Francis Crick, R.I.P.

Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the double helicoid structure of the DNA molecule, has passed away at the age of 88. Mark Steyn graces us with an excellent obituary.

Crick was an atheistic Darwinian who was most interested in taking his naturalistic assumptions to their logical conclusions, though like most such thinkers, he stops well short of going all the way.

For instance, Steyn quotes him as writing in his last major work, The Astonishing Hypothesis, "that 'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: 'You're nothing but a pack of neurons.'"

In other words, the human being is for Crick nothing more than a clump of chemicals, mud and blood, a muscle and bone machine. If Crick is right about this, however, it has the most distressing and devastating consequences for our view of human existence. As Viewpoint has argued on previous occasions, every major yearning of the human heart is hopelessly unfulfillable if all we are is a pack of neurons. Life and the world are completely absurd, there's no meaning or purpose to human love, striving, or suffering. There's no ground for moral judgment, no real justice, no basis for human dignity or rights. There is only, for most people who've ever lived, the prospect of pain, conflict, alienation, and finally annihilation with perhaps a few fleeting moments of joy arising briefly like the ephemeral light of a firefly in an otherwise uniformly dark and bleak night.

The worldview of such as Francis Crick leads anyone who is serious about its logical consequences into the abyss of nihilism and despair. Anything else is just whistling past the graveyard. It is an odd thing about atheism that few people are able to live consistently with its fundamental convictions that we are an accident of blind, impersonal forces and that this life is the only life there is.

Progress in Iraq

Senator Kerry claims that Iraq is in chaos, that the president is botching it so badly that Kerry has no idea what he will find when he takes office in January. He may, he claims, find that Iraq is another Lebanon, and so on. Yet everything we read coming out of that country, except what we read in the MSM, suggests that the Senator simply doesn't know what he's talking about. This is understandable, of course, since he never attends the meetings of the Intelligence Committee he serves on, but it's not excusable.

There is much news from Iraq which indicates that things are going much better there than the Senator would have us believe. One such story at National Review Online concerns the quality of Iraqi troops which are daily growing more competent, more effective and more numerous. Consider these excerpts:

The enthusiasm of U.S. Marine captains Thomas "Tad" Douglas and David Nevers can hardly be contained. Their voices, alternately crackling over a weak satellite-phone connection, are heartening as they describe the successes they are witnessing in Iraq. The insurgency is losing ground. Iraqi civilians, feeling less afraid than in previous months, are increasingly coming forward with solid information about the bad guys. And a new Iraqi special-operations force is taking the lead in wiping out guerilla strongholds, south of Baghdad.

From their operating base in Kalsu...Douglas tells National Review Online, "The Iraqis are performing well-above my expectations. Their strengths are their aggressiveness and mobility, and we are enhancing those strengths."

"This is an emerging force, and yet they are taking the lead in our operations against the insurgents," says Nevers. "We conducted an operation a month ago in which this force did most of the planning and then physically led the way. The operation was very successful, and it consequently set the stage for what we are doing right now."

Asked if those on the team are more-formidable fighters than the best Iraqi troops faced by U.S. forces during the spring 2003 invasion, Nevers is quick to respond, "Yes, and they are far better than the Iraqis we were contending with in April 2004 [during the brutal fighting in and around Fallujah and Ramadi]."

Speaking of Iraq, there is another helpful article on the conditions in Fallujah in the Washington Post (free registration may be required). Evidently, the American tactic of wearing down the insurgents in that city is paying dividends by setting the various groups against each other, and the foreigners are feeling both the heat and the fear.

Local insurgents in the city of Fallujah are turning against the foreign fighters who have been their allies in the rebellion that has held the U.S. military at bay in parts of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland, according to Fallujah residents, insurgent leaders and Iraqi and U.S. officials.

Relations are deteriorating as local fighters negotiate to avoid a U.S.-led military offensive against Fallujah, while foreign fighters press to attack Americans and their Iraqi supporters. The disputes have spilled over into harsh words and sporadic violence, with Fallujans killing at least five foreign Arabs in recent weeks, according to witnesses.

U.S. and Iraqi authorities together have insisted that if Fallujah is to avoid an all-out assault aimed at regaining control of the city, foreign fighters must be ejected. Several local leaders of the insurgency say they, too, want to expel the foreigners, whom they scorn as terrorists. They heap particular contempt on Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian whose Monotheism and Jihad group has asserted responsibility for many of the deadliest attacks across Iraq, including videotaped beheadings.

"He is mentally deranged, has distorted the image of the resistance and defamed it. I believe his end is near," Abu Abdalla Dulaimy, military commander of the First Army of Mohammad, said.

One of the foreign guerrillas killed by local fighters was Abu Abdallah Suri, a Syrian and a prominent member of Zarqawi's group. Suri's body was discovered Sunday. He was shot in the head and chest while being chased by a carload of tribesmen, according to a security guard who said he witnessed the killing.

One way or another Fallujah will be pacified by the end of November as will be Ramadi and Sadr City. Elections will be held and foreign corporations, eager to get a chunk of Iraq's oil wealth, will stream into the country to further hasten reconstruction. This will drive the left in this country to near hysteria, not only because George Bush will be largely vindicated and given the credit, and the judgment and motives of the left will be indicted, but also because once Iraq is stabilized, the attention of the world, i.e. the U.S., will perforce turn toward Iran's nuclear program. If Iraq begins to settle as November draws to a close, look for the left to employ every play in their playbook in a desperate attempt to preempt military action against Iran should it be deemed necessary.

Moreover, if Bush is re-elected in a couple of weeks look for the French, Germans, and Russians to join the coalition against Iran. They will seek to redeem themselves after their disgraceful behavior in Iraq, where they accepted bribes from Saddam in exchange for thwarting the American demarche. Unless, of course, they're also accepting bribes from the mullahs in Tehran.

Swift Vets Are Back

Transcripts of two new Swift Boat Veterans ads, set to run during Monday Night Football, can be found here. The second of the two sounds like it will be very powerful. Thanks to Kerry Spot for the tip.

Mr. Bush's Liabilities

Many people have wondered why President Bush doesn't defend his record more vigorously in the debates and attack Kerry's record, which is eminently vulnerable, more incisively. The answer, perhaps, is that Mr. Bush suffers from three rhetorical liabilities. First, he seems to assume that everybody already knows all the facts. He himself is immersed in matters of policy all day long, and it's easy for such a man to think that what's obvious to him is obvious to everybody. Perhaps he doesn't realize the depth of political ignorance and indifference that resides just outside the beltway. When, for example, he accuses John Kerry of being a "liberal", probably three quarters of citizens of voting age have no idea what he means.

Second, he's just not a quick thinker on his feet. His mind doesn't seem to work well when he's under the pressure of having to come up with gaffe-free answers in front of the whole nation. He no doubt works much better in intimate, relaxed settings where he can be himself, has time to consider options and think through problems.

Third, he's not particularly eloquent so that when he does know what he wants to say he has trouble putting it into words and using the appropriate inflections and gestures to drive the words home.

All of these liabilities work to his detriment in a debate setting, and it's quite surprising that his team didn't insist on the same sort of format that was used in the Cheney/Edwards debate which would have put him more at ease. It's also surprising that they didn't insist that he be allowed to use notes which would've made his task much less onerous.

None of this, mind you, should be taken as in any way a reflection upon his intelligence. Brilliant men have suffered the same sorts of disabilities, and absolute dolts can appear eloquent and articulate in public. Everyone is different in this respect. One reason why Viewpoint opposes Presidential debates is that they give the impression that the skills needed to do well in such events are somehow necessary qualifications for the presidency. That is not the case and never has been, and we do our nation a disservice by placing so much emphasis on the minutiae of these events.

Left-Wing Loopiness

Among the many reasons why the nation seems so divided this election season is the fact that the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic party (about 90% of politically active Democrats) seems to have taken leave of their senses. Their febrile minds conjure up all manner of nightmarish fantasies that they are quite certain are accurate accounts of Bush administration plots and machinations, and out of their paranoia and hallucinogenic condition arises the most spiteful and vile rhetoric. Or they express their distaste so ineptly that it just sounds dumb. Either way most sane folk are put off by it and wish to have nothing to do with them.

Slate.com provides us with a fine illustration of the mental state of the contemporary left. They interviewed thirty one novelists to see who these writers will be voting for in November. As one might expect from such a group, twenty four responded that they will be voting for Kerry and four favor the President (three chose other options). More interesting than who they support, however, are their reasons for their selection. Here's a sample from the twenty four Kerry supporters:

Dan Chaon

He [Bush] seems truly, frighteningly dangerous and completely without scruples. I'm alarmed by his administration's attacks on civil liberties, by the deliberate lies that brought us into a poorly planned war, by the gleeful disregard for the environment, by the social policies - the tax cuts, which so nakedly benefit the very few to the detriment of almost everybody else; the ugly, merciless No Child Left Behind educational policy; the reckless budget deficit .... I have found myself recoiling from the newspaper, and I dread where another four years of his administration would lead us. I find myself particularly repelled by Bush's professed "Christianity," even as his administration repudiates every value that Christ represents. He's probably not the Antichrist, but he comes as close as I've seen in my lifetime.

Amy Tan

I'm voting for Kerry, because I have a brain and so does he.

Rick Moody

The Bush presidency is the most corrupt in modern history. Under the cynical disguise of evangelical Christian moralizing (and don't even get me started on Bush's moronic theology), Bush conducted (and continues to conduct) a fire sale, in which he auctioned off the entire nation to the highest corporate bidder, piece by piece.

Jonathan Franzen

He's [Bush] the candidate whose defeat Osama Bin Laden (if he's alive) is praying for. I trust him not to pour additional gasoline on the fires that Bush has set overseas. Also, since he's [Kerry] a Democrat, I trust him to exercise a modicum of fiscal sanity and to show a little compassion for the unlucky. Also, his wife is hot hot hot.

Jane Smiley

Would George Bush steal the election if he thought he could get away with it? The evidence is that he has (disenfranchising black voters in Florida in 2000) and wants to again (attempting the same trick already this year). That such a man, an amoral prevaricator and ruthless opportunist, actually has supporters in his bid to wreck American democracy appalls me. I think that the coming election will result in a constitutional crisis of unprecedented danger. I consider a vote for Bush a vote for tyranny.

David Amsden

A cousin of mine spent a year fighting with the Army in Iraq. He was a harder man when he returned, tweaked, difficult to relate to. His stories were crushing - did you know that there are giant spiders that creep up on sleeping soliders at night? That this is the sort of thing that causes nightmares....For all his swaggering bravado, the guy has no real backbone, no confidence in anything but his squinty little grin, which is frightening.

Well, we could go on, but why bother. After all, the level of ignorance, falsehood, anti-Christian bigotry, and plain stupidity in this brief sample of responses is just too depressing to warrant prolonging the exercise.

Despite the intellectual perversities, eccentricities, and loopiness on display here, there are a few bright lights of rationality shining amidst the liberal gloom. These are mostly provided, however, by those novelists who are supporting Bush. Click on the link above to read their statements.

George Bush Should Receive a Nobel Prize

Scott Norvell has a fine piece here on the election in Afghanistan. He writes from Kabul:

It was a regrettably typical comment from an American reporter in this part of the world. "At least it's news," he said of the Afghan election scuffle over the weekend. "Otherwise, this is just a success story."

God forbid it be a success story.

But that's what it was here, no matter how hard the international media tried to spin it. There were no car bombs raining body parts all over the polling stations. There were no last-minute assassinations. There were no drive-by shootings. The best they could come up with for "news" was grumbling from hopelessly trailing opposition candidates about washable ink and threats of a boycott. The media's disappointment was palpable.

When Kabul came out of its election-time shell on Monday, the picture was instead one of a city reveling in the chaos of commerce. Real estate prices are rising, and the din of new construction is pervasive. Foreign investment is up. There are three times as many private cars on the streets as five years ago, and women can go shopping without getting whipped by thugs from the Taliban Ministry of Vice and Virtue for baring sockless ankles beneath their burqas. It is a chaos to which Afghans have been accustomed for centuries, one they are happy to have back.

This is a Nobel prize caliber accomplishment. In fact, it surpasses in magnitude virtually anything any previous recipients of that award have achieved. What other world leader has done so much for so many of the world's oppressed in just four years? Maybe FDR in WWII (although it's questionable), surely Reagan, but it took him eight years, and even then it wasn't until after his presidency that his policies toward the communists brought about the collapse of their tyranny.

What other world leader has done as much for women's rights in such a brief period of time as has George Bush? Twenty five million women in Afghanistan and Iraq can vote for the first time ever. In Afghanistan they can go to school and hold elective office for the first time. This is monumental, but it leaves our feminists unimpressed. After all, Bush still opposes the right of a woman to kill her unborn child.

Bush's accomplishment of freeing fifty million people in Afghanistan and Iraq is probably unique in world history, but the odds that Bush will be awarded the Nobel are probably about the same as they were for Ronald Reagan. Doubtless the enlightened eminences who decide upon the recipients, if they don't select some mentally unstable virago who rants about white scientists developing AIDs in order to wipe out the black race, will choose someone who campaigned hard to prevent what Bush has achieved. Maybe Jacques Chirac, now that he's no longer receiving bribes from Saddam, can use the cash.

If You Don't Like it...

The Democrats are in a massive snit over the decision by Sinclair Broadcasting Corp. to preempt regular programming to air a film based on the book Stolen Valor which takes a very close look at the character of the Senator who would be president. The film is seen by the left, who ought to know one when they see it, as an attack piece.They're outraged that a broadcasting conglomerate would use the public airwaves to promote a partisan assault on their candidate.

One wonders where all this anger and indignation from the left were when CBS and Dan Rather were using 60 Minutes to slander George Bush with fraudulent memos.

One commentator on MSNBC said that this new film is not like Fahrenheit 9/11 because people had to buy a ticket to see that and this is coming into homes free courtesy of the public airwaves. Of course, Fahrenheit 9/11 was shown for free to students in taxpayer subsidized universities all across the country, but that's different. That was a hit piece on George Bush. Those should be subsidized. Unlike Michael Moore's movie, this film is factually accurate, however, and may seriously hurt John Kerry, so it's an obvious abuse of the public trust that must be stopped.

Anyway, what is it that the liberals always tell people who complain about the sleaze and junk network television serves up on a daily basis? "Hey, if you don't like it, don't watch it."

The <i>Leap of Faith</i>Ticket

John Kerry has evidently made a last minute switch of running mates exchanging John Edwards for faith-healer Benny Hinn. At least that's the word out of the midwest today where the Democratic vice-presidential candidate had these promises for an Iowa audience:

"We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases... When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."

If the race stays close look for the vice-presidential candidate, whoever he is, to be promising voters eternal life if Kerry's elected.

No word from Iowa yet as to how many listeners were "slain in the Spirit" at the event.

Spiking Steyn

Mark Steyn is always worth reading. He's bright, funny, and an outstanding writer. He recently wrote a column for his paper, The Telegraph in England, which the editors declined to run. They evidently felt that Steyn was a little too insensitive in discussing the reaction of some British government officials and the family of Ken Bigley in the wake of his abduction and murder by Islamic terrorists in Iraq. Viewpoint wonders, however, if the refusal to publish the column doesn't say more about The Telegraph's editors than it does about Steyn. Be that as it may, he subsequently posted his column online with a brief explanation. Go here to read it. It's very good.

The World Kerry Would Create

Senator Kerry has been receiving a drubbing in the New Media for his gaffe in yesterday's New York Times to the effect that he wants to see terrorism reduced to the level of a nuisance. The statement was at best stupid and Power Line does a fine job of explaining why it is so egregious. Even so, I don't think that that is the worst thing he says in the interview. Elsewhere in the article he's quoted as saying that:

September 11 "didn't change me much at all," rather it "sort of accelerated, confirmed in me, the urgency of doing the things I thought we needed to be doing....We need to engage more directly and more respectfully with Islam, with the state of Islam, with religious leaders, mullahs, imams, clerics, in a way that proves this is not a clash with the British and the Americans and the old forces they remember from the colonial days. And that's all about your diplomacy....A new presidency with the right moves, the right language, the right outreach, the right initiatives, can dramatically alter the world's perception of us very, very quickly."

This statement reveals a shocking lack of understanding of our enemy. Kerry sees terrorism as a problem of diplomacy, of economics. This is incredibly naive and almost guarantees worse strikes against our country than we experienced on 9/11. The jihadis are not trying to kill us because we have inept diplomats. Nor are they trying to destroy us because they resent our exploitation of their oil. They are trying to murder us because they see us as enemies of God who must be converted or exterminated. In their eyes we are infidels who are guilty of two major crimes.

The first is that we serve as a guarantor of Israel's continued existence. The only diplomatic strategy we could adopt which would (temporarily) appease the Islamists would be to pull out of the Middle East completely. Not only would we have to abandon Iraq and our bases elsewhere in the Persian Gulf, but we would also have to abandon any and all commitments to Israel's security. Nothing short of this will mollify the terrorists, and this will only assuage their hatred in the short term.

The second crime of which we are guilty is that we are, in their eyes, spreading a corrupt, decadent culture throughout the Muslim world. It's not just our sexual permissiveness that upsets them, it's the freedom we have to believe and say what we wish, it's the equality we give to women, it's the idea that church and state should not be entangled. Each of these is abhorrent to Muslims and their religion, or their interpretation of it, calls upon them to wage tireless, unceasing jihad against the corrupting influences of the West which threaten to undermine the Faith.

As long as we're strong, however, their efforts are unlikely to prosper so they must defeat us by destroying our economic power base. They must conquer us by wearing us down, by striking at our homeland in order to dispirit us. As long as we're a politico-cultural presence in the world they will strive relentlessly to bring us low, and terror is the only means they have at their disposal to accomplish this. They certainly are not prepared to wage a war of ideas nor can they persuade us through diplomacy to commit cultural suicide. Thus for Kerry to suggest that better diplomacy will reduce or eliminate terrorism reveals an alarming naivete on his part. The Islamic hatred for the West does not lend itself to diplomatic ameliorations.

What diplomacy would accomplish, however, is an illusory lessening of conflict. The jihadis would doubtless give the impression that they were succumbing to whatever inducements or bribes a Kerry administration held out to them. They would attempt to lull us to sleep with assurances that now that the cowboy Bush is out of office it is possible to discuss our differences reasonably. Tensions would ease. Americans, always willing to delude ourselves, would become complacent.

To show our good faith, and to keep negotiations moving along, a Kerry administration would likely relax our prosecution of the war against Muslim terrorists abroad. With the reduction of military operations would come a simultaneous relaxation of vigilance which would almost surely result in making our borders even less secure than they are now. It would be just a matter of time before a WMD was smuggled into the U.S. and detonated in one of our cities. The resulting death and chaos would be unprecedented.

The terrorists would then announce through their media outlets to a stunned nation that there are similar weapons planted in other cities throughout the United States and that unless we meet their demands, i.e. get out of the Middle East and abandon Israel, they will begin to set the others off as well. They don't have to really have the weapons, they only have to have had the first one, and have used it, and the ensuing panic would be seismic in scale. No administration which refused to accede to these demands would survive. The result would be a paralyzed, panic-stricken America, and this would be catastrophic for the entire globe.

With a United States helpless to impose its will, war would almost certainly break out between Arabs and Jews, between China and Taiwan, and on the Korean peninsula. It would probably also erupt between India and Pakistan and Iran and Iraq. In each of these cases it would no doubt be nuclear. Tribal warfare in Africa would rage unnoticed against the global conflagration that would result from a United States crippled by a terror strike such as we've envisioned. Civil strife would plague our cities as well, especially in locales with Muslim populations.

This is the world John Kerry's thinking and approach could very likely create. It is the most plausible consequence of believing that the war on Islamic terror can be fought by diplomats and deal-making.

Paladins of Pessimism

Below the media radar screen the struggle in Iraq continues and is clearly moving in the coalition's favor. Heretofore, there were two main groups of resistance, Muqtada al Sadr's Mehdi Army in Najaf and Sadr City, and al Zarqawi's thugs in Samarra, Fallujah, and elsewhere in the Sunni Triangle. As Strategy Page reports, however, al Sadr is just about finished, Samarra has been pacified, and time is running out for the insurgents in Fallujah.

Elections are on track for Iraq just as they were in Afghanistan, the Iraqi economy is taking off, schools and businesses are bustling, and all the Democrats can say is that the liberation of 25 million Iraqis is a disaster, a colossal mistake. Even as the Democrats sing their woeful dirges the insurgents find themselves caught in the coils of a python, and as more Iraqi troops and police come on line the squeeze is only going to get tighter.

In light of all this, the real colossal mistake would be to elect the twin paladins of pessimism, John Kerry and John Edwards, to determine the direction of the war on terror for the next four years.

Senator Kerry on the Supreme Court

In the debate in St. Louis last Friday evening John Kerry said, "Now, here's what I believe. I don't believe we need a good conservative judge, and I don't believe we need a good liberal judge. I don't believe we need a good judge of that kind of definition on either side."

He then followed his claim to be uninterested in whether a judge is liberal or conservative by conjuring an image of a liberal jurist: "The future of things that matter to you - in terms of civil rights, what kind of Justice Department you'll have, whether we'll enforce the law. Will we have equal opportunity? Will women's rights be protected? Will we have equal pay for women, which is going backwards? Will a woman's right to choose be protected? These are constitutional rights, and I want to make sure we have judges who interpret the Constitution of the United States according to the law."

Last May the Senator spoke these words: "I believe that a woman's right to choose is a constitutional right, I will not appoint anyone to the Supreme Court who will undo that right."

In other words, Kerry will not, contrary to what he said Friday night, appoint a conservative justice to the Supreme Court who disagrees with him on whether there is anything in the constitution guaranteeing a woman the right to terminate a pregnancy. If this is Senator Kerry's position, so be it, but it is simply disingenuous of him to suggest that ideology doesn't matter, as if he were only interested in finding the best qualified person for the job. He isn't. By his own admission, if the best qualified person has a strict constructionist view of the constitution he would have no chance of serving on a Kerry court.

Whichever man is elected president on November 2nd will probably have the opportunity to profoundly restructure our highest judicial Court. Justice John Paul Stevens, a liberal appointed by President Ford, is 84. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a conservative first appointed by President Nixon and then elevated to chief justice by President Reagan, just turned 80. Sandra Day O'Connor, a Reagan appointee who often votes with the liberals, is 74. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Clinton appointee who anchors the court's left, is 71. At 56, Clarence Thomas, a conservative, is the only justice under 65.

It's possible that the next president will have the opportunity to make four appointments to the Bench. That's why this election is so important in the eyes of so many. The next president will not only decide the future of the war on terror but the direction of law in this country for the next fifty to a hundred years. The choice is between a man who would appoint people to the Court who believe that we should interpret the constitution in light of what its authors intended (Bush), and a man who believes that the constitution should be interpreted to conform to current political and social fashion (Kerry). Senator Kerry's claim that a judge's ideology doesn't matter to him is nonsense.

Thanks to Captain's Quarters for some of the above.

Conservatives and Liberals

A friend passes on this little illustration of the difference between conservatives and liberals with respect to the problems of unemployment and poverty:

A conservative and a liberal were walking down the street when they came to a homeless person. The conservative gave the homeless person his business card and told him to come to his office for a job. He then took twenty dollars out of his pocket and gave it to the homeless person.

The liberal was very impressed, and when they came to another homeless person, he decided to help. He walked over to the homeless person and gave him directions to the welfare office. He then reached into the conservative's pocket and took out twenty dollars. He kept $15 for administrative processing fees and gave the homeless person five.

Now you understand the difference between conservatives and liberals.

It'll be difficult, as we watch the debate Wednesday night, to keep from imagining John Kerry with his hand in the pockets of America.

Rev. Jackson, Call Your Office!

Uh Oh. A friend passes word that yet another ballot has been rigged by the Republicans in order to suppress the Kerry vote. No doubt this will be an issue in the next debate. Go here and try to cast a vote for Kerry to see what we're talking about.

You have to hand it to the Republicans. When it comes to dirty tricks all the attempts by the Democrats to hide who they are, to deny the vote to servicemen and servicewomen, to deceive the public about what the Republicans will do if re-elected, and to register new voters in excess of the populations of some voting districts, all seem amateurish in comparison to stunts like this.

The Price of Gasoline

Gasoline prices will probably soon become an issue in the presidential campaign and perhaps they should, but Viewpoint cautions against falling for the claim that they're higher now than ever before in our history. That would be true if the price is considered in constant dollars, but if the price is adjusted for inflation we find that a dollar buys much more gasoline today than it did in 1980. Brother Bill, who is the brains behind this blog, sends along a link to this graph to buttress the point.

Animals and Humanism

Peter Singer is a professor of philosophy at Princeton University who is has famously made a case for legalizing infanticide and who is also well-known for his advocacy of animal rights. In the recent issue of Free Inquiry, the organ of the Council for Secular Humanism, Singer chides his fellow humanists for their overall failure to shed the prejudice of speciesism which, he claims, has been inherited from Christian forebears.

He writes that Christians believe that "God gave human beings dominion over the natural world, and God doesn't care how we treat it....Nature itself is of no intrinsic value," in the Christian view, "and the destruction of plants and animals cannot be sinful." This, of course, is the sheerest flapdoodle, but more on that later.

Singer chastises humanists for holding to the Christian idea that humans are at the center of the moral universe and for thinking that values are grounded in the welfare of humans rather than in the "welfare of all beings capable of having a welfare at all." There is, Singer asserts, "no non-religious reason why the pains and pleasures of non-human animals should not be given equal [moral] weight with the similar pains and pleasures of human beings."

As an atheistic Darwinian, this is a very peculiar argument for the Princeton professor to make. It may be that there's no non-religious reason for not treating animals as the moral equal of humans, but the salient point is that there's no non-religious reason why one should do it. Searching the article for reasons why he believes humanists are wrong to exploit animals, the only thing one finds is his claim that they should reject this sort of behavior because it's based upon Christian dogma and, the implication is, anything Christian is ipso facto wrong.

Singer is in an awkward position here. He wants to make the case that exploitation of animals is immoral, but as a Darwinian he has no basis for making such a claim. What grounds does Darwinian survival of the fittest give us for condemning the mistreatment of animals? The only ethic one can derive from evolution is that one should look out for one's own interests. The principles of evolution are silent, as they must be, about the means employed to insure one's survival. If human survival is accomplished through behaviors that involve cruelty to other creatures, evolution affords us no basis for passing judgment. Darwinian evolution, to the extent that it endorses any ethic over any other, simply endorses the view that might makes right.

Singer's complaint against the mistreatment of animals distills to this: He likes animals and it makes him sad to see them treated badly, and he wishes others would feel the way he does. As an atheist that's the most he can say. To suggest that others are immoral if they don't feel the way he does is silly. Indeed, an animal abuser could reply that it is Singer who is immoral for not believing that animals should be killed for sport and pleasure, and his argument would be no less compelling than Singer's.

One of the oddities of what people like Singer are trying to do is that in seeking to convince people that they should discard every vestige of religious dogma, they make it clear that they themselves wish to retain the concept of moral judgment. Yet moral judgment is incoherent apart from religious assumptions, specifically the assumption that there exists a personal God.

It needs to be stressed that the only basis we have for saying that it is wrong to treat animals unkindly is the Christian doctrine that animals, and nature in general, belong to God who has given us stewardship over them. He grants us the right to derive pleasure from them in various ways, but he expects us to treat them with respect and care and to avoid inflicting gratuitous pain and harm. We have, therefore, an obligation, a moral obligation, to be diligent in our care of his creation.

We're in the position of the babysitter who has been told to feel free to help herself to the refrigerator, but such a privilege does not entitle her to go on a destructive rampage throughout the house. Take away the belief that God exists and has made us stewards over his creation, however, and adopt instead the view that all of life is just an amazing fluke in a vast, empty cosmos, and the notion that there exists some imperative to treat animals, or other humans for that matter, in any particular way becomes ludicrous.

Say What?

There's much blustering and harrumphing going on in the blogosphere over the ABC memo from ABCNews political director Mark Halperin that fell into the hands of Matt Drudge on Friday, but, truth to tell, I'm not sure what to make of it. The easy interpretation is that it's just another illustration of how the MSM see themselves as the propaganda arm of the Kerry campaign, and perhaps that's the correct way to read it. It's just that the memo is so enigmatic, obscure, and unintelligible that whatever Halperin was trying to tell his troops at ABC it's doubtful that any of them could decipher it. Here's the last paragraph:

It's up to Kerry to defend himself, of course. But as one of the few news organizations with the skill and strength to help voters evaluate what the candidates are saying to serve the public interest. Now is the time for all of us to step up and do that right.

I've received better writing from barely literate high school students. In fact, one account has it that Drudge got the memo from a staffer who asked him to read it so he could tell him what it says (Just kidding).

Perhaps they simply speak in code at ABC so that when Halperin states that We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides "equally" accountable when the facts don't warrant that maybe they just assume he's giving them the green light to stick it to Bush whenever they see the opportunity. Maybe, but, heck, why do they need a cryptic memo to know to do that? They're liberal media creatures, for heaven's sake. Savaging Republicans is part of their genetic endowment. It's what they do.

Perhaps, like a coach at halftime trying to rally a team which has played listlessly in the first half, Halperin feels the need to prod his staffers on to a more vigorous performance of their duties. Perhaps he's striving, in his semi-coherent way, to inspire them to feats of political partisanship of which they otherwise could not have imagined themselves capable. Whatever. It would have been easier to discern what he was trying to accomplish if the guy knew how to write.

Jacques Derrida, RIP

Peter Schramm at No Left Turns relays word that the famous French literary critic and philosopher Jacques Derrida has passed away. Derrida was famous for his work on textual deconstruction which reduced literature, in the minds of many, to nothing but a series of expressions of self-interest. Schramm offers this obituary:

The Parisian Heidegerrian Jacques Derrida has died. I'm tempted to deconstruct this, but I'll just leave it as a postcard since my intention wouldn't control the reading of the text. It would be the metaphysical illusion. Deconstruction is justice, Derrida said. I say Derrida isn't even a trace; and that's the truth.

An Australian Augur?

In Australia Prime Minister John Howard, a dependable ally of ours in Iraq and in the war on terror has been re-elected to office, defeating an opponent who sounded a lot like Senator Kerry in his promises to pull Australia's troops out of Iraq and concentrate them on the "real" war on terror closer to home.

This is by itself good news, of course, but it may be even better than it appears. Reports up until election day had the race very close, John Kerry's sister, who lives in Australia, campaigned vigorously against Howard, and yet he seems to have won a 53% to 48% plurality. There might be a lesson here for our election which seems to have some things in common with Australia's. Just because the polls show the race getting tight doesn't mean that it really is.

The Debate

It's impossible to say how many viewers were willing to have their vote decided by anything that happened on the stage last night, and, of those who were, we can't know how many will make their decision based upon what was said rather than upon the image that the candidates projected. In our post-modern world, unfortunately, people are persuaded more by style than by substance, more by how one says what they say rather than by what they say. A smooth, eloquent delivery covers a multitude of sins against logic and coherence.

Consequently, for the fashionably po-mo John Kerry is very appealing, but for the remnant of modern thinkers who believe that character counts and that substance should trump style, George Bush would've been awarded the laurel last evening and should be granted it on election day as well. Hugh Hewitt tells us why:

In the past eight days, John Kerry has:

*announced to a national audience that American actions in defense of national security must pass a "global test";

*announced that he would sell nuclear fuel to Iran;

*could not answer, and badly filibustered a question on what he would do if Iran continued to push towards nuclear weapons acquisition;

*denounced as unilateralism the conation that George Bush put together to overthrow Iraq, and called for unilateral appeasement of North Korea;

*compared Iraq to Lebanon, but insisted a summit could entice other countries to join the effort in Iraq, even after the French and the Germans announced they would not do so even if Kerry was elected;

*twice identified the most pressing proliferation problem as the American effort to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons capable of destroying deep bunkers, thus equating the United States with rogue states like North Korea and Iran and proclaiming hostility to modernization of the American arsenal - vintage Kerry defense thinking;

*announced plan after plan for which no details exist;

*"absolutely" pledged not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $200,000 annually, a pledge that even his most ardent admirers know is either a bald lie or a repudiation of most of his spending plans;

*ignored the creation of 1.9 million jobs over the past 13 months and ignored the economic consequences of the Clinton recession and 9/11 attacks while attacking Bush's tax cuts;

*while calling attention to his Catholic status, defended his vote against banning partial birth abortion, called for taxpayer support for abortion, argued that "parental notification" was connected to dads raping daughters and defended the wholesale harvesting of frozen embryos for research purposes --four positions completely opposite of Catholic Church teaching and far outside the American consensus opinion on abortion;

*actually said "John Edwards and I are for tort reform," and told the American people that lawsuits against doctors are 1% of the health care problem;

*defensively denied being "wishy washy," a "flip flopper," and a "liberal," while complaining about being branded such by the president;

*embraced the Kyoto Treaty and called for its resuscitation with amendments;

*told America that General Shinseki had been fired by Bush and that the firing had a "chilling" effect on all generals, and one day later said Shinseki had been "retired" --not fired-- and left off the "chilling effect" argument --a record one day flip flop;

*saw his running mate get woodshedded and his campaign try to reverse that blow by arguing that the Vice President should have remembered meeting Edwards;

*heard his wife assert that American troops were fighting for oil and many other stunning things;

*watched as Bush did not make a single memorable error in two debates while effectively underscoring Kerry's "global test" pratfall, focusing on Kerry's did-nothing time-serving two decades in the Senate, wrestle the ISG report to its appropriate place in the discussion of the Iraq War, persuade by repeated argument (which the Vice President also helped along) that coalitions can not be led or maintain by derision or democracies built by indecision;

*watched as Bush effectively and accurately branded KerryCare as an expanded form of HillaryCare;

*watched as Bush simply and devastatingly branded Kerry as not credible on taxes, spending and most important of all, defending the United States.

Against all of this and more, Kerry backers point to his debating skills in round one and George W. Bush's expressions from the first debate. If this was a good eight days for Kerry, then November 11, 1864 was a fine day for Atlanta. In fact this stretch has been a disaster for Kerry as all the set-up work Bush-Cheney had performed for eight months came home in eight days as Kerry cooperated in his unmasking as a candidate far from the country's center of political gravity on nearly every issue, comfortable only in ambiguity and a champion of every one of the left's pet domestic causes from partial birth abortion and taxpayer funded abortions to Kyoto and federal delivery of health care.

The relentless focus on his hard left posturing on foreign affairs through 20 years in the Senate hasn't even begun yet. Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke wondered aloud last night why the president didn't make use of Kerry's 1991 vote against the first Gulf War, and I wonder when we will hear about Kerry's mini-Munich in Managua in April 1985 or his nuclear freeze pedigree and opposition to many of the major weapon programs on which our military now relies, but there is still three and a half weeks and one more debate left in which these and other points have opportunity to surface.

The clock has almost run out on Kerry, and his little gust of momentum - called a hurricane by his backers because they hadn't felt a breeze for months - is spent.

We're not as sanguine about all this as Hewitt is because, as mentioned above, too many people who will go to the polls on November 2nd don't really care about facts or argument. They'll cast their vote on the basis of "presence" or physical attractiveness or verbal eloquence, all criteria which are absurdly irrelevant to picking a president but by which Kerry will score high. Even so, Viewpoint certainly hopes that Hewitt is right.