The Strange Case of Alvin Greene

By now you're probably familiar with the controversy swirling around the South Carolina Democratic primary election for U.S. Senate in which a completely unknown candidate named Alvin Greene who, in the words of Ann Coulter:

...beat Vic Rawl, a former state representative and judge, with a whopping 60 percent of the vote in last Tuesday's primary, despite Greene's having no job, no house, no campaign website, no campaign headquarters -- indeed, no campaign. Other than paying the $10,000 filing fee, Greene seems to have put no effort into the race whatsoever.

Moreover, Greene has a felony record for showing obscene pictures to college girls.

The left is in a tizzy, alleging everything from GOP dirty tricks to faulty voting machines to explain Greene's win. Obama senior adviser David Axelrod said Greene was not a "legitimate" candidate and called his victory "a mysterious deal."

I don't know why there's such consternation over this. The obvious explanation is probably the correct one, to wit, in any given election most Democrat voters have no idea who or what they're voting for. They just pull the lever for whichever name sounds most fetching and go have a beer. In the present case, Greene is black so word of mouth probably spread through black communities that he's the guy to vote for, so they did.

That may not be what happened, but it makes a lot more sense than that the guy is a Republican plant (even if he is that doesn't explain why 60% of Democrats voted for him) or that, in an election for the privilege of being clobbered in November by the GOP incumbent, Jim DeMint, Republicans would risk scandal by somehow tinkering with the voting machines.

It really is a shame because when you hear Mr. Greene talk he sounds like a man who is marginally retarded, but the Democrats are stuck with him. They really can't take the nomination away from a poor black man and give it to an upper class white guy like Rawls without getting hammered for the implicit "racism" in such a tactic.

Anyway, as Coulter suggests, it's not the first time it has happened that a young African-American man with strange origins, suspicious funding, shady associations, no experience, no qualifications, and no demonstrable work history came out of nowhere to win an election.

RLC

Blaming the Victim

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of the most courageous women on the planet. An outspoken critic of Islamic treatment of women she lives everyday under the threat of death. Indeed, her co-producer of a movie on Islam, Theo Van Gogh, was murdered by a Muslim and a note was pinned by a knife to his chest threatening Ali with the same fate.

Ali is a secular humanist feminist which, you might think, would have Western liberals rallying to her support, but alas, she's also critical of Islam, and there's the problem, as Mark Steyn explains:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's great cause is women's liberation. Unfortunately for her, the women she wants to liberate are Muslim, so she gets minimal support and indeed a ton of hostility from Western feminists who have reconciled themselves, consciously or otherwise, to the two-tier sisterhood: when it comes to clitoridectomies, forced marriages, honour killings, etc., multiculturalism trumps feminism. Liberal men are, if anything, even more opposed. She long ago got used to the hectoring TV interviewer, from Avi Lewis on the CBC a while back to Tavis Smiley on PBS just the other day, insisting that [you can] say what you like about Islam but everyone knows that Christians are just as backward and violent, if not more so. The media left spends endless hours and most of its interminable awards ceremonies congratulating itself on its courage, on "speaking truth to power," the bravery of dissent and all the rest, but faced with a pro-gay secular black feminist who actually lives it they frost up in nothing flat.

The latest is Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. Reviewing Ayaan's new book Nomad, he begins:

"She has managed to outrage more people-in some cases to the point that they want to assassinate her-in more languages in more countries on more continents than almost any writer in the world today. Now Hirsi Ali is working on antagonizing even more people in yet another memoir." That's his opening pitch: if there are those who wish to kill her, it's her fault because she's a provocateuse who's found a lucrative shtick in "working on antagonizing" people.

The Left used to scoff at the "blame the victim" folks who would minimize brutality against women by saying that they must have somehow brought it upon themselves, but that was when the women were white Westerners and the offenders were white males.

Steyn continues:

In Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman wrote that suicide bombings "produced a philosophical crisis, among everyone around the world who wanted to believe that a rational logic governs the world." In other words, it has to be about "poverty" or "social justice" because the alternative-that they want to kill us merely because we are the other-undermines the hyper-rationalist's entire world view. Thus, every pro-gay, pro-feminist, pro-black Western liberal's determination to blame Ayaan Hirsi Ali for the fact that a large number of benighted thuggish halfwits want to kill her. Deploring what he regards as her simplistic view of Islam, Nicholas Kristof rhapsodizes about its many fine qualities-"There is also the warm hospitality toward guests, including Christians and Jews."

Oh, for crying out loud. In the Muslim world, Christians and Jews have been on the receiving end of a remorseless ethno-religious cleansing for decades. Christian churches get burned, along with their congregations, from Nigeria to Pakistan. Egypt is considering stripping men who marry Jewesses of their citizenship. Saudi Arabia won't let 'em in the country. In the 1920s, Baghdad was 40 per cent Jewish. Gee, I wonder where they all went. Maybe that non-stop "warm hospitality" wears you down after a while . . .

Imagine that Christians put out fatwas on those who criticize and demean Christianity. How many secular liberals, do you suppose, would be praising the "warm hospitality" of Christianity? How many secular liberals find anything to praise in Christianity as it is? Yet they have no trouble finding things to commend about those committed to a religion which advocates destroying by the sword not only Christianity and Judaism, but the entire Western value system and anyone, like Ali, who criticizes their faith and culture.

To praise for their "warm hospitality" those who embrace a religion that allows clerics to call for the murder of someone like Ali, is something like praising the Nazis, in the midst of a discussion of their attempt to exterminate the Jews, because they cultivated an appreciation for classical music. It may be true that the Nazis had refined aesthetic tastes, but it's a fact that seems hardly significant, or redemptive, in the context of that discussion.

RLC

Who's in Charge?

Earlier today we remarked on the unbelievable bureaucratic dunderheadedness on display in the Gulf oil cleanup project. Now Jason calls our attention to this video from an ABC news report on this subject that reveals that the Obama administration's assurances that they're doing everything they can notwithstanding, they're clearly not. Or, if they are doing everything they can, then they're clearly incompetent:

Maybe I'm just too cynical, but I wonder if there's any connection between the lack of White House responsiveness to the pleas of the two governors in this report and the fact that both governors are Republicans. Surely Mr. Obama couldn't be that petty, but the alternative is that he is utterly inadequate to the office to which he was elected.

I guess we can expect more of this sort of commentary in the weeks ahead:

Billboard in Texas

RLC

You-Have-To-Be-Kidding

Forgive me, but this is just nuts:

Eight days ago, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal ordered barges to begin vacuuming crude oil out of his state's oil-soaked waters. Today, against the governor's wishes, those barges sat idle, even as more oil flowed toward the Louisiana shore.

"It's the most frustrating thing," the Republican governor said today in Buras, La. "Literally, yesterday morning we found out that they were halting all of these barges."

Sixteen barges sat stationary today, although they were sucking up thousands of gallons of BP's oil as recently as Tuesday. Workers in hazmat suits and gas masks pumped the oil out of the Louisiana waters and into steel tanks. It was a homegrown idea that seemed to be effective at collecting the thick gunk.

"These barges work. You've seen them work. You've seen them suck oil out of the water," said Jindal.

So why stop now?

"The Coast Guard came and shut them down," Jindal said. "You got men on the barges in the oil, and they have been told by the Coast Guard, 'Cease and desist. Stop sucking up that oil.'"

A Coast Guard representative told ABC News today that it shares the same goal as the governor.

"We are all in this together. The enemy is the oil," said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Dan Lauer.

But the Coast Guard ordered the stoppage because of reasons that Jindal found frustrating. The Coast Guard needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board, and then it had trouble contacting the people who built the barges.

Doesn't this take your breath away? What is it about authority and boneheadedness that makes the two so often go together? If the Coast Guard Commander is serious about the enemy being the oil why is he so enthralled by the "rules" that he can't set them aside or work around them until the marshes are cleaned up? If he's in charge then just suspend the rules until the crisis is over.

This is like the bureaucratic insanity that kept BP from burning off the oil in the early days of the leak because of concerns about air pollution, or the refusal of the EPA to allow Louisianna to build sand berms to protect their coasts because an environmental impact study hadn't been done, or the refusal of the Obama administration to accept foreign assistance to skim the oil, or the refusal to send boom that "may" have been substandard to Louisianna. There is something in the nature of government bureaucracies, evidently, that inclines them toward imbecility.

If a nuclear weapon were ever set to go off in a major American city some government flunky would prohibit disarming it until it was estanlished that the nuclear materials could be disposed of safely.

Can't wait for the government to take over our health care.

RLC

Suppressing Freedom

Freedom of speech is one of our most valuable rights, but it's under increasing assault today by politicians who, according to this article, don't like that the internet makes it possible for you to know too much about them.

Currently, Senator Joe Lieberman is pushing a bill that would essentially give the president the ability to shut down the internet in the event of a national emergency. Of course, what constitutes a national emergency may well be in the eye of the beholder:

As we have repeatedly warned for years, the federal government is desperate to seize control of the Internet because the establishment is petrified at the fact that alternative and independent media outlets are now eclipsing corporate media outlets in terms of audience share, trust, and influence.

We witnessed another example of this on Monday when establishment Congressman Bob Etheridge was publicly shamed after he was shown on video assaulting two college students who asked him a question. Two kids with a flip cam and a You Tube account could very well have changed the course of a state election, another startling reminder of the power of the Internet and independent media, and why the establishment is desperate to take that power away.

The government has been searching for any avenue possible through which to regulate free speech on the Internet and strangle alternative media outlets, with the FTC recently proposing a "Drudge Tax" that would force independent media organizations to pay fees that would be used to fund mainstream newspapers.

Similar legislation aimed at imposing Chinese-style censorship of the Internet and giving the state the power to shut down networks has already been passed globally, including in the UK, New Zealand and Australia.

We have extensively covered efforts to scrap the internet as we know it and move toward a greatly restricted "internet 2″ system. Handing government the power to control the Internet would only be the first step towards this system, whereby individual ID's and government permission would be required simply to operate a website.

In the last five years politicians accustomed to working in relative secrecy have found themselves and their questionable behavior broadcast across the world by vehicles such as the Drudge Report, blogs, and You Tube. The internet has in many ways been a political blessing to the common folk because it facilitates the rapid dissemination of knowledge and allows for instant communication. Moreover, the internet frees the public from being held captive to the ideological predilections of the major media outlets. That liberal politicians want to control this resource is not surprising, but that's a power that they must never be given. They can't be trusted with it.

On the other hand, MSNBC's Ed Schultz is happy to give them all the power they want:

It's hard to believe that it would ever cross the lips of an American that the president should act like a dictator, but I guess freedom isn't as important to liberals as it used to be back when Bush was president.

RLC

Sexual Obesity

Mary Eberstadt weighs in at First Things with an outstanding essay on what she calls, following psychiatrist Mary Ann Laydon, an epidemic of "sexual obesity," i.e. the widespread gorging on pornography in our culture.

Here's an excerpt:

Pornography today, in short, is much like obesity was yesterday-a social problem increasing over time, with especially worrisome results among its youngest consumers, and one whose harms are only beginning to be studied with the seriousness they clearly deserve.

Parallels between the two epidemics are striking. Much like the more commonly understood obesity, the phenomenon of sexual obesity permeates the population-though unlike regular obesity, of course, pornography consumption is mostly (though not entirely) a male thing. At the same time, evidence also shows that sexual obesity does share with its counterpart this critical common denominator: It afflicts the subset of human beings who form the first generation immersed in this consumption, many of whom have never known a world without it-the young.

The data about the immersion of young Americans in pornography are startling and disturbing. One 2008 study focused on undergraduate and graduate students ages 18 to 26 across the country found that more than two-thirds of men-and one out of every ten women in the sample-viewed pornography more than once a month. Another study showed that first-year college students using sexually explicit material exhibited these troubling features: increased tolerance, resulting in a turn toward more bizarre and esoteric material; increased risk of body-image problems, especially among girls; and erroneous and exaggerated conceptions of how prevalent certain sexual behaviors, including risky and even dangerous behaviors, actually are.

In the essay Eberstadt tackles several commonly repeated myths about pornography use:

• That it's use is a merely private matter.
• That it only affects men.
• That it only involves consenting adults.

Eberstadt explodes each of these myths in turn and in doing so provides a great service. There are simply too few articles like her's that encourage men who are drawn to pornography to stop rationalizing their behavior and stop deceiving themselves into thinking that it's harmless.

We didn't have to ban alcohol or tobacco in order to convince most people of the harm done to themselves and others by smoking and drinking. Perhaps it's time to mount a similar campaign against pornography to persuade society that this stuff is the psychological and spiritual equivalent (or worse) of cigarettes and alcohol. We don't have to prohibit it in order to make people realize the harm it does to themselves and others. What we can not afford to do, though, is ignore the epidemic.

Read the whole article and read the comments as well.

RLC

Raising the Minimum Wage Is a Bad Idea

Over the years in which Viewpoint has been around we have from time to time argued that raising the minimum wage is a bad idea. In fact, it's such a bad idea that the only reason we can see for raising it is to flim-flam the young and the poor into thinking that they're being done a favor by their friendly congressperson.

Here's an economics Ph.D candidate giving a four minute presentation in which he lays out two reasons why everyone, especially the young and the poor, should oppose raising the minimum wage:

HT: Hot Air.

RLC

The Very Angry Tea Party

J.M. Bernstein at The Stone/Opinionator frets about Tea Party anger, meditates on its causes, and comes to a number of what I think to be erroneous conclusions about what the Tea Party (TP) is all about.

Mind you, I don't presume to speak for the TP. I'm not affiliated with any of its affiliates, and I don't get any mailings they might distribute. Nevertheless, I think I can surmise some things about it that Bernstein apparently misses. He writes:

It would be comforting if a clear political diagnosis of the Tea Party movement were available - if we knew precisely what political events had inspired the fierce anger that pervades its meetings and rallies, what policy proposals its backers advocate, and, most obviously, what political ideals and values are orienting its members.

Of course, some things can be said, and have been said by commentators, under each of these headings. The bailout of Wall Street, the provision of government assistance to homeowners who cannot afford to pay their mortgages, the pursuit of health care reform and, as a cumulative sign of untoward government expansion, the mounting budget deficit are all routinely cited as precipitating events. I leave aside the election of a - "foreign-born" - African-American to the presidency.

Bernstein cannot resist poisoning the well with the obligatory innuendo hinting at racist motivations. He evidently wants us to believe that whatever other nefarious impulses animate the TP we should keep in mind that before we had an African-American president there was no TP. Ergo, Bernstein hints, the TP is a movement caused by the election of an African-American president.

This egregious bit of post hoc, propter hoc reasoning is very unbefitting a college philosophy professor, and thankfully he moves quickly along before the reader has a chance to digest what he's just said:

It is not for the sake of acquiring political power that Tea Party activists demonstrate, rally and organize; rather, [Mark Lilla in the New York Times Review of Books] argues, the appeal is to "individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power." Lilla calls Tea Party activists a "libertarian mob" since they proclaim the belief "that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone." Lilla cites as examples the growth in home schooling, and, amidst a mounting distrust in doctors and conventional medicine, growing numbers of parents refusing to have their children vaccinated, not to mention our resurgent passion for self-diagnosis, self-medication and home therapies.

This, I believe, is not true. Most TPers would gladly acknowledge their need for community support, even for the support of their state, and even, to some degree, the support of the federal government. What they object to is being controlled by forces and bureaucrats who have no accountability and who are as remote from their everyday lives as they are indifferent to them.

What Lilla cannot account for, and what no other commentator I have read can explain, is the passionate anger of the Tea Party movement, or, the flip-side of that anger, the ease with which it succumbs to the most egregious of fear-mongering falsehoods. What has gripped everyone's attention is the exorbitant character of the anger Tea Party members express. Where do such anger and such passionate attachment to wildly fantastic beliefs come from?

Well, now. Bernstein has thrown the allegation out there that TPers are attached to wildly fantastic beliefs, as if we all know exactly what beliefs he's talking about. Maybe we would if he would tell us, but he doesn't. He just leans out of the car, fires this volley at the crowd, and speeds away.

He does spend some time decrying the libertarian inclinations he descries lurking in the background of the TP which then occasions a rather pedantic excursis into the philosophy of Descartes and Hegel. Finally, though, he gets around to putting his finger on the source of TP anger, or at least he thinks he does:

Hegel's thesis is that all social life is structurally akin to the conditions of love and friendship; we are all bound to one another as firmly as lovers are, with the terrible reminder that the ways of love are harsh, unpredictable and changeable. And here is the source of the great anger: because you are the source of my being, when our love goes bad I am suddenly, absolutely dependent on someone for whom I no longer count and who I no longer know how to count; I am exposed, vulnerable, needy, unanchored and without resource. In fury, I lash out, I deny that you are my end and my satisfaction, in rage I claim that I can manage without you, that I can be a full person, free and self-moving, without you. I am everything and you are nothing. This is the rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other - the anonymous blob called simply "government" - has suddenly let them down, suddenly made clear that they are dependent and limited beings, suddenly revealed them as vulnerable.

The problem with this is that it's almost entirely wrong (not to mention fatuous), or at least I think it is. The TP is not libertarian so much as it is conservative and it's animus has not suddenly arisen with the Obama presidency. It's been simmering since the sixties. The discontent of TPers stems largely from a frustration with the direction this country has been moving for fifty years. As leftists have been making their long march through the institutions of our culture, more and more people have grown increasingly alarmed at the erosion of traditional values and freedoms.

Periodically, they were given hope that things would change course - in the eighties when Reagan was elected, in 1994 when Republicans took control of congress for the first time in fifty years, and again in 2000 when George Bush was elected with a Republican congress. But these all proved to be only temporary impediments to the inexorable advance of progressivism which has moved through the culture like army ants devouring everything within reach.

By the last years of the Bush administration the tinder was as dry as parchment and three sparks came together to set it ablaze: The first was talk radio. Rush Limbaugh, and even more importantly, perhaps, Glenn Beck, have diligently and cogently exposed the left's agenda in ways that average people can grasp and have provided the ideas and insights which have fueled, informed, and stoked the kindling anxieties of conservatives throughout the nation.

Then the Obama administration came along and began confirming what Beck and Limbaugh had been saying on radio and tv every day. Mr. Obama was clearly the most left-wing president ever to make it to the Oval Office and he began almost immediately to "fundamentally change" the country in ways that appalled both conservatives and independents, many of whom in the latter group had voted for Obama thinking he would bring a touch of class and competence to the White House.

But the spark that finally galvanized ordinary people to engage in public protests and demonstrations was Rick Santelli's spontaneous performance on CNBC in February of 2009 which immediately went viral. Santelli's call for a modern tea party had an amazing resonance with people, tapping into the discontent that had been smoldering for over a generation and moving average people to finally say they had simply had enough:

Bernstein, however, acknowledges none of this history. Indeed, he seems oblivious to it. He then compounds his ignorance of the movement he writes about by making this baffling assertion:

In truth, there is nothing that the Tea Party movement wants; terrifyingly, it wants nothing. Lilla calls the Tea Party "Jacobins"; I would urge that they are nihilists.

Nihilists?! Here Bernstein is just being silly. It's simply not true that TPers want nothing. They want the government to stop spending money it doesn't have, to stop insulting our allies and bowing to our enemies, to stop raising our taxes to feed the ravenous bureaucratic appetite of Washington, to stop allowing people to enter the country illegally, to stop devouring major corporations, to stop crony capitalism, to stop imposing policies like the freeze on oil drilling that are costing tens of thousands of jobs, to stop telling us what kind of light bulbs we have to use, and on and on. There's a lot the Tea Party wants, but most of all it wants the people responsible for the corruption and sleazy politics of the last two years to be unemployed come November of 2010 and 2012.

To date, the Tea Party has committed only the minor, almost atmospheric violences of propagating falsehoods, calumny and the disruption of the occasions for political speech - the last already to great and distorting effect. But if their nihilistic rage is deprived of interrupting political meetings as an outlet, where might it now go? With such rage driving the Tea Party, might we anticipate this atmospheric violence becoming actual violence, becoming what Hegel called, referring to the original Jacobins' fantasy of total freedom, "a fury of destruction"? There is indeed something not just disturbing, but frightening, in the anger of the Tea Party.

With this paragraph Professor Bernstein has managed to scale the highest peaks of asininity. For fifty years we've heard nothing but excuses for the rage of the left or the rage of minorities. Liberals witnessed the destructive rage of left-wing nuts who tried to assassinate several presidents (and did assassinate JFK), and said nothing about the ideology that motivated the assassins. They witnessed the mob rage at every gathering of the World Trade Organization and tut-tutted the youthful misbehavior. They laid the deadly rage of African American mobs in L.A. and elsewhere squarely at the feet of the larger society with which minorities had "legitimate" grievances. Now a bunch of senior citizens, housewives, home-schoolers, small businesspersons and other such folk finally get tired of seeing the country they love - the country they've spent a lifetime to build and in some cases defend - get flushed down the toilet, and Bernstein is quaking with fear at what these "Jacobins" might actually do.

It's hard to take such piffle seriously. It's the sort of thing only a liberal college professor could really believe.

RLC

Presidential Paralysis

Bill writes to inform us of a development in Arizona that's truly dispiriting. An 80 mile swath of parkland along the border has been closed to American citizens because the area is too dangerous to enter. Illegal aliens have turned Buenas Aires National Wildlife Refuge into a no-go zone, but though Arizona officials have demanded that the federal government fulfill it's constitutional obligation to defend the states against foreign incursion, President Obama has been no more inclined to send them help than he has been to send booms and skimmers to Governor Jindal in Louisianna.

It's mystifying to me that the President is so unresponsive to the pleas of people along the Gulf coast to send the means for them to fend off the oil threatening their beaches and marshes. It's equally mysterious why he would allow taxpayer funded parks to be closed rather than send the means to secure them from those who are there illegally.

We thought last evening he would provide an explanation for why he has not done some things he could have done, and how he will proceed in the future to see that the mess is cleaned up. In the event, however, his speech was disappointing, telling us almost nothing.

It's as if Mr. Obama is suffering some sort of mental paralysis and is simply unable to make a decision except as to where to go to play golf. Either that, or he's deliberately trying to win acclamation as the worst President in the history of our nation.

If it's the latter he's certainly well on his way.

RLC

Nature's Beauties

These ten Black-bellied whistling ducks were photographed recently by Kevin Ripka at Riverlands park in Luzerne Co. Pennsylvania. The birds are extremely rare in PA being indigenous to the Rio Grande Valley and southern California. I've seen them in Texas and was forunate to see them a few days ago in Pennsylvania:

They're lovely birds.

Speaking of lovely birds, this little beauty is a Golden-winged warbler. They nest in brushy areas like power-line cuts from northern Pennsylvania up into Canada. I was in the Poconos a couple of weeks ago and one was flitting around the tree just a few feet in front of me. Gorgeous.

RLC

Miracles Natural and Divine

One of the biggest problems with any naturalistic explanation of life is trying to account for how it got started. The problem of the origin of life (OOL) is the gravamen of Stephen Meyer's excellent book Signature in the Cell in which he argues compellingly that no naturalistic explanation ever advanced can explain how the information it takes to run a living cell could have been produced solely by natural processes and random chance.

Jack Szostak is a prominent OOL researcher who's confident that a naturalistic answer will indeed be found eventually. He's published a paper in which he discusses six of the major problems that must be overcome by any such explanation and offers a possible way forward in the solution of each.

Chunkdz at Telic Thoughts summarizes Szostak's argument and then wraps up his summary with this biting piece of satire:

We now have a picture of how life may have developed under prebiotic conditions. One can easily envision a scenario in which the earth was bombarded by meteorites containing amino acids, organic compounds and fatty acids which had passed through the circular polarized light of an interstellar molecular cloud, then cyanamide and glycolaldehyde were mixed in a freshwater tide pool and allowed to sit overnight, glyceraldehyde was then added and allowed to incubate overnight before reacting with cyanoacetylene in another tide pool containing a buffered aqueous solution of pH 6.5, then phosphorylated with urea and ammonium salts under heat, dehydrated and rearranged via intramolecular nucleophilic substitution before being allowed to cool and rehydrate and subsequently bathe in ultraviolet light. Once all the necessary nucleotides were present they were concentrated around freshwater thermal vents covered with montmorillonite clay and metal hydride which was occasionally exposed to the air for dehydration and concentration. Once in sufficient concentrations after a few freezing cycles and subsequent grinding, chunks of montmorillonite clay were scooped into fatty bubbles where they began to polymerize in the relative safety of their protective bubble of fat. Then when the molecules started replicating and the bubbles allowed more raw materials to permeate their fatty membranes, highly charged molecules caused the bubbles to become long and skinny which made them break and form tiny "baby" bubbles which continued to grow as long as they remained in a cold pond with a local geothermal feature nearby. Then Darwinian evolution took over and facilitated the complex machinery which we find in modern cells.

Of course, there are still a few unanswered questions.

Indeed. The problem with such scenarios as Szostak envisions is not that they strike the mind as quite nearly impossible but rather that naturalists believe the fortuitous collocation of miracles they require actually happened without any input by an intelligent mind.

The difficulty is not in believing that such things happened, of course, since similar things happen every day in laboratories around the world. The difficulty is in believing that they could've happened purely by chance apart from any intentional intelligent agency. That's something that never happens in the lab.

Having rejected a priori the possibility that such an intelligent agent was involved in the OOL, the hypotheses the naturalists serve up to us are just too easy to parody, as Chunkdz's example illustrates.

RLC

When the World No Longer Believes

Jewish columnist Dennis Prager takes us on a quick tour of the post-Christian world and shows that as the influence of Christianity wanes human depravity and horror waxes. I mention that Prager is Jewish because I think it's important to understand that he's not merely an apologist for the Christian right. He prefaces his tour with this:

One of the many beliefs -- i.e., non-empirically based doctrines -- of the post-Christian West has been that moral progress is the human norm, especially so with the demise of religion. In a secular world, the self-described enlightened thinking goes, superstition is replaced by reason, and reason leads to the moral good.

Of course, it turned out that the post-Christian West produced considerably more evil than the Christian world had. No mass cruelty in the name of Christianity approximated the vastness of the cruelty unleashed by secular doctrines and regimes in the post-Christian world. The argument against religion that more people have been killed in the name of religion than by any other doctrine is false propaganda on behalf of secularism and Leftism.

The amount of evil done by Christians -- against, for example, "heretics" and Jews -- in both the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity -- was extensive, as was the failure of most European Christians to see Nazism for the evil that it was. The good news is that Christian evils have been acknowledged and addressed by most Christian leaders and thinkers.

But there were never any Christian Auschwitzes -- i.e., systematic genocides of every man, woman and child of a particular race or religion. Nor were there Christian Gulags -- the shipping of millions of innocents to conditions so horrific that prolonged suffering leading to death was the almost inevitable end.

The anti-religious Left offers two responses to these facts: The first is that modern technology made the Nazi and Communist murders of scores of millions possible; had the church been technologically able to do so, it would have made its own Auschwitz and Gulag. The second is that Nazism and Communism were religions and not secular doctrines.

The response to the first is that technology was not necessary for the Communist murders of over a hundred million innocent people in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and elsewhere. In Cambodia, millions were murdered with hammers, in Rwanda with machetes.

The response to the second is that Communism and Nazism were secular movements and to deny that is to tell a gargantuan lie. Even if one argues that Nazism and Communism were religions, they were nevertheless secular religions. That too many Christians morally failed when confronted with Nazism is true, but irrelevant to the fact that Nazism was in no way a Christian movement.

And now the post-Christian world is getting worse. The moral news about the world in which we live is almost unremittingly negative.

The rest of Prager's essay is very much worth reading.

There are very simple reasons for why Christianity has provided a check on evil. Secular faiths like communism, Nazism, or secular humanism, have no ground for judgments of good and evil, and other theistic faiths lack the sublimity of Christ's moral teaching. Christians, like non-Christians, have sometimes done awful things, but the difference is that when Christians have done evil they've acted inconsistently with their faith. When atheists do evil they're not being inconsistent with anything.

Little wonder, then, that where Christianity is in decline human depravity is on the rise. Permit me a relatively small but specific example of the problem a secular society has in trying to talk about ethics. Maureen Dowd relates a story about how male students at a private school (called Landon) in suburban D.C. were treating local girls as though they were sexual trophies in a hunt for big game (a sport that is unfortunately common on campuses everywhere). After describing the dehumanizing competition Dowd writes:

Jean Erstling, Landon's director of communications, said she was "aware of the incident" but that "student records including disciplinary infractions are confidential."

She said that "Landon has an extensive ethics and character education program which includes as its key tenets respect and honesty. Civility toward women is definitely part of that education program."

Time for a curriculum overhaul. Young men everywhere must be taught, beyond platitudes, that young women are not prey.

Now here's the problem: How can a secular teacher respond to a young man who asks why, precisely, women are not prey other than to simply insist that, well, they're just not? If we're nothing more than the products of eons of evolution, if life is all about promoting our genes into the next generation, if pleasure is all there is to give life meaning, then why should a young man treat a young woman as anything other than an object of gratification?

When faced with the question of why it's actually morally wrong to treat girls as sexual playthings all the teacher can do is shrug her shoulders and say that it's wrong because she doesn't like it.

The only good answer to the hypothetical question is that the reason it's wrong is that each of us is made in the image of God, God deeply loves us, and He wills that we treat each other with dignity, respect and kindness or there will be hell to pay. Take that answer off the table and Landon's extensive ethics and character education program which "includes respect, honesty and civility toward women" is little more than an attempt by Landon to persuade students to accept these values for no reason other than they would just prefer that they do so.

Once students, like people all throughout the Western world, see through the flimsy arbitrariness of such instruction they'll reject it at the first opportunity. That rejection is what Prager's column is all about.

RLC

Strange Bedfellows

The United States has evidently failed to dissuade Iran from building nuclear weapons, a failure that was predictable once Iran perceived that President Obama was disinclined to use force to accomplish the goal.

That leaves the matter of how to stop Iran in the hands of the Israelis who believe with considerable justification that a nuclear Iran is an existential threat. The Israelis are not the only actors in the region who are terrified of Iran's nuclear ambitions and disappointed in America's lack of resolve. In the Middle East the aphorism that the enemy of my enemy is my friend results in some very strange arrangements:

Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defences to enable Israeli jets to make a bombing raid on Iran's nuclear facilities, The Times can reveal.

In the week that the UN Security Council imposed a new round of sanctions on Tehran, defence sources in the Gulf say that Riyadh has agreed to allow Israel to use a narrow corridor of its airspace in the north of the country to shorten the distance for a bombing run on Iran.

To ensure the Israeli bombers pass unmolested, Riyadh has carried out tests to make certain its own jets are not scrambled and missile defence systems not activated. Once the Israelis are through, the kingdom's air defences will return to full alert.

"The Saudis have given their permission for the Israelis to pass over and they will look the other way," said a US defence source in the area. "They have already done tests to make sure their own jets aren't scrambled and no one gets shot down. This has all been done with the agreement of the [US] State Department."

Sources in Saudi Arabia say it is common knowledge within defence circles in the kingdom that an arrangement is in place if Israel decides to launch the raid. Despite the tension between the two governments, they share a mutual loathing of the regime in Tehran and a common fear of Iran's nuclear ambitions. "We all know this. We will let them [the Israelis] through and see nothing," said one.

There's more at the link. Israel may be able to set the Iranian program back, but the U.S. has the power to end it. What we don't have, unfortunately, is the will.

RLC

Frauds and Fakers

Yesterday I wrote about the pending deportation of Mosab Yousef, author of Son of Hamas, and suggested that unless the Department of Homeland Security knows something about Yousef that they're not disclosing this would be a terrible injustice.

Today I came across an article in Books and Culture about a Muslim immigrant to the U.S. who has a story strikingly similar to that of Yousef and who, it seems, may really be a fraud.

Doug Howard, who teaches at Calvin College, tells us about Kamal Saleem, author of Blood of Lambs, who recounts in his book his years as a terrorist, his coming to America, and his subsequent conversion to Christianity. Howard argues persuasively that much of what Saleem tells us about himself seems too implausible to be true.

I don't know if Howard is right. I don't know if Saleem is what he says he is nor if Yousef is what he says he is, but it would sure be helpful to learn all the facts about why DHS wants to deport him.

RLC

Testy, Testy

Well, another Democrat congressman has made it big on YouTube. Robert Ethridge from North Carolina's 2nd District is greeted on a Washington street by a student who asks him if he fully supports the President's agenda. The question certainly seems reasonable, the young man is dressed in coat and tie and hardly appears threatening, but the congressman reacts in a way that would get anyone else arrested:

Apparently, Democrats regard being asked if they support the President as though it were some sort of insult to their sanity or perhaps a threat to their safety. Come to think of it, I guess it is, at least if by safety one means political safety.

Hopefully, this guy will be gone in November. He's in a Republican district and his opponent, Renee Ellmers, sounds like the sort of candidate with which the state of North Carolina would feel comfortable. She's pro-life, fiscally conservative, supports border enforcement, and opposes Obamacare. And she promises if elected not to mug any young people on the streets of the nation's capital.

RLC

Maher on the Media

This is twice in the last couple of months that I think Bill Maher has it right. In the video below, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC expresses skepticism that there are many pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli voices in the MSM. Maher doesn't actually answer Maddow, who asks a fair but answerable question, rather he just assumes there are such people and then gives a rather insulting, but understandable, explanation as to why.

The part that I think he has right, and the part more people need to comprehend, is the last thing he says:

I say his explanation is insulting but understandable because I think it's true that in the West the benefit of the doubt often goes, inexplicably, to those who are seen either as the underdog or as foes of the U.S. It seems both illogical and perverse, but that's how the liberal mind often works. It's why, perhaps, the use of deadly force by the Israelis to defend their lives has been condemned by many Western liberals as "disproportionate."

The reasoning, such as it is, goes like this: The Palestinians can't match Israeli firepower so it's unfair for the Israelis to use it. They should limit themselves in any fight to the death to the same weapons as those used by their opponents. It's this sort of thinking, probably, that underlies Maher's remark about "stupidity."

As for the last part of what he says, the Palestinians have indeed brought much of their suffering upon themselves. They elect a "government," Hamas, which declares the extirpation of Israel to be its primary goal and reason for being. They blow Israeli children to bits whenever they can, and then the world, silent withal, rouses itself to condemn the Israelis whenever they've had enough and undertake stiff measures, like a blockade, to defend themselves.

Anyway, while we're on the subject of the perversity of some of the anti-Israeli arguments one hears, we might lighten the mood with this little parody by an Israeli troupe called Latma of the "peace activists" aboard the Mavi Marmara:

Conning the world isn't hard to do, I suppose, when the world is so eager to be conned.

Thanks to Atlas Shrugs for the video.

RLC

Shame

Timothy Morgan at Christianity Today informs us of what appears on the surface, at least, to be a shameful decision by Janet Napolitano's Department of Homeland Security. You might recall I wrote last March about a book by Mosab Yousef titled Son of Hamas. Yousef was the son of one of the founders of Hamas who grew disenchanted with the terrorism and brutality of the organization, worked for the Israeli spy agency Mossad, and eventually converted to Christianity. He then emigrated to the U.S. where he wrote a book about his experience. Now DHS is trying to deport him.

The Obama administration is reluctant to stem the flow of illegal aliens, many of them criminals, into this country, Obama's Kenyan aunt was even granted "political asylum" recently, but this young man, who is almost certain to be killed if he returns to his homeland, is being told he can't stay here.

What can possibly be the justification? If DHS thinks he's a sleeper terrorist or some sort of double agent then they should produce the evidence. Otherwise, how is justice served by sending him to his death?

Read the article at the link. Unless DHS knows something it's not telling us it'll make you ashamed of your government.

RLC

Degeneracy

Sometimes we need to be reminded of the kind of people these are who seek to impose their will and their religion on the rest of the world. This story affords us a horrifying glimpse of the true face of those Muslims who are engaged in waging a generational war against the West. The story also gives us an idea of what it would be like living in a world where these people dominate the culture. It gives us a picture of pure barbarism:

Twisted Taliban militants took terror to a new low by accusing a 7-year-old boy of spying - and hanging him high.

That outrage drew immediate condemnation from the Afghan president, who called the execution a "crime against humanity."

"I don't think there's a crime bigger than that, that even the most inhuman forces on earth can commit," Hamid Karzai said Thursday. "A 7-year-old boy cannot be a spy. A 7-year-old boy cannot be anything but a 7-year-old boy.

The execution happened Tuesday in the embattled Helmand province, said Dawoud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the provincial governor.

"The innocent boy was not a spy, but he may have informed the police or soldiers about planted explosives," Ahmadi told Central Asia Today.

"If this is true, it is an absolutely horrific crime," added British Prime Minister David Cameron, while on a stop in Kabul. "I think it says more about the Taliban than any book, than any article, than any speech could ever say."

Indeed it does. It illustrates the utter savagery and degeneracy of Islamists like the Taliban. These, and others like them, are people who stone to death their wives and daughters, execute homosexuals, behead journalists, blow up Jewish schoolchildren, and who are working feverishly to obtain nuclear weapons.

RLC

The Last Generation

Philosopher Peter Singer seems to delight in making himself controversial if not blatantly outrageous. In a recent post at Opinionator.com he affords us an interesting glimpse of one aspect of the death wish that follows hard upon the modern denial of God. In the post he discusses the ethics of perpetuating the human species:

[H]uman lives are, in general, much less good than we think they are. We spend most of our lives with unfulfilled desires, and the occasional satisfactions that are all most of us can achieve are insufficient to outweigh these prolonged negative states. If we think that this is a tolerable state of affairs it is because we are, in Benatar's view, victims of the illusion of pollyannaism. This illusion may have evolved because it helped our ancestors survive, but it is an illusion nonetheless. If we could see our lives objectively, we would see that they are not something we should inflict on anyone.

So why don't we make ourselves the last generation on earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required - we could party our way into extinction!

Of course, it would be impossible to get agreement on universal sterilization, but just imagine that we could. Then is there anything wrong with this scenario? Even if we take a less pessimistic view of human existence than Benatar, we could still defend it, because it makes us better off - for one thing, we can get rid of all that guilt about what we are doing to future generations - and it doesn't make anyone worse off, because there won't be anyone else to be worse off.

Is a world with people in it better than one without? Put aside what we do to other species - that's a different issue. Let's assume that the choice is between a world like ours and one with no sentient beings in it at all. And assume, too - here we have to get fictitious, as philosophers often do - that if we choose to bring about the world with no sentient beings at all, everyone will agree to do that. No one's rights will be violated - at least, not the rights of any existing people. Can non-existent people have a right to come into existence?

I do think it would be wrong to choose the non-sentient universe. In my judgment, for most people, life is worth living. Even if that is not yet the case, I am enough of an optimist to believe that, should humans survive for another century or two, we will learn from our past mistakes and bring about a world in which there is far less suffering than there is now. But justifying that choice forces us to reconsider the deep issues with which I began. Is life worth living? Are the interests of a future child a reason for bringing that child into existence? And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent future human beings?

Now this may seem like a very odd argument for an evolutionist like Singer to make, and it reveals, I think, the profound emptiness to which any atheistic worldview must ineluctably lead. The reason I say that it may seem odd is that for Darwinians our whole purpose is bound up in survival of the species. Our perpetuation is the ground for all ethics. Any action that runs contrary to the imperative to promote species survival is, for the Darwinian, ipso facto immoral.

I'm also perplexed by Singer's concern for individual rights. Exactly how, in a non-theistic universe, does anyone come to have rights? Who bestows them and what are they based upon? What should it matter whether someone is compelled to do something he doesn't want to do? In a world without God what's "right" is, as Plato told us in The Republic, whatever is in the interest of the stronger.

These quarrels aside, I have to say that I agree with Singer about this much: Life in his world is indeed a miserable affair. We're born, we're bored, we suffer, we have unfulfilled yearnings, and then we die and, if Singer is right, we pass into nothingness. It's a view of life that has led many thoughtful people to embrace nihilism and despair (I'm reminded of the line in the Smashing Pumpkins' song Jellybelly: "We're nowhere, we're nowhere, we're nowhere. Living makes me sick. So sick I want to die.").

The solution to this existential predicament, however, is not to allow humanity to extinguish itself. The solution is to embrace the one thing that makes the meaninglessness meaningful: A God who offers us life everlasting. It's remarkable that Singer, with a modest reservation, would prefer to see the human race go extinct rather than turn to the one thing that could make life's trials meaningful and worthwhile. There seems to be something perverse in this.

I could understand his reluctance to turn to faith were there compelling reasons to think that such a God doesn't exist, but there simply isn't, and, in fact, the opposite is the case. In any event, I think Singer's argument is important, revealing plainly for all to see the culture of death to which atheism leads.

RLC

Re: Underwater Dive

A former student named Andrew writes to fill us in on some interesting details related to our post featuring Guillaume Nery (See: Underwater Dive):

I work in jewelry so I had to say something about your post. If you check out Guillaume's wet suit you will notice BALL as a sponser. They are a brand of watches with a great American heritage that we carry here at my store. Webster Ball started the company back in 1892 by request of the Lake Shore Railroad. Essentially they made accurate pocket watches and then monitored the pocket watches of all persons working on the railroad system to make sure they had no variation more than 30 seconds. By the end of the railroad era, Ball's system was being used by nearly 75% of the railroads in America. Ball State and the term "on the ball" both come from Ball watch. It's a pretty neat story. Webster Ball was even fundamental in the birth of Hamilton Watch Co. that was here in Lancaster for so many years.

Thanks to Ball I've know of Nery for quite a while. He is a four time world record holder in the sport of Free Diving in which you see how deep you can go on just one breath. I believe he holds the record at nearly 113 meters with no assistance other than a large "monofin."

Ball watch has some interesting info about the company on their website ballwatchusa.com I will tell you... they aren't cheap watches... from $1000-$5000. Back in the day they were the "expensive" pocket watch at $60-$80 dollars instead of the $20-$30 that Elgin and Bulova charged. They also use this very interesting technology that you as a former science teacher might find interesting. They capture Tritium gas in tiny tubes to use as a glowing agent. The gas makes the little tube glow for 25 years! It's pretty cool, I have one of the watches myself and love it... a little piece of American history on my wrist!

Good stuff. Thanks, Andrew.

RLC