformers have written that Islam, as it is widely practiced, is too violent. They were subsequently subject to death threats from other Muslims who thought the reformers claims were insulting.

One of the most bizarre cases of such violence occurred in September or 2007 in the Sudan. A fifty four year-old school teacher from England named Gillian Gibbons used a teddy bear as a teaching tool in her classroom and asked her students to give the bear a name. Twenty of the twenty three students suggested naming the stuffed animal Mohammed, not after the Prophet, but after the most popular boy in the class. When somehow word of this sacrilege got out Gibbons was arrested and eventually convicted of insulting religion.

The day following her conviction tens of thousands of people armed with machetes and swords filled the streets of Khartoum demanding that she be put to death for blasphemy. Fortunately, the British government was able to extricate her from Khartoum and get her safely back to England, but many others have not been as lucky.

The terror is widespread throughout the Middle East, northern Africa, and Indonesia, but it's also spreading to Europe where politicians and jurists are putting themselves through intellectual contortions in order to appease Muslims who demand that no criticism or satire of Islam be permitted in European society, while at the same time trying to hold on to a residuum of free speech.

Dutch Filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered, Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali was essentially booted out of the country and is living in the U.S. under protective guard, Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated for his criticism of Muslim immigration, Novelist Salman Rushdie has been living in hiding since 1989 when a fatwa of death was put on him by the Ayatollah Khomeini for Rushdie's novel the Satanic Verses. Much of the rest of Europe has been cowed into submission.

Christian pastors can be brought to trial in Europe for "hate speech" if they criticize Islam in a sermon, an astonishing fact given that madrassas around the globe inculcate hate for Christians and Jews into their students on a daily basis.

The situation in the U.S. is not yet quite so grim because of our First Amendment protections, but the chilling effect of the threat of Muslim violence extends even to our shores. Yale Publishing Co. published a book on the Danish cartoon controversy in which a series of cartoons depicting Mohammed set off the deadly riots mentioned above. But while Yale published the book they refused to show the cartoons which the book was about.

Our own State Department and Department of Homeland Security have censored the language that government employees can use to refer to terrorists. They are proscribed from using words like "salafi", "wahhabist," "caliphate," and "jihadist" because these are said to be offensive to Muslims when used by non-Muslims. They also banned the use of the term "Islamic terrorism," replacing it with the rather inartful but more politically correct term, "man-caused disasters."

In Canada, journalist Mark Steyn and the news magazine for which he wrote were hauled before three separate Canadian human rights commissions because he wrote an essay critical of Islamic fundamentalism and Canadian political correctness. The column offended Muslims, mainly because Steyn maintained that Islam was making inroads into European society and was profoundly changing the culture. Steyn was eventually absolved, but under Canadian law he had to pay all of his legal fees, a fact guaranteed to discourage others from putting themselves through a similar ordeal.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that emerges from Marshall and Shea's extensive research that a dark age is descending upon the globe, an age in which violence is used to inhibit and suppress any criticism and scrutiny of a particular religious belief, to extinguish the great Western legacy of free speech, and to gradually compel its acceptance throughout Western society.

The authors have done us a valuable service by documenting what life is like for those who already live under such conditions and what it will be like for those in the West if they continue to allow the freedom to speak critically about a belief system and its practitioners to be eroded away by fear of violence.

Ayn Rand and the Tea Party

Walter Hudson at Pajamas Media has some good thoughts on the role of religion in politics. His post was triggered by the wish of a group of Ayn Rand's followers to join forces with the Tea Party:

It began without controversy. At a routine board meeting of the North Star Tea Party Patriots (NSTPP), a coalition of activist groups in Minnesota which this author chairs, a vote was taken to admit a new member organization. The new group was the Minnesota Objectivist Association (MOA) which advocates the philosophy of Ayn Rand as expressed in her novel Atlas Shrugged.

Though not a Tea Party organization in name, MOA was nonetheless supportive of the movement’s mission and principles. Signs reading “Who is John Galt?” in reference to Rand’s novel had been a staple at Tea Party rallies since the movement began.

Within days, word got around to the broader NSTPP membership that MOA had been admitted. Pushback began. Some complained that MOA did not have “Tea Party” in their name. Others noted that MOA was not listed on Tea Party Patriots’ national directory.

The concern over these relatively minor points seemed disproportionate. Provision had been made in the NSTPP constitution to include organizations which predated the Tea Party movement yet sought the same ends. A group without “Tea Party” in its name had been admitted before.

After some beating around the bush, the crux of the matter emerged. Ayn Rand was an atheist, and her philosophy of Objectivism did not acknowledge the existence of God. Thus was alleged an irreconcilable difference between the Tea Party and Ayn Rand.

As the controversy progressed, MOA ultimately withdrew from the coalition, citing the episode as a needless distraction to all parties concerned. Precluding debate left some important questions unresolved. What role does religion play within the Tea Party? Must one be a theist in order to be philosophically aligned with the movement?

Hudson goes on to ask whether the Tea Party is just about smaller, fiscally responsible government, lower taxes, and less government regulation or is there some larger unarticulated religious vision also lying at the core of the movement. There might be, but I don't think the Tea Party should exclude those of like mind who don't share their theistic assumptions and commmitments. It should, in my opinion, keep its focus on the above fiscal matters and welcome as allies anyone who agrees with them on those issues.

But read Hudson's post and see what you think, whether you're sympathetic to the Tea Party or not.

Politics of Personal Destruction

As predicted, Herman Cain is being drawn and quartered by the media for alleged inappropriate behavior over a decade ago. If he's guilty it's certainly something the voters should know, but the way this sordid episode has been handled and the media feeding frenzy that has resulted, raise several questions.

Given that most successful people in business and politics have something in their past they wouldn't want made the topic of world-wide interest, why would anyone want to put themselves through the incredibly absurd and brutal process we call a political campaign? Our contemporary political process is designed to all but insure that the winner will be either the most ruthless, the most dishonest, or the most bland and enigmatic candidate in the race. It's no wonder that people like Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie don't want to run. Why put your family through this?

I also wonder how many of the people who are seeking to destroy Cain by publicizing these allegations and pillorying him in the media stood by President Clinton when he was accused of doing far worse than merely making a woman feel uncomfortable. Clinton was accused by Juanita Broaddrick of rape, by Kathleen Willey of sexual assault (while consoling her over the death of her husband), and by Paula Jones of indecent exposure. Moreover, he had extramarital affairs with at least five women while governor of Arkansas and was convicted of perjury while serving as president, but none of that seemed to matter to his supporters, many of whom would gladly vote for him again and many of whom are among those condemning Herman Cain for unspecified acts which made several women "feel uncomfortable".

Finally, why are reporters tripping all over each other to rush unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct against Cain into print when they sat on substantiated allegations of John Edwards philandering and his "love child" until Edwards was no longer a presidential candidate and there was no doubt about the nature of his pathetic behavior?

I don't know what Cain did. If it was sexually inappropriate that certainly reflects poorly on his suitability for high office, but whatever he did it wasn't as bad as what either Clinton or Edwards did, both of whom were given a pass by the people who are today delightedly destroying Cain. Nor was Cain's behavior as sleazy as that of a hypocritical media which staunchly defended President Clinton and slandered his accusers, but is determined to ruin a man whose offenses were far milder but who poses a serious threat to the reelection of the incumbent president.

The Ongoing Controversy

The global warming debate continues and is starting to look a bit like a soap opera.

Last week Richard Muller of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) project team - a scientist who had formerly been skeptical of the claims that the earth was inexorably warming - rocked the climate science world by releasing a paper in which he reversed his former skepticism and acknowledged that he now believed that man-caused, or anthropogenic, global warming (APG) was an indisputable fact. His new position was quickly repudiated, however, by a prominent colleague at BEST who argued that Prof. Muller was hiding data that completely negated his argument that the earth's temperature is rising.

Here's part of the story:

Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and his colleagues from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST), claimed to have shown that the planet has warmed by almost a degree centigrade since 1950 and is warming continually.

Published last week ahead of a major United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, next month, their work was cited around the world as irrefutable evidence that only the most stringent measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can save civilization as we know it.

It was cited uncritically by, among others, reporters and commentators from the BBC, The Independent, The Guardian, The Economist and numerous media outlets in America.

The Washington Post said the BEST study had ‘settled the climate change debate’ and showed that anyone who remained a skeptic was committing a ‘cynical fraud’. But today The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a leading member of Prof Muller’s team has accused him of trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.

Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming skeptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis. Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers.

Her comments, in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, seem certain to ignite a furious academic row. She said this affair had to be compared to the notorious ‘Climategate’ scandal two years ago. Like the scientists exposed then by leaked emails from East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit, her colleagues from the BEST project seem to be trying to ‘hide the decline’ in rates of global warming.

In fact, Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties – a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained.

‘There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’

However, Prof Muller denied warming was at a standstill. ‘We see no evidence of it [global warming] having slowed down,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. There was, he added, ‘no leveling off’. But a report to be published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation includes a graph of world average temperatures over the past ten years, drawn from the BEST project’s data and revealed on its website.

This graph shows that the trend of the last decade is absolutely flat, with no increase at all – though the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have carried on rising relentlessly.

These are the graphs which appeared in The Mail's article:

‘This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting,’ Prof Curry said. ‘Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.’ In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected skeptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.

They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago.

Yesterday Prof Muller insisted that neither his claims that there has not been a standstill, nor the graph, were misleading .... However, he admitted it was true that the BEST data suggested that world temperatures have not risen for about 13 years. But in his view, this might not be ‘statistically significant’, although, he added, it was equally possible that it was – a statement which left other scientists mystified.

‘I am baffled as to what he’s trying to do,’ Prof Curry said.

Well, the mystification is understandable if, as the article tells us, Prof. Muller had previously insisted that there's no evidence that global warming was at a standstill.

At any rate, it certainly seems that since 1998 global temperatures have not risen even though we have continued to pump CO2 into the atmosphere. This is inexplicable given the predictions of global warming alarmists and suggests that climate change/stability is a much more complicated affair than a simple correlation between greenhouse gas emissions and temperature.

What the truth of the matter is I certainly don't know, but I do think it's safe to say that when people like Al Gore insist that the science is settled on APG they don't know what they're talking about.

Lord of the Flies

The Occupations, or at least some of them, appear to be devolving into what you might expect - chaos, bickering, and crime. If the Democrats had hoped to exploit this unrest and dissatisfaction for political gain, they're doubtless reconsidering now.

Here's a sample of what's happening in Baltimore:

Via Hot Air

Darwin and Hitler

A piece by Richard Weikert, author of the excellent book From Darwin to Hitler, recently caught my eye. Weikert recounts being interviewed by a writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer who challenged his claim that Darwinists have no grounds upon which to judge the morality of Adolph Hitler, or anyone else, for that matter. Here's part of his account:

When the Philadelphia Inquirer's science writer Faye Flam interviewed me recently for her article "Severing the Link Between Darwin and Nazism," she pressed me to discuss the implications of the Darwinism-Nazism connection that my scholarship has explored (especially in my two books, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany and Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress).

I threw down the gauntlet to many of my Darwinian opponents by telling her that if Darwinism is indeed a purposeless, non-teleological process, as many evolutionists and biology textbooks proclaim, and if morality is the product of these mindless evolutionary processes, as Darwin and many other prominent Darwinists maintain, then "I don't think [they] have any grounds to criticize Hitler."

According to Flam, these are "fighting words." However, I have spoken with intelligent Darwinists who admit point-blank that they do not have any grounds to condemn Hitler, so I am not just making this up. Many evolutionists believe that since evolution explains the origin of morality -- as Darwin himself argued -- then there is no objective morality. The famous evolutionary biologist and founder of sociobiology, E. O. Wilson, and the prominent philosopher of science Michael Ruse co-authored an article on evolutionary ethics in which they asserted, "Ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to co-operate."

This is obviously not an undisputed point among Darwinists, but it is a position embraced by many leading Darwinists, and it does seem to reflect Darwin's own position. If indeed ethics is an illusion, merely the product of mindless, purposeless processes, it is hard to see what basis Darwinists could have to condemn Hitler morally.

Indeed, on several occasions I have asked those committed to the evolutionary origins of morality about the implications of their views: "Can you say then that Hitler is objectively evil or not?" Usually, they reluctantly admit to me that they have no objective basis to condemn Hitler or any other purveyors of atrocities.

Richard Dawkins himself says precisely this, as we've pointed out on previous occasions: "What's to prevent us from saying," Dawkins asks, "that Hitler was right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question." And Dawkins is far from being the only naturalistic scientist who has arrived at this conclusion.

There's much more of interest in Weikert's post. For example, it's clear that Flam really doesn't understand the nature of the problem for the belief that we have moral obligations that's posed by naturalism:

[Flam] argues that "Darwin himself wrote that violence, selfishness, charity, and goodwill are all part of human nature. He hoped that we would choose to act on the better parts." Wait a minute. Where did this notion of "better" come from? If Flam is taking a fully naturalistic Darwinian perspective, as she seems to be, with evolution being a purposeless, non-teleological process, why does she think that charity and goodwill are any "better" than violence and selfishness.

According to the Darwinian account of the origin of morality, all these character traits allegedly helped humans adapt to their present environment in the struggle for existence. All of these are "natural" behaviors, as are genocide, rape, murder, and theft, or honesty, self-sacrifice, and altruism. What arbitrates between these behaviors? Who can say that any of these behaviors are "better" than any others?

She concludes her article by asking, "If our lives really did hinge on countless accidents, couldn't that notion make life ever more precious?" Again, she is smuggling ideas into her argument that are fundamentally incompatible with her worldview. "Precious" implies that something has value, meaning, and significance; indeed it means that something has more value than other things.

However, a naturalistic understanding of Darwinism cannot sustain the notion that life is precious, because everything, not just life, is the product of chance and would be equally valuable, making life no more precious than anything else in the cosmos. A lump of coal or a dung heap is every bit as much the product of countless accidents as you are. Does that make them precious? Many Darwinists today, such as Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, reject the idea that human life is special and has any meaning or purpose.

Flam's problem is that, like so many other naturalistic materialists, she's piggy-backing on Christian theism without realizing it. She's assuming that naturalism need not diminish our view that life is full of meaning and that human beings have objective moral duties, when in fact naturalism erases both of these. Naturalists like Flam insist that theism is false but live as if it were true, and the contradiction doesn't trouble them because they're blithely unaware of it.

The droll thing about this is that, while living as if the thing they claim to be false is really true, they're happy to proclaim to one and all that Christianity is irrational.

Flam responds to Weikert, rather weakly in my view, here.

Taking Down the Sign

It turns out that the atheist group which paid several thousand dollars to put up this billboard is ignominiously taking it down. A thorough search was unable to corroborate that Thomas Jefferson said anything close to what the billboard claims he said:

So, not only is there no evidence Jefferson ever said such a thing, but Mr.Gleason is incorrect in asserting that it nevertheless expresses his true feelings. Not only is there much evidence to the contrary, but only a complete historical illiterate could say that there's not one redeeming feature of Christianity. I think it safe to say that Jefferson would have been offended that such ignorance was imputed to him.

The atheist group that sponsored the sign is not only historically benighted they're also pusillanimous. Here's a test: Unless one is willing to put up a similar billboard saying the same about Islam they really shouldn't put up a sign derogating Christianity. It takes no courage to criticize people you know will do nothing more serious to you than pray for you. It does take courage, however, to broadcast the same message about a religion whose devotees will do all they can to cut off your head for saying it.

Moreover, is this the best that the Cosa Mesa atheists can do with $4000? How many meals would that money have provided in a soup kitchen? How many elderly could have their utility bills paid with that amount? How many vaccines could be purchased for destitute Africans? What good comes from spending the money on an effort to dispirit and discredit the very people who are actually doing these things?

HT: The Blaze

The Handy Hammer of Hate

The Washington Post takes note of how hate is being used by the left as a tool to censor legitimate debate in our public square. It's significant, I think, that this article, which is critical of the left, appeared in the Post which is one of the more liberal newspapers in the land. Here's the gist of it:

In the debates over gay marriage, "hate" is the ultimate conversation-stopper.

Some stories from recent months: A religion instructor at a midwestern state university explains in an e-mail to students the rational basis for Catholic teaching on homosexuality. He is denounced by a student for "hate speech" and is dismissed from his position. (He is later reinstated - for now.)

At another midwestern state university, a department chairman demurs from a student organizer's request that his department promote an upcoming "LGBTQ" film festival on campus; he is denounced to his university's chancellor, who indicates that his e-mail to the student warrants inquiry by a "Hate and Bias Incident Response Team."

On the west coast, a state law school moves to marginalize a Christian student group that requires its members to pledge they will conform to orthodox Christian doctrines on sexual morality. In the history of the school, no student group has ever been denied campus recognition. But this one is, and the U.S. Supreme Court lets the school get away with it.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a once-respected civil rights organization, publishes a "report" identifying a dozen or so "anti-gay hate groups," some for no apparent reason other than their vocal opposition to same-sex marriage. Other marriage advocacy groups are put on a watch list.

On a left-wing Web site, a petition drive succeeds in pressuring Apple to drop an "app" from its iTunes store for the Manhattan Declaration, an ecumenical Christian statement whose nearly half-million signers are united in defense of the right to life, the tradition of conjugal marriage between man and woman, and the principles of religious liberty. The offense? The app is a "hate fest." Fewer than 8,000 people petition for the app to go; more than five times as many petition Apple for its reinstatement, so far to no avail.

Finally, on "$#*! My Dad Says," a CBS sitcom watched by more than 10 million weekly viewers, an entire half-hour episode is devoted to a depiction of the disapproval of homosexuality as bigotry, a form of unreasoning intolerance that clings to the past with a coarse and mean-spirited judgmentalism. And this on a show whose title character is famously irascible and politically incorrect, but who in this instance turns out to be fashionably cuddly and up-to-date.

What's going on here? Clearly a determined effort is afoot, in cultural bastions controlled by the left, to anathematize traditional views of sexual morality, particularly opposition to same-sex marriage, as the expression of "hate" that cannot be tolerated in a decent civil society.

The argument over same-sex marriage must be brought to an end, and the debate considered settled. Defenders of traditional marriage must be likened to racists, as purveyors of irrational fear and loathing. Opposition to same-sex marriage must be treated just like support for now long-gone anti-miscegenation laws.

It is indeed one of the more charming habits of some liberals to label arguments or opinions they don't like a form of hatred. It would be a derisory tactic were it not for the fact that it so often works, at least with those who can't be bothered to examine such claims carefully.

Having proven itself in the past to be an effective expedient for winning debates and getting one's way, it receives frequent employment by commentators on the left. Simply accuse one's opponents of some form of bigotry, whether racial or sexual, and you effectively discredit and thus silence them without having to actually construct an intelligent argument. This is insidious because it stifles and derails the kind of open and honest discourse upon which a democratic society is nourished. But then, a lot of these folks aren't really interested in open and honest discourse, nor are they interested in a free and democratic society.