More Complex Than Expected

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

Heading for Default

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

The Hockey Stick

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

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

RLC

Stretching the Truth

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

LiveAction.org observes that:

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

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

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

RLC

Buyer's Remorse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

Microscopic Beauty

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

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

RLC

This Year's Daniel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

Flincher

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

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

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

RLC

Who's to Say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

Imploding Justice

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

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

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

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

RLC

Ethical Question of the Day

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

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

RLC

Clarification

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

RLC

Faith Commitments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

A Lot of Eggs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lenin put it this way:

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

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

RLC

Who's the Man in 2012?

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

Tale of Two States

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

The Other Shoe

The other shoe appears to be ready to drop:

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

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

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

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

RLC

The Irrepressible Law of Unintended Consequences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

Manhattan Declaration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

Leaving the Right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

!?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC