The Anti-Obama

One name being mentioned with increasing frequency when the talk turns to the question of who the GOP candidate might be in 2012 is Mitch Daniels. Daniels is the current governor of Indiana and Mona Charen fills us in on his background. Her column should be read in its entirety for what it tells us about the man, but this excerpt might pique your interest:

When Daniels took office in 2005, Indiana, which had been enduring Democratic governors for 16 years, was running an $800-million deficit. Four years later, it had a $1.3-billion surplus. Daniels accomplished this without raising taxes (as 66 percent of states have done); in fact, he passed the largest tax cut in state history. Nor did he cut essential services like education, as 40 states have done. As Mark Hemingway reported in National Review, "In the last three years, the state has repaid $760 million to schools and local governments that had been appropriated to finance the state's deficit spending." Additionally, Indiana has hired 800 new child-welfare caseworkers and 250 state troopers, all while cutting the rate of increase in state spending from 5.9 to 2.8 percent annually.

Having experience in successful governance isn't the only thing attractive about Daniels. Charen goes on to tell us more:

Daniels has successfully courted business investment and has welcomed "two Toyota plants, a Honda factory, a $500-million Nestl� facility, and a British Petroleum project that will bring $3.8 billion to the state."

This is a laboratory of successful conservative governance. As Daniels put it to NR, "Our health-care plan is health savings accounts for poor people. Our telecommunications policy is deregulation. Our infrastructure policy was the biggest privatization in state history." And his spending policy was less is more.

A former chief of the Office of Management and Budget (under George W. Bush), Daniels is known for his incisive mind and mastery of detail. In addition to government service - he also worked as an aide to Sen. Richard Lugar and as Ronald Reagan's political director - Daniels has headed a conservative think tank, the Hudson Institute, and served as president of Eli Lilly's North American operations.

Not only has he governed but he's also run a major business. No wonder they call him the Anti-Obama.

RLC

More on the Dubai Assassination

Those following the mysterious tale of the assassination of the Hamas terrorist leader Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in Dubai last month may be interested in some of the latest developments. According to DEBKAfile:

Dubai's police chief Dhahi Khalfan said Friday, Feb. 26, that DNA and fingerprint evidence of at least one of the 26 team of assassins had been found in the hotel room where Hamas commander Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh was found dead on Jan. 19. The first arrest warrants have now been issued through Interpol.

DEBKAfile's intelligence sources report that the Dubai authorities believe that a persistent stream of "revelations" about the Mabhouh investigation will make Israel and its Mossad intelligence agency slip up and admit responsibility for his death.

According to those sources, it makes no sense for the Dubai police to have found DNA or fingerprints in room 230 of the Al-Bustan Rotana luxury hotel occupied by Mabhouh and in none of the other rooms taken by hit team members. Any fingerprints will not be of much use unless they can be matched with prints of identified persons already on file with the Dubai police, and in any case are probably not genuine.

Our sources disclose that all the suspects arrived in Dubai disguised from head to toe and their fingerprints were most likely faked along with the rest of their appearance. Therefore, the Dubai police's fine collection of video clips and passport photos are of little use to the inquiry.

DEBKAfile sources therefore dismiss the claims by the Dubai police and certain Israeli publications citing "security experts" that the Mossad was caught unawares by the security cameras which tracked the death squad's movements. They missed the fact that the team was not only aware of the cameras but controlled them and used them in support of their mission.

Therefore, when Khalfan comes out with his next round of "revelations," he will most likely produce video depictions of some of the suspects using electronic gadgets to open the door of 230, Mabhouh's hotel room, at 8:24 p.m. Jan. 19, as the victim climbed up from the lobby to his room. The next shot 19 minutes later will show the same suspects leaving room 230, relocking the door and with the same gadget shooting the inside bolt home to concoct the appearance of a locked room mystery.

But the Dubai police are clearly missing the essential 19-minute segment covering the action inside room 230, without which they have no real evidence of a crime. That did not happen by chance.

According to our sources, the death squad kept the cameras running long enough to exhibit their facility to penetrate any secure site in the Middle East, but switched them off when they wanted to conceal the actions they took in pursuance of their mission.

Well, now. I don't know who DEBKAfile's sources are, but if this was not a Mossad operation who else would be trying to send the message that they could strike anywhere in the Middle East?

I also wonder why DEBKAfile thinks there's no real evidence of a crime if the suspects can be seen surreptitiously entering the room before the murder and leaving it afterwards, locking the body inside. That certainly seems like evidence to me.

Anyway, the TimesOnline reports that since the assassination became public young Israelis are applying for jobs with Mossad in droves.

RLC

Over the Cliff

Ramirez offers his perspective on why Republicans don't want to go along with Democrats on health care:

Pretty funny.

RLC

ID vs. TE

One of the sidebar debates in the intelligent design controversy is the clash between IDers and theistic evolutionists. Both agree that the world is intentionally designed but IDers believe that the evidence of this design can be detected in the world whereas TEers don't. TEers argue that natural forces and laws have produced the world as we see it (at least the living world) but that these laws and forces were the product of a Divine mind. Thus, TEers maintain, even though God is the primary cause of the world, we can know this only by faith not by any discovery of science.

According to TE the world appears just as it would were natural forces and laws solely responsible for it. IDers argue that, on the contrary, the world shows immense evidence of an underlying intelligence. The intelligence may not be that of the God of the Bible (though most IDers personally believe it is), but it's an intelligence all the same.

It seems like a small difference to be so exercised over but the theistic evolutionists, at least, are adamant, and sometimes even angry, in their opposition to ID, especially their opposition to treating ID as science.

A good introduction to the difference between the two positions is a debate that took place about a year ago between William Lane Craig and Francisco Ayala who addressed the question: Is Intelligent Design Viable? Craig argued for the affirmative and, as usual, pretty much dominated the event, which is interesting because Craig is a philosopher (not even a philosopher of science) and Ayala is a biologist.

Anyway, if you'd like to hear the audio you can listen to it here. There's also video of Craig's opening presentation here. The comments at the first site are also worth checking.

RLC

Abstinence Only Ed

The critics of abstinence-only education have been nothing if not adamantine in their insistence that AE doesn't work, that kids are going to have sex no matter what we say, and that we owe it to our young people to give them information on how to protect themselves.

According to a column by Mona Charen that point of view has recently gotten much harder to sustain. Charen says that the claim that kids are going to have sex regardless of what they hear from their elders just isn't supported by recent research reported in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine:

The Obama administration had disdained and defunded abstinence education in favor of "evidence-based" programs to prevent teen pregnancy (Note the assumption that liberal ideas are founded on evidence whereas conservative ideas spring from prejudice, ignorance or downright orneriness.). No one study settles things, but this one, conducted by an African-American professor from the University of Pennsylvania, will be hard to ignore.

Between 2001 and 2004, John B. Jemmott III and his colleagues studied 662 African-American sixth- and seventh-graders (average age 12). The kids were randomly assigned to one of four programs. The first emphasized abstinence and included role-playing methods to avoid sex. The second combined an abstinence message with information about condoms. The third focused solely on condom use, and the fourth (the control group) was taught general health information.

Over the course of the next two years, about half of the kids who received the condom instruction and half of the control group were having sex. Forty-two percent of those who got the combination class were sexually active, but only 33 percent of the abstinence-only group were having sex. Additionally, and this confounds one of the myths of the condom pushers, the study found no difference in condom use among the four groups of students who did engage in sex. "I think we've written off abstinence-only education without looking closely at the nature of the evidence," Jemmott told the Washington Post. "Our study shows this could be one approach that could be used."

Elayne Bennett, founder of the Best Friends program, is delighted that the Jemmott research reinforces her experience with mostly African-American adolescent girls. Offering a mixed program of mentoring, dance, music, and role-playing, Best Friends and its new spinoff, Best Men for boys, has had two decades of success in helping kids abstain from sex, drugs, and alcohol until they graduate from high school. She has found that the kids desperately want someone to tell them it's OK to postpone sex. It's a commentary on our times but there it is - we need special programs to give kids permission to say no.

"The opponents," Bennett notes, "have popularized three words, 'Abstinence doesn't work.'" But her program and others like it have excellent track records. Every previous study showing the effectiveness of abstinence programs has been picked apart for one trivial flaw or another, but the new research seems airtight.

Charen goes on to note that supporters of so-called "comprehensive sex ed," with its heavy emphasis on "safe sex" and condoms, have always argued that "no matter what we say, the kids are going to have sex anyway so they might as well be safe." But they never adopted that logic with, say, cigarettes. They didn't lobby for mandatory filters on the grounds that the kids were going to smoke willy-nilly.

Good point. The problem is that too many people think that, unlike smoking, the only negative consequences of youthful sexual adventures are pregnancy or disease and that if kids protect themselves against these then sex is no more problematic than soccer.

This strikes me as incredibly naive. Sex is psychoemotional nitroglycerin. It's extremely volatile and often changes everything in a relationship. When two people not related in a life-long commitment allow their relationship to go physical the change is often for the worse. I can't prove this, of course, but it seems to me to be a universal human experience. It's why the fear that a boy will no longer respect her after sex is prevalent among many girls. It's why so many relationships falter once the couple has allowed it to become sexual. It's even the impetus behind the lyrics to the 1964 Supremes song "Where Did Our Love Go?" for heaven's sake.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about how the way we see a person changes once we "know" them. He wasn't talking about sex, but he easily could have been:

"Alluring and attractive was [s]he to you yesterday...a sea to swim in. Now you have found h[er]shores, found it a pond, and you care not if you ever see it again."

I know I'm coming across to a lot of people as though I'm a hopeless anachronism, but nevertheless I think it's true that if a girl wants to increase the chances that she'll have a successful marriage one thing she should do would be to make him wait.

RLC

One Consequence of the Summit

I don't know what, if anything, will come of the Health Care Summit the President presided over yesterday, but one thing will almost certainly change. The perception, encouraged by the media, that the Republicans are simply the party of "no," that they have no plan, and that they're uninformed on health care, will no longer be tenable. I didn't watch the whole thing, but in what I did watch the Republicans seemed very well prepared, very bright, and full of ideas. Perhaps I didn't watch enough, but the Democrats seemed to base their arguments mostly on emotional appeals.

The fundamental difference between the two groups seems to be this: The Democrats are primarily concerned with extending coverage to millions of people who don't have it at present. The Republicans are primarily concerned with cutting the costs of health care for everyone which would have as one of its indirect benefits making coverage affordable for those who can't afford it now.

I don't see how extending coverage to millions of people can do other than drive the country to fiscal ruin, which is why I think the republican emphasis is the proper one. It'll do no good to have universal coverage if a third of the nation's workers are out of work.

Anyway, here's an example of why I say it'll be very hard for the media to continue to portray the GOP as inept, uninvolved in the health care issue, and simply trying to obstruct the President for none but political reasons. This is a video of Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. It's a little wonky, but he certainly generates confidence that he knows what he's talking about and isn't just throwing out feel-good platitudes for the tv cameras:

RLC

More PP Pratfalls

It seems that Planned Parenthood is in a contest with ACORN to see whose employees can most often be caught flouting the law.

This video was shot in Wisconsin where sex between an adult and a girl age 16 or under is a felony and must be reported to the authorities by any health care professional who becomes aware of it. Apparently, some PP employees don't think that applies to them:

It'll be interesting to see if Sonia is prosecuted. Any bets?

RLC

Lewis on Friendship (Pt. III)

In the third and final part of our series on C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves we find Lewis sharing some scathing thoughts on the effect of women on male/male friendship. He's not writing of women in general, it must be emphasized, but of a certain kind of woman who is not interested in the things which interest the men in her ambit and who may sometimes begrudge them their friendships:

...[In societies where] it is the men who are civilized [educated] and the women not, and when all the women, and many of the men too, simply refuse to recognize the fact .... we get a kind, polite, laborious and pitiful pretence. The women are deemed (as lawyers say) to be full members of the male circle. The fact - in itself not important - that they now smoke and drink like the men seems to simple-minded people a proof that they really are.

No stag parties are allowed. Wherever the men meet, the women must come too. The men have learned to live among ideas. They know what discussion, proof and illustration mean. A woman who has had merely school lessons and has abandoned soon after marriage whatever tinge of "culture" they gave her - whose reading is the Women's Magazines and whose general conversation is almost wholly narrative - cannot really enter such a circle. She can be locally and physically present with it in the same room. What of that?

If the men are ruthless, she sits bored and silent through a conversation that means nothing to her. If they are better bred, of course, they try to bring her in. Things are explained to her: people try to sublimate her blundering and irrelevant observations into some kind of sense.

But the efforts soon fail and, for manners' sake, what might have been a real discussion is deliberately diluted and peters out in gossip, anecdotes and jokes. Her presence has thus destroyed the very thing she was brought to share. She can never really enter the circle because the circle ceases to be itself when she enters it - as the horizon ceases to be the horizon when you get there....She may be quite as clever as the men or cleverer. But she is not really interested in the same things, nor mistress of the same methods.

The presence of such women, thousands strong, helps to account for the modern disparagement of Friendship. They are often completely victorious. They banish male companionship, and therefore male Friendship, from whole neighborhoods. In the only world they know an endless prattling "Jolly" replaces the intercourse of minds. All the men they meet talk like women while women are present.

This victory over Friendship is often unconscious. There is, however a more militant type of woman who plans it. I have heard one say "Never let two men sit together or they'll get to talking about some subject and then there'll be no fun." Her point could not have been more accurately made. Talk, by all means; the more of it the better; unceasing cascades of the human voice; but not, please, a subject. The talk must not be about anything.

There are women who regard [their husband's friendships] with hatred, envy and fear as the enemy of Eros and perhaps even more, of Affection. A woman of that sort has a hundred arts to break up her husband's Friendships.

Lewis was writing in a time when there was often a much greater disparity between the education of men and women. Even so, he does have an eye for human nature. Men are much more likely to talk about things which women find boring, and vice-versa, and it's certainly true that the presence of people who are bored by a conversation is often fatal to it. This is especially so if the bored, uninformed party seeks to enter the conversation in order to change it or resents not being able to participate in it in the first place.

RLC

That Was Then

Senate Democrats under Harry Reid, and with the encouragement of President Obama, are expected to push health care reform through the Senate in a process called "Reconciliation" which is actually intended to be used only for budgetary measures. Under Reconciliation, which is now called "the nuclear option," a bill only needs a simple majority of 51 votes to pass.

The Democrats are planning to use this tactic to pass health care because they lack the 60 votes necessary in the senate to close off a Republican filibuster. If they go the route of Reconciliation they would only need 50 votes (plus the Vice-President's tie-breaker)to pass the reforms they are trying to enact.

The amusing irony is that back in 2005 the Democrats were, via filibuster, blocking a number of President Bush's judicial appointments, and the President threatened to use Reconciliation to get them through. The Democrats in the Senate were in high dudgeon. Senator Schumer accused Bush of precipitating a constitutional crisis. Then Senator Biden prayed to God that the Democrats would never do something so low. Senators Clinton and Reid decried the move as an arrogant power grab.

Here, thanks to Breitbart tv and Naked Emperor News, is the video of our august senators declaiming against the perfidy of the Bush administration in 2005:

That was then, of course, and this is now. Now these same people are all (Mrs. Clinton excepted since she's no longer in the Senate and hasn't stated her opinion on the matter) very much in favor of doing precisely what their principles impelled them to so vehemently oppose when the GOP was in power.

If we weren't as charitable as we are here at Viewpoint we might call this rank, cynical hypocrisy, but we are charitable so we'll just call it an astonishing inconsistency.

RLC

Lily White at MSNBC

Recently Keith Olbermann of MSNBC thought he'd score a few points on his Countdown show by somewhat unctuously challenging the tea-partiers to explain why there are no minorities at their events. The Dallas Tea Party turned Mr. Olbermann's criticism rather cleverly back upon him in this ad:

The best part is the "Have you no shame, sir?" line which is one of Olbermann's favorite rhetorical cudgels. He uses it often against whomever it is he wishes to disgrace on a particular day.

RLC

No Wonder

Stories on the assault on Marjah in Afghanistan are reporting that it's going slower "than expected." Little wonder that that's the case when you read about another battle in Afghanistan at Ganjgal. If the situation in Marjah is like it was in Ganjgal it's a wonder that the operation is making any headway at all.

Four Marines lost their lives in Ganjgal largely because the artillery support the commanding officer requested when they were ambushed was denied because the Rules of Engagement forbade using artillery if civilians might be killed. As a result four Marines and nine Afghan soldiers died:

Four U.S. Marines were killed Tuesday, the most U.S. service members assigned as trainers to the Afghan National Army to be lost in a single incident since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. Eight Afghan troops and police and the Marine commander's Afghan interpreter also died in the ambush and the subsequent battle that raged from dawn until 2 p.m. around this remote hamlet in eastern Kunar province, close to the Pakistan border.

Dashing from boulder to boulder, diving into trenches and ducking behind stone walls as the insurgents maneuvered to outflank us, we waited more than an hour for U.S. helicopters to arrive, despite earlier assurances that air cover would be five minutes away.

U.S. commanders, citing new rules to avoid civilian casualties, rejected repeated calls to unleash artillery rounds at attackers dug into the slopes and tree lines - despite being told repeatedly that they weren't near the village.

"We are pinned down. We are running low on ammo. We have no air. We've lost today," Marine Maj. Kevin Williams, 37, said through his translator to his Afghan counterpart, responding to the latter's repeated demands for helicopters.

If you go to the link be sure to click on the video.

It is certainly proper that we do all we can to limit civilian casualties, but we should not be sending our young men into combat if we're going to be so punctilious about harming civilians that we sacrifice our sons rather than give them the support they need. If these are the Rules of Engagement our President is going to set then it is morally reprehensible of him to put Americans in the line of fire at all. He should withdraw them from Afghanistan immediately or explain why, as in the case of the battle of Ganjgal, these men were denied the cover they needed.

While he's at it he might also try to explain to the American people why anyone should join the military when the politicians are unwilling to do everything they reasonably can to insure their safety.

RLC

Brian Cox on the LHC

While reflecting on an earlier post (see Dawkins' Non-Answer) one of my students, a fellow named Quinn, suggested I watch a video of particle physicist Brian Cox explaining the purpose of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The lecture really is very good - simple and easy to understand (as long as you've had high school level physics). Cox gives us a good primer on what particle physics is all about and the significance of the Higgs Boson which is the quarry the LHC folks are seeking.

Quinn also makes a good point about the end of the video, but watch it first and then read his comment below. Cox's lecture is worth the fifteen minutes it takes to watch. Better yet, read Dawkins' Non-Answer then watch the video, and then read Quinn's thoughts.

Quinn writes:

Cox makes a startling claim: Using Newton's Standard Model, physicists can calculate "everything other than gravity that happens in the universe," even the shape of DNA, and although the equation does not work because particles required for the equation to be useful have not been discovered, he provides commentary on the "beauty" of physics. In essence, he describes the forces of physics as Dawkins' "blind watch maker." He discusses how any change in the weak force would prevent the stability of elements necessary to life.

I find it interesting that Dawkins', Cox, and other naturalists who describe the power of the "natural order" to produce things as complex as DNA and the human eye fail to understand the implications of such orderly processes. What Cox fails to note in his discussion on particle physics is why the forces of physics are the way they are. Why should the weak force not be any different than it is? It seems like the complexity of particles and orderliness of forces would point to a divine "watchmaker" just as much as the complexity of the eye itself.

On top of all this, I would suggest that the forces of nature, natural selection, etc. working as a "blind watchmaker" take much more faith to accept than a God. The odds of dust particles combining in such a way to form living matter, living matter evolving in such a way to form thinking beings with complex organs like eyes, and those thinking beings having the ability to look back on the process that created them seems a lot less likely than a God.

And so we come to Freud's idea of wish fulfillment that accurately (I think) reflects the fact that what individuals claim to take based on fact they really take based on preference. Dawkins, because he wishes for there to be no God, in fact turns himself into his own "blind watchmaker" as he ignores his own faith and theorizes a system so improbable and complex that Brian Cox describes it, rather ironically, as a "creation narrative in its own right."

RLC

Lewis on Friendship (Pt. II)

Here are a couple more quotes from C.S. Lewis' chapter in The Four Loves devoted to Friendship:

A Friend will, to be sure, prove himself to be also an ally when alliance becomes necessary; will lend or give when we are in need, nurse us in sickness, stand up for us among our enemies, do what he can for our widows and orphans. But such good offices are not the stuff of Friendship. The occasions for them are almost interruptions. They are in one way relevant to it, in another not. Relevant, because you would be a false friend if you would not do them when the need arose; irrelevant, because the role of benefactor always remains accidental, even a little alien to that of Friend.

It is almost embarrassing. For Friendship is utterly free from Affection's need to be needed. We are sorry that any gift or loan or night-watching should have been necessary - and now, for heaven's sake, let us forget all about it and go back to the things we really want to do or talk of together. Even gratitude is no enrichment to this love.

The stereotyped "Don't mention it" here expresses what we really feel. The mark of perfect Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all. It was a distraction, an anomaly. It was a horrible waste of the time, always too short, that we had together. Perhaps we had only a couple of hours in which to talk and, God bless us, twenty minutes of it had to be devoted to affairs!

In most societies at most periods Friendships will be between men and men and women and women. The sexes will have met one another in Affection and in Eros but not in this love. For they will seldom have had with each other the companionship in common activities which is the matrix of Friendship. Where men are educated and women are not, where one sex works and the other is idle, or where they do totally different work, they will usually have nothing to be Friends about.

More tomorrow. See here for Part I.

RLC

Emoting About Justice

Heather watched a couple of the sessions in Professor Michael Sandel's class on Justice at Harvard and came away a little underwhelmed. She has some very perceptive comments on the vacuousness of much contemporary ethical discourse, and I thought others might appreciate what she wrote:

Surely no one can fault Sandel's class for being uninteresting. I enjoyed watching the first two classes, examining the situations he posed, and hearing the students' opinions. There is, however, a sense in which his class was empty, not for lack of students, rather, in the absence of concrete standards by which to measure the rightness of one choice over another, their discussion of justice was unsubstantial.

In his class, Sandel presented his students with the case of Queen vs. Dudley in which a captain, in order to save himself and two other men, killed Parker, an orphaned cabin boy, for their consumption. Students were asked to articulate their opinions on the case and their views were many and varied. The two students who were called on to defend their belief that murder is objectively wrong were particularly interesting because, though they wanted to say that murder is always wrong, they were hesitant to claim that the other students, who argued that this cannibalism was justified, were objectively wrong. "I think murder is always wrong, but that's just my opinion," claimed one student. When a like-minded student was asked, after declaring his belief in the categorical immorality of murder, if he though his opponents' beliefs were wrong, he responded with a weak "Yes" only when pressed.

Herein lies the problem: the students wanted to say that the murder of Parker was wrong, but they had no basis for doing so. One student tried to argue that the killing was wrong because humans have rights. Though not a bad answer, it was a meaningless one without an indication of why humans are endowed with rights. Without belief in God, black and white merge into a murky grey moral paint whose pigments cannot be separated.

Perhaps the most perceptive response was that offered by a student who thought that Dudley's murderous act was justifiable. This character said, in essence, that "It's all about survival and you have to do what you have to do." In the absence of belief in God, this is the most logical answer. Why should the captain have concerned himself with Parker's happiness when his own life was at stake? Let the captain eat his breakfast in peace.

Rather than calling his class, "Justice: What's the right thing to do?" Sandel should name his course "Opinion Exchange Hour." Philosophy not built on the foundation of belief in God is nothing more than the distribution of human sentiments. The arguer who is "right," then, is the one with the best rhetorical skills.

Heather is exactly right. What happens in so many of our ethical discussions is what philosophers call "emoting." All that happens is that people share their tastes and feelings. It's like having students get up in an auditorium and declare their preference between Coke or Pepsi. It's absolutely inane unless those opinions are grounded in some transcendent foundation, but for the modern secular student there is no such ground so all they can do is emote.

RLC

Death of a Movement

Walter Russell Mead rather colorfully, and perhaps prematurely, issues a death certificate for the late movement to reverse global climate change:

...the movement to stop climate change through a Really Big and Comprehensive Grand Global Treaty is dead because there is no political consensus in the US to go forward. It's dead because the UN process is toppling over from its own excessive ambition and complexity. It's dead because China and India are having second thoughts about even the smallish steps they put on the table back in Copenhagen. Doorknob dead.

As the Post story shows, the mainstream media is now coming to terms with the death. Environmentalists are still trying to avoid pulling the plug, but the corpse is already cool to the touch and soon it will begin to smell. As the global greens move from the denial stage of the grief process, brace yourself for some eloquent, petulant and arrogant rage. Tears will be shed and hands will be wrung. The world is stupid, uncaring, unworthy to be saved. Horrible Republicans, evil Chinese, demented know-nothing climate skeptics have ruined the world and condemned our grandchildren to lives of sorrow and pain. Messengers will be shot; skeptics will be blamed for asking questions and the media (and the internet) will be blamed for reporting the answers.

This storm will have to blow for a while; there's a lot of emotion and conviction in the 'climate change' community. A year ago they were the last, best hope of the world, a shining band of brothers (and sisters) who were saving the planet and taming the excesses of self-destructive capitalist greed. The Force was with them and the world lay at their feet. They were going to be greeted as liberators by a grateful world desperate to be saved.

Now they are just another piece of roadkill on the heartless historical highway...

Mead goes on to place the lion's share of the blame on Al Gore:

I think Al Gore failed the climate change movement and that his negligence and blindness has done it irreparable harm. If the skeptics are right and the world isn't warming - or if natural causes are responsible for climate change - it doesn't matter much. But if Al Gore and the climate change people are even half right about what is happening to our world, the cost of Mr. Gore's failures are incalculably great. He was the one world leader who had the standing inside the climate change movement to lead it onto a more sustainable path and, as far as we can tell from the facts now before us, he didn't really try.

One reason for the rapid collapse of the movement, if indeed it has collapsed, besides the obvious fraud and appalling sloppiness that's been uncovered at East Anglia and elsewhere, is that global climate change became a left-wing political cause and thus a tool with which to undermine capitalism. This came at a time when people were growing increasingly impatient with attempts to destroy the American way of life. The shame is that if climate change really is man-made and environmentally threatening, the world will have been poorly served by those who substituted ideological propaganda and deviousness for calm, disinterested science.

RLC

Lewis on Friendship (Pt. I)

I recently read C.S. Lewis' Four Loves and enjoyed especially his treatment of friendship. He said so many interesting things on the topic that I thought I'd share some of them with readers of Viewpoint over the next couple of days. These should get us started:

Nothing is less like a friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to each other about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best.

Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden).

The companionship on which Friendship supervenes will not often be a bodily one like hunting or fighting. It may be a common religion, common studies, a common profession, even a common recreation. All who share it will be our companions; but one or two or three who share something more will be our Friends. In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? - Or at least, "Do you care about the same truth?" The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer.

That is why those pathetic people who simply "want friends" can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question Do you see the same truth? would be "I see nothing and I don't care about the truth; I only want a Friend," no Friendship can arise - though Affection, of course, may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and friendship must be about something.

When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass - may pass in the first half hour - into erotic love. Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other, or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later.

I'll have more in a day or two.

RLC

Let's Bring Back Shame

Replying to the post of 2/10 titled Root Causes which discussed Heather MacDonald's article in City Journal on the correlation between crime and other dysfunctions with fatherlessness, William writes to tell us that the importance of fatherhood was known even in the days of Caesar Augustus. He writes that Augustus:

...considered it so important that men hold the responsibilities of a father that he required all bachelors and all families with less than three children to pay a hefty fine. Augustus even forced all bachelors to stand up in public, where they would be mocked by the rest of the citizens.

Augustus' concern appears to have been to shame men who were not doing enough to populate the Roman empire, but perhaps there's something here that we could borrow from the Romans. Perhaps it would be a good idea to publicly ridicule not bachelors but any man who spawns children without providing a proper home and support for them. There would need to be provision for exceptional cases, of course, but by and large, the idea of humiliating those who act in socially irresponsible ways has a certain appeal to it.

Indeed, this seems to be the impetus behind MSNBC's regular airing of their "stings" of adult men who seek out sexual liaisons with teenage girls. Maybe MSNBC could be prevailed upon to start filming, and shaming, men who sire children out of wedlock and then leave the mother to raise the offspring pretty much by herself. After all, if it's appropriate to shame men for one form of child abuse it's certainly appropriate to shame them for another.

RLC

No Place Left to Hide

Were the recent arrests of Taliban leaders in Pakistan a result of U.S. diplomacy or increasing frustration in the Pakistani government with the brutality of the Taliban? Most likely the new cooperation from Pakistan in the war on terror is a combination of both as this WaPo article suggests. Here's an excerpt:

This month's arrests represent "major progress," a U.S. intelligence official said. "No one has forgotten Pakistan's complex history with the Taliban. But they understand how important this is to the United States, the region, and to their own security."

The U.S. intelligence buildup in Karachi re-creates a level of cooperation that existed until 2004 and resulted in the arrests of senior al-Qaeda figures in Pakistan, before relations began to sour between George W. Bush's administration and the then-government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

Jones, the national security adviser, visited Islamabad again last week. Significantly, he held a joint meeting with Pakistan's military and civilian leaders, who have often worked at cross purposes on both domestic and foreign policy.

Subtle signs of a shift among Pakistani officials have occurred in recent months, as the Taliban's Pakistani offshoot has unleashed a sustained campaign of suicide bombings. Pakistan's army chief, Ashfaq Kiyani, recently offered to train Afghan forces, an overture that some analysts read as a message to the Afghan Taliban that Pakistan had other options for exerting influence in Afghanistan. Some Pakistani security officials had grown concerned that the Afghan Taliban might be aiding the Pakistani franchise, said Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a professor and defense analyst.

"It helps Pakistan from a purely Pakistan perspective," he said of the Taliban arrests, "in the sense that they have also communicated a very clear message, even to the Afghan Taliban, that Pakistan can play tough with them."

"We are dependent on technical intelligence being provided by the U.S. . . . That is exactly what happened here," the ISI official said of the Baradar capture. "What is our strategic interest? Our strategic interest is that this guy is a menace, a threat, and we always thought he was in Afghanistan. When we found him in Pakistan, we arrested him. That demonstrates our sincerity."

It's unclear how long Pakistan's assistance will last, but it must have sent shudders up the backs of the Taliban, as they cast about for some refuge to escape the relentless Americans and their predator drones, to know that now they're not safe even in Karachi.

RLC

Response to the New Atheists

Bethel College philosopher Chad Meister and Biola University philosopher William Lane Craig recently published a co-edited a response to the challenges posed by the "New Atheists." Taking off on Christopher Hitchens' book titled God Is Not Great, Meister and Craig put together, God is Great, God is Good: Why Believing in God is Reasonable and Responsible.

Meister talks about the book in an interview with the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Here's an excerpt:

One of the objections to religious faith raised by the New Atheists and other critics of religion is that one must be both unreasonable and irresponsible to hold religious beliefs. This is often a criticism rooted in a reaction to fideism-a reliance on nonrational or irrational faith. In this book we attempt to demonstrate that faith need not be blind, unreasonable or irresponsible. Belief in God and Christ can be grounded on reason and solid evidence. Indeed, not only can one be warranted in holding Christian faith, but it may be much more intellectually honest and epistemically responsible -when taking into consideration the latest work in science, history, and philosophy-to be a believer than not.

I would add that not only is it more intellectually honest, it's more intellectually satisfying - for a host of reasons. I invite anyone who'd like to pursue that claim to read the argument outlined here.

RLC

Public Abasement

I guess I'm missing something, but I just don't understand why Tiger Woods owes a public apology to the whole world. Sure, he needs to apologize to his friends and family and others he's hurt or embarrassed, but that should be done in private. Why does anyone think he owes you and I an apology? How did he hurt any of us? What business is it of ours what he did in his personal life, anyway? He committed no crime, he's not a public official, he's not responsible to us any more than we are responsible to him for what we do. If my neighbor cheats on his wife he certainly doesn't owe me an apology, and it would be extraordinarily pretentious and self-righteous of me to think he does.

Some have asserted that Woods' case is different because he's a celebrity, but I fail to see why that should matter. Simply because he's in the public eye gives none of us any claim on his life. Nor does it give us the right to demand that he stand before us in sackcloth and ashes and flagellate himself.

Cable tv and print media personalities assiduously dissecting his mea culpa are acting either like officious prigs, characters straight out of The Scarlet Letter, or like salacious gossips who relish the flaws and debasement of others because it somehow makes them feel a little better about their own humble station in life and their own meager moral achievements.

It's all pretty tawdry. A less vulgar culture would simply avert its eyes from Mr. Woods' private life and perhaps offer a prayer for him and his family rather than seek to exploit his shortcomings to advance their own ratings.

RLC