ATP Synthase

In yet another tribute to the skill displayed by blind mechanistic processes in constructing what anyone but a Darwinian true-believer would recognize as an engineered machine, Telic Thoughts offers a simulation of the operation of the enzyme that synthesizes ATP in the body's cells.

RLC

If It Should Come to War

The BBC reports on the American plan of attack should Iran persist in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Here's part of the BBC story:

It is understood that any such attack - if ordered - would target Iranian air bases, naval bases, missile facilities and command-and-control centres. The US insists it is not planning to attack, and is trying to persuade Tehran to stop uranium enrichment.

The UN has urged Iran to stop the programme or face economic sanctions. But diplomatic sources have told the BBC that as a fallback plan, senior officials at Central Command in Florida have already selected their target sets inside Iran.

That list includes Iran's uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. Facilities at Isfahan, Arak and Bushehr are also on the target list, the sources say.

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the trigger for such an attack reportedly includes any confirmation that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon - which it denies.

Alternatively, our correspondent adds, a high-casualty attack on US forces in neighbouring Iraq could also trigger a bombing campaign if it were traced directly back to Tehran.

Long range B2 stealth bombers would drop so-called "bunker-busting" bombs in an effort to penetrate the Natanz site, which is buried some 25m (27 yards) underground.

The BBC's Tehran correspondent Frances Harrison says the news that there are now two possible triggers for an attack is a concern to Iranians.

It should be of concern to everyone. One of the interesting things about these plans is that they have been somehow made available to the BBC at the same time that the Bush administration is adamant in its denials that any attack on Iran is being planned. We appear to be playing mind games with the Iranians. Let's hope it works.

RLC

The Blasphemy Challenge

Something called the "Rational Response Squad" is soliciting people, mostly young people, to make a commitment to condemn themselves to eternal damnation by videotaping themselves denying the existence of the Holy Spirit.

Set aside the callowness of the project and the dubious theology that underlies their interpretation of blaspheming the Holy Spirit and explore for a moment the psychology of what these kids are doing. They are proclaiming that they don't believe that God exists, but for what purpose? Someone may believe that space aliens don't exist but most people would hardly bother to send in videos to You Tube declaring the fact. If one doesn't believe that God exists why go to the trouble of videotaping an affirmation of one's doubt? What is it about denying the existence of something that is a source of such pride in the denier?

For some of these kids, moreover, it seems that they're not so much denying God's existence but rather banishing the God they suspect exists from any role in their lives. In other words, it's not an intellectual or philosophical position they're voicing, but an act of defiance or rebellion against the concept of God that they've come to hold. In the very act of denying God's existence they seem to be admitting that they know He's there, but that they resent that He is.

If this is a correct interpretation of what at least some of these kids are doing, then, for all of their pretense at intellectual sophistication, they're making themselves look silly. It's foolish, after all, to deny the existence of what deep down you know to be real. It's foolish to despise what deep down you believe to be the source of all that's good and right in the world. In their attempt to be "rational" they make themselves irrational. In their attempt to be "cool" they make themselves dumb. It's very sad.

RLC

Supporting the Troops

Michael Ramirez sums up what the Democrats in congress mean when they say that they "support the troops":

RLC

They Mean No Harm

We're expecting Softball's Chris Matthews to feature this news report when next he blasts the Bush administration for allegedly hyping intelligence that points to Iran as the source of weapons being used in Iraq to kill Americans:

(2007-02-12) - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today confirmed U.S. allegations that high-ranking Iranian officials provide Shiite militias in Iraq with armor-piercing explosives, however, Iran's president said the devices are for peaceful purposes only.

"No one can deny the right of the Iranian people to develop technology that improves our lives," said Mr. Ahmadinejad. "Although we cannot control how our Iraqi customers use our products, we make these armor-piercing devices to generate energy."

The Iranian leader noted that the devices are "especially useful for bringing light to confined dark places, like the inside of an Abrams tank or Humvee, as well as for providing a plentiful source of instant heat."

Unconfirmed reports coming out of Washington indicate that Ahmadinejad's claims were well-received by congressional Democrats who considered them to be perfectly plausible.

RLC

Bird Brains

Go to Telic Thoughts and watch the video of a crow trying to get food out of a container with a wire. The bird can't manage it so it bends the wire into a hook. It's astonishing.

TT also links to a fascinating article at Neurophilosophy on how birds navigate. There are evidently at least two separate mechanisms employed, one for measuring the strength of the earth's magnetic field and one for assessing its direction. These mechanisms are incredibly "engineered" and certainly suggest intelligent input. But maybe not. Maybe they arose by blind forces acting by trial and error over millions of years, just like your computer might have if nobody had ever designed one.

RLC

Worst Country in the World

According to this report Britain is the worst place in the developed world for a child to grow up. Perhaps it's because of all that evangelical religion afflicting England.

RLC

Warming or Cooling?

NASA has a graphic which shows the global temperature deviations from seasonal averages for every month since 1979 through 2003. The most striking thing about the graphic is that although it seems like some places are consistently warmer than the seasonal average other places are consistently cooler. In other words, to the extent that warming is occuring it appears to be occuring locally or regionally and not uniformly around the globe.

Canada and the arctic seem to be warming while the southern states, Central, and South America seem to be cooling.

The bottom graph is the average global deviation from the long-term mean. You can select any month by moving the cursor across the graph. It appears that the average global temperature fluctuates around the mean spending as much time below it as above it (except for a bit of a spike in May of 1998).

So what's it all mean? I'm not sure, but it certainly suggests that the situation is more complex than the global warming people are letting on. The ambiguity of the data causes us to wonder what motivates those like The Weather Channel's Heidi Cullen who are so eager to have everyone believe that the earth is getting warmer that they want to forcibly silence all dissent from that opinion by having dissenters stripped of their scientific credentials.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

Banning Hate Speech

WorldNet Daily has a very disturbing report on how hate speech legislation is being used in Australia and Europe to muzzle and intimidate anyone who would criticize minority individuals or groups:

Two Christians in Australia have been indicted for criticizing Islam, and another for criticizing Zionism. A filmmaker has been threatened with arrest for using the word "homosexual" rather than "gay." Now a German priest faces jail time for publicly criticizing abortionists, and in Holland, "fornicators" and "adulterers" are protected classes and cannot be criticized.

All courtesy of the concept of federal "hate crimes" legislation, which unless defeated soon could be mandatory in the United States, warns a rising chorus of critics.

There's much more on this proposed legislation at the link and all of it is frightening.

Here's a question: If the legislation passes and it becomes illegal to use any language that communicates hate or even mere disapproval, will we be putting liberals in jail for expressing their feelings about George Bush and Dick Cheney? Just wondering.

RLC

Comes the Dark Horse

The more astute political pundits are beginning to discern a dark horse in the Republican race that few in the media have been discussing. In fairness to the pundits they haven't been discussing him because he is not yet a declared candidate. Nevertheless, he polls consistently high in almost every survey of Republican voters and for good reason. He is probably the most conservative of the viable candidates and certainly the deepest thinker of any candidate of either major party.

Dick Morris has taken note and writes about him at The Hill.

RLC

Myth of Sisyphus

There's an ancient Greek myth about a man named Sisyphus who, having offended the gods, was punished by being condemned to push a heavy stone up a hill. When he finally reached the summit the boulder would roll back down to the bottom. Sisyphus would then have to push it back up again only to have the same thing happen every time he got to the top. This was this poor man's fate - to push that stone up the hill over and over again for eternity.

The Greeks thought this to be a wonderful metaphor for absolutely pointless, mind-numbing absurdity. If they were alive today they'd have an even better metaphor. Sisyphus, in the modern version, would be strapped into a chair in front of a television and given a remote, but no matter which of the 100 channels he selected there would be somebody talking about Anna Nicole Smith. Forever.

I can't imagine how empty must be the lives of those celebrities who live like Ms Smith lived, but even worse, I can't imagine how shallow must be the people who devote their days to reporting on the lives of such as Ms Smith. At the end of the day what exactly have they done to make the world a better place? What have they accomplished? How is going to their job in the morning any different than Sisyphus leaning his shoulder against the rock one more time?

Equally as inane, if not moreso, are the lives of those who actually find such talk to be interesting.

It's no wonder radical Muslims believe that our culture is corrupting the whole world. A lot of it is.

RLC

Defeating Iran

Victor Davis Hanson offers a prescription for Iran that sounds very much like what the Bush administration, insofar as we can tell, is already doing, except for his last suggestion. The last suggestion, lowering the price of oil through conservation, is critical to impoverishing Iran, but there doesn't seem to be much encouragement from the White House on this front. Be that as it may, what VDH recommends is a means to bring about the collapse of Iran's nutty leadership without having to resort to war, or at least an invasion. Here's the heart of it:

We can begin to do this by pushing international accords and doggedly ratcheting up the weak United Nations sanctions. Even if they don't do much to Iran in any significant way, the resolutions seem to enrage Ahmadinejad. And when he rages at the United Nations, he only loses further support, especially in the Third World. We should start another fissure by prodding the European Union, presently Iran's chief trading partner, to be more vocal and resolute in pressuring Iran. The so-called EU3 - Britain, France and Germany - failed completely to stop Iran's nuclear proliferation. But out of that setback came a growing realization among Europeans that a nuclear-tipped missile from theocratic Iran could soon hit Europe just as easily as it could Israel. Now Europeans should adopt a complete trade embargo to prevent Iranian access to precision machinery and high technology otherwise unobtainable from mischievous Russia and China.

Americans should continue to support Iranian dissidents. We need not encourage dissidents to go into the street, where they could be shot. Instead we can offer them media help and access to the West. Americans can highlight the plight of women, minorities and liberals in Iran - just the groups that so appeal to the elite Western left.

And we should announce in advance that we don't want any bases in Iran, that we don't want its oil, and that we won't send American infantry there. That would preempt the tired charges of imperialism and colonialism.

The United States also must stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan. The last thing Iran wants is a democratic and prosperous Middle East surrounding its borders. The televised sight of Afghans, Iraqis, Kurds, Lebanese and Turks voting and speaking freely could galvanize Iranian popular opinion that in time might overwhelm the mullahs.

At the same time, we need to remind the Gulf monarchies that a nuclear Shiite theocracy is far more dangerous to them than either the United States or Israel - and that America's efforts to contain Iran depend on their own to rein in Wahhabis in Iraq.

We should say nothing much about the presence of two or three U.S. carrier groups in the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean. Iran will soon grasp on its own that the build-up of such forces might presage air strikes that the United States excels in - and not more ground fighting that the American public apparently won't any longer stomach.

We must continue to make clear that Israel is a sovereign nation with a perfect right to protect itself. Sixty years after the Holocaust, no Israeli prime minister will sit still idly while seventh-century theocrats grandstand about wiping out Israel.

Let's also keep our distance and moderate our rhetoric. There's no reason to frighten average Iranians - who may share our antipathy to their country's regime - or to make therapeutic pleas to talk with those leaders in bunkers whom we know are our enemies.

Finally, and most importantly, Americans must conserve energy, gasify coal, diversify fuels, drill more petroleum and invent new energy sources. Only that can collapse the world price of petroleum.

As we have said in the past, anything would be preferable to war with Iran. Anything except allowing Iran to gain access to nuclear weapons.

RLC

More on <i>Friend of God</i>

Michael Linton offers a review of Alexandra Pelosi's documentary on evangelical christians called Friends of God about which we've written here. Linton points out that Pelosi seems very sympathetic to evangelical Christianity and that her documentary is mostly a fair presentation.

Maybe it is fair, but I have to wonder what sort of message it sends to the secular world about Christians. After reading her discussion with pastor Ted Haggard, for instance, one is left flabbergasted that someone who had risen to such a high position of responsibility and visibility in the church turns out to be such a ... well, a jerk. And this was taped before the news of his sordid homosexual sex life became public.

Read Linton's piece to see what I mean.

RLC

Rumors of Bin Laden's Death

Rumors are circulating that Osama bin Laden has died earlier this month of typhoid. This site has the details in an article by Robert Fox. The conclusion of his piece is a little strange, though. He claims that bin Laden's death would be a blow to neo-conservatives and would require a re-thinking of the global war on terror. Why this should be the case Fox does not explain, and so we're left to ponder the odd logic of asserting that bin Laden's demise will be a setback for those people who have for a decade wanted to see him dead.

At any rate, the reports are unconfirmed at this point.

RLC

The Shadow War

Well. Bill Roggio reports that a bus carrying Iranian Revolutionary Guards soldiers was blown up by a car bomb which killed 18 Iranian troops. Roggio is suspicious that this might be payback for Iranian complicity in the deaths of American soldiers although there's no evidence of American involvement.

In the same post he notes a few more developments in the war against Mookie al-Sadr's Mahdi army in Baghdad. It's interesting reading.

RLC

Slow-Bleeding the Troops

John Murtha, whose willingness to accept a bribe was documented on tape in the Abscam scandal of the early eighties, is, as chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Sub-Committee, working with anti-war groups to make it almost impossible for the White House to win in Iraq. Realizing that an American victory would be a devastating blow to Democrats for years to come, and believing that the American people would punish the Democrats if they overtly used congressional power to cut off funds for the war, Murtha, Pelosi and others seem to have chosen subterfuge over principle. Rather than hold a straight up or down vote on cutting off funding for the war, they have opted for a more furtive, more obscure way of accomplishing the same thing. Their ploy will enable them to conceal their handiwork from the voters behind a faux concern for the troops:

Top House Democrats, working in concert with anti-war groups, have decided against using congressional power to force a quick end to U.S. involvement in Iraq, and instead will pursue a slow-bleed strategy designed to gradually limit the administration's options.

Led by Rep. John P. Murtha, D-Pa., and supported by several well-funded anti-war groups, the coalition's goal is to limit or sharply reduce the number of U.S. troops available for the Iraq conflict, rather than to openly cut off funding for the war itself.

As described by participants, the goal is crafted to circumvent the biggest political vulnerability of the anti-war movement -- the accusation that it is willing to abandon troops in the field. That fear is why many Democrats have remained timid in challenging Bush, even as public support for the president and his Iraq policies have plunged.

There's more on the Dems strategy at the link. It certainly looks like a strategy born of political cowardice. It also looks like their plan is almost certain to result in increased American casualties since it will be difficult for the military to send reinforcements to aid those troops already in the field. Perhaps I and others misunderstand what the Democrats are doing with this proposal, but if not, the details of it are as cynical as they are despicable.

One wonders how fat Murtha's wallet has grown on this one.

RLC

Has al-Masri Been Captured?

The successor to Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the former leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, is a man named Abu al-Masri. Breitbart has a report that al-Masri was wounded in fighting with Iraqi forces:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The leader of al-Qaida in Iraq was wounded and an aide was killed in a clash Thursday with Iraqi forces north of Baghdad, the Interior Ministry spokesman said.

The clash occurred near Balad, a major U.S. base about 50 miles north of the capital, Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said.

Khalaf said al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Ayyub al-Masri was wounded and his aide, identified as Abu Abdullah al-Majemaai, was killed.

Khalaf declined to say how Iraqi forces knew al-Masri had been injured, and there was no report on the incident from U.S. authorities.

Deputy Interior Minister Maj. Gen. Hussein Ali Kamal said he had no information about such a clash or that al-Masri had been involved.

Al-Masri took over the leadership of al-Qaida in Iraq after its charismatic leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a U.S. airstrike last June in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad.

If this report is confirmed it should have a chilling effect on those waiting in line to fill the role of leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Who wants to take a position that offers such lousy retirement benefits and such poor job security.

RLC

The Chicksters

Paul Nowak puts the Dixie Chicks in perspective and, with a single drawing, manages to make them appear whiny, self-absorbed, and historically oblivious, which, of course, they are:

I wonder if any of them have ever even heard of Solzhenitsyn.

RLC

No Story Here

It seems now that there has been yet another rape allegation in Durham, North Carolina. A woman alleges that she was assaulted at a house party, a circumstance similar to the case in which the Duke lacrosse players were accused, falsely, of having raped an "exotic" dancer.

The second case even has another similarity to the first in that it is an interracial incident. Nevertheless, despite the media obsession with the Duke case, and its similarities with this second case, you probably haven't heard about the recent incident. Why do you suppose that is? Does not our media salivate like Pavlov's dogs at the thought of writing about white on black crime? Then why hasn't it jumped on the second case? One guess.

Some crimes evidently don't matter as much to the folks who report our news as do others.

RLC

Atheism, Theism, and Design

One often hears, despite numerous attempts to disabuse people of the notion, that Intelligent Design is religious because it leads inevitably to the conclusion that the designer must be the God of the Bible. This is nonsense, of course, but the objection persists because were it ever to be given up it would open the door for ID to be taught in public schools and once that happened Darwinism would go the way of Marxism and Freudianism.

Telic Thoughts has a post on a 1982 speech given by Sir Fred Hoyle, one of the most famous scientists of the twentieth century. Hoyle was an atheist but, as impossible as it might seem to some of ID's opponents, he believed in the intelligent design of life on earth.

Read the article to see what Hoyle advocated. The point is that ID, to the disappointment of theists and atheists alike, does not necessarily entail the God of the Bible and is, ironically, compatible with both. What it's not compatible with is the materialist interpretation of Darwin which says that physical processes like the laws of chemistry and physics, plus time and chance, are all that's required to explain life and the cosmos.

Hoyle believes that the designer is part of this universe. It is possible, though, that the designer transcends this universe, but is still not the God that Christians worship. Physicists talk of the possibility of other universes existing beyond our own. If there are such worlds out there it's possible that an inhabitant of one of them designed our world. If speculations about the existence of other worlds is a legitimate topic of scientific discourse then so must be the possibility of an intelligence in such a world being capable of designing other worlds. Again, the point is that whether ID is a scientific theory or not, it is clearly not religious. It does, however, have religious implications, just as does materialistic Darwinism.

RLC