Miscellaneous Thoughts on the Egyptian Revolution

Throughout the eighteen days of drama in Cairo a number of thoughts about what was going on both there and here kept recurring. Here are a few of them:

1. Why were the thousands of protestors some of whom were seen throwing stones and heard expressing hate for Israel treated by our media as heroes when thousands of tea party demonstrators in the U.S. who threw no rocks and displayed no bigotry were immediately and persistently said to be nothing more than racist, red-necked, rabble?

2. When the young people demonstrated in Iran and were subsequently arrested and some even executed our government said almost nothing. In Egypt, however, our government quickly took the side of the demonstrators. How do they decide which side to take? Is it that the Iranian government is hostile to the U.S. and the Egyptian government was friendly? Is it our policy to appease those who hate us and throw away those who help us?

3. What is the essential difference between what the tea party folk were demanding in Washington and what the Egyptian protestors were demanding in Cairo? The tea party wanted to end the hegemony of the Democrat party which was doing little to create jobs while piece by piece taking away our freedoms. The Egyptian protestors wanted to end the hegemony of a party that was doing little to create jobs and which had deprived the people of many of their freedoms. Yet President Obama ignored the tea party, which was calling for the defeat of Obamacare and of his party in November, but demanded that the Mubarak government heed the will of the people and begin immediately to hand over power.

4. Our Director of National Intelligence told Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood was a secular Muslim organization. Isn't the term "secular Muslim" an oxymoron? Any Muslim will tell you that if one is secular one is not a Muslim, and if one is Muslim one is not secular. Could the DNI actually be that ignorant of the nature of one of the most powerful Islamic organizations in the world? Shouldn't his ignorance fill us all with a certain trepidation that a man so uninformed about Islam is heading a major intelligence agency?

5. Why are so many people jubilant that Mubarak resigned? I don't mean the Egyptian protestors who are understandably euphoric, but rather I refer to our own media and government personnel. Does no one among these celebrants remember the Iranian revolution? The Cuban revolution? The Russian revolution? In each of these one tyrant was overthrown to the great joy of the people only to have him replaced by a worse tyrant. Do any of those in the media and elsewhere know how the Egyptian imbroglio is going to play out? Our lack of insight into how all this is going to wind up should be sobering rather than thrilling.

OK Go Meets Thomas Aquinas

Watch this OK Go video and then there'll be a test. Pay special attention to the beginning and the end:

OK Go probably had no idea they were doing it, but their video serves as a fine illustration of two of medieval philosopher/theologian Thomas Aquinas' famous Five Ways of demonstrating the existence of God. Here are two questions that might help clarify the relationship between Aquinas' argument and the video.

First question: What do you think are the chances of an entire system like this one coming into existence apart from the very intelligent engineers standing on the platform at the end of the video? What would have happened, do you suppose, if one of those dominos was missing? Do you think it reasonable to believe that the system could have resulted from the chance arrangement of its parts?

The atheistic materialist has to believe something very like this about our universe which is far more complex than the Rube Goldberg device designed by these engineering students. The materialist, though, doesn't hesitate to tell those who believe that the Rube Goldberg device required the input of intelligent engineers that they're being irrational. Just read Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett or their epigones.

Second question: If the series of causes and effects that comprise our universe had a beginning, like the sequence of events in the video, then it must have had a cause that triggered it. What was that cause?

The skeptic could buck the consensus of modern cosmologists and try positing an infinitely old universe that had no beginning, but that means the sequence of dominos would be infinitely long with no first falling domino. If there is no first falling domino then it's hard to imagine how the series of falling dominos would ever get started.

The skeptic might retreat to the safety of granting the reasonableness of believing that there was an initial cause of the universe, but then ask why anyone should think the cause is the God of theism. Consider, though, what's entailed by the acknowledgement that the universe had a cause: An adequate cause or explanation of the universe must, it's reasonable to assume, be very powerful and very intelligent. It must also be outside the universe and outside time, and it must be a personal being since what it causes or explains contains personality (human beings). This may not be precisely the God of traditional theism, but it's certainly something very much like Him.

The skeptic, in full flight now, might just say, as many have, that the universe is just there, a brute fact. It has no cause and no explanation. It just is. But, of course, not only is this a waving of the white flag of surrender and fleeing the field, it's also a science-stopper. It's also more than a little ironic because it's a favorite retort of the opponents of intelligent design to allege that ID is the science-stopper. The charge is false in the case of ID, but it's certainly not false to identify the view that the universe has no explanation a science-stopper.

Who Is He?

Who is Barack Obama? What does he really believe? What is his vision for the nation? Despite having written two books telling us about his life, most people still see him as an enigma and many are skeptical that he really is the moderate pragmatist he has sought to portray himself as since the November elections.

Perhaps he could do much to allay Americans' concerns about him by answering these two questions:

1. What ten books that you've read in the last ten years have been most influential in your personal and political life, and what is it about them that you found most significant to you?

2. What five persons alive or dead do you admire most and why?

We can learn much about a man by knowing the books which have influenced him and the people he admires. It would be very helpful in understanding Mr. Obama if we could see those two lists.

Oil and Water

France's President Nicolas Sarkozy is the latest in an expanding list of world leaders who are clearly disenchanted with the European multicultural experiment. British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Australia's ex-prime minister John Howard and Spanish ex-premier Jose Maria Aznar have also recently acknowledged that attempts to accommodate and integrate large numbers of immigrants have been unsuccessful:

"My answer is clearly yes, it is a failure," Sarkozy admitted in a television interview when asked about the policy which advocates that host societies welcome and foster distinct cultural and religious immigrant groups.

"Of course we must all respect differences, but we do not want... a society where communities coexist side by side.

"If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France," the president added.

"The French national community cannot accept a change in its lifestyle, equality between men and women... freedom for little girls to go to school," he said. "We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him."

It has been clear for some time that the left's vision of a nation consisting of a mosaic of identities rather than a melting pot in which all people are loyal citizens of the state to which they emigrant was going to lead to balkanization, resentment and tension between factions. Ethnic groups which wish to maintain their cultural identity by living in their own neighborhoods should certainly be free to do so, but this only works if the members of the group respect and share most of the principles upon which the larger society is founded and are willing to acknowledge the authority of the laws of the state.

A group which rejects the founding principles of a nation and refuses to submit to them, demanding their own laws instead, laws which are often completely contrary to the existing law, is on a collision course with the very people who have taken them in. It is as if you were to accept a guest into your home who then proceeded to impose his own ideas on how to manage your household upon you and gets truculent if you don't go along. This is what's happening in many European nations which have welcomed large numbers of Muslim immigrants to their shores. These and their descendents often refuse to assimilate into the larger culture, and wish rather to establish a state within a state in their host country.

Many Muslims and Westerners alike see Islam and Western culture as fundamentally incompatible, like oil and water, and throwing them together and pretending that the result is a beautiful, harmonious mosaic is an act of self-deception. It's more likely to wind up like Sarajevo. It doesn't have to be that way, of course, but that's the way it's turning out in Europe.

If a potential immigrant to this country is unwilling to submit to the United States Constitution, particularly the freedoms contained in the Bill of Rights, he really should look elsewhere to make his residence. If he finds those freedoms and the emphasis on equality and toleration to be in conflict with his religious beliefs why would he want to come here anyway?

Conceding Good Faith

Justin Paulette is a lawyer who has written a delightful piece on dialoguing with one's political opposites. The essay is titled Conceding Good Faith and is posted at First Things. Elsewhere he quotes Charles Krauthammer's observation that the problem with our political discourse is that conservatives come to the table convinced that liberals are stupid and liberals come believing conservatives are evil. Given that trenchant insight it's little wonder that our conversations so often quickly deteriorate into angry name-calling.

Paulette, though, recounts some instances where he turns those assumptions to rhetorical advantage, and in the process sets a fine example of how we should engage our friends and acquaintances with whom we find ourselves in disagreement.

Here's how he opens:

Meeting friends and family is part of the universally recognized progression of any relationship, and so it was for me while dating a fellow law student in Washington, D.C. Beyond our common career path, we shared very little—I was a conservative, Republican Catholic from the Midwest and she a liberal, atheist Democrat from Massachusetts.

My girlfriend also happened to be a former Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador, so every few months I tagged along for dinners, birthday parties and social events of the informal “El Sal. Peace Corps Crowd.” They were a well-educated, professional and civic-minded group of white, middle-class young adults. They pursued master’s degrees in international relations with third-world (or, as they corrected me, “developing world”) countries, worked in eco-conscious government agencies such as NOAA, or joined NGOs devoted to global female empowerment.

They were the vanguard foot soldiers of progressive liberalism.

I’d only met one friend-of-the-girlfriend prior to my first evening with the entire crew. She was charming, and found her calling in protecting women’s health by sending glass cooking pots to poor Central American villages in order to reduce open-fire food preparation. We pondered whether her desire for government-mandated price-capping, wage-setting and capital-regulation amounted to communism, and amicably agreed that she was not a militant “brown-shirt” communist, or even a full-blown “red” communist, but rather a befittingly “soft-pink” communist.

The first group dinner was predictably located in an ethnic restaurant in one of the more fashionably hip, socially dynamic quarters of the city. The atmosphere was jovial and the conversation freely swayed between friendly catch-up and political banter. It was early 2003, and I thought it wise to remain politely detached as they excoriated conservative policies, Republican rhetoric, and absolutely everything about George W. Bush. I’d struck up a nice conversation on nothing of significance with a quiet, reserved chap across the table.

The rest of the essay is a very enjoyable, and informative, read although one nagging question never got answered: How did his relationship with a girl with whom he had almost nothing in common turn out?

If you read it you should also read the comments.

Nobody Gets Married Anymore, Mister

In a sobering article in City Journal Gerry Garibaldi puts his finger directly on a major problem with our modern public schools. It's not that they're underfunded, it's not that teachers are not dedicated to teaching, it's that so many of our kids come from dysfunctional homes. To make the problem worse many of them consider the dysfunctionality to be utterly normal.

The specific manifestation of this problem that Garibaldi addresses is the phenomenon of unwed teenage motherhood. As one young girl told him, "Nobody gets married anymore, mister." If our politicians were serious about improving our educational performance and giving urban kids a shot at a decent life they would forget about all their flowery talk about "races to the top" and laptops on every lap and focus their attention on the problem of the disintegrating family. Until the families they come from are healed and healthy, expending money on a child's education will in many cases be a waste of resources.

Garibaldi, a former Hollywood screenwriter turned journalism teacher, sets the stage for his essay, which is hard to stop reading once you've started, with this:

Here’s my prediction: the money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric about saving our children — all of it will have a limited impact, at best, on most city schoolchildren. Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch.

My first encounter with teen pregnancy was a girl named Nicole, a pretty 15-year-old who had rings on every finger and great looped earrings and a red pen with fluffy pink feathers and a heart that lit up when she wrote with it. Hearts seemed to be on everything—in her signature, on her binder; there was often a little plastic heart barrette in her hair, which she had dyed in bright hues recalling a Siamese fighting fish. She was enrolled in two of my classes: English and journalism.

My main gripe with Nicole was that she fell asleep in class. Each morning—bang!—her head hit the desk. Waking her was like waking a badger. Nicole’s unmarried mother, it turned out, worked nights, so Nicole would slip out with friends every evening, sometimes staying out until 3 am, and then show up in class exhausted, surly, and hungry.

After a dozen calls home, her mother finally got back to me. Your daughter is staying out late, I reported. The voice at the other end of the phone sounded abashed and bone-weary. “I know, I know, I’m sorry,” she repeated over and over. “I’ll talk to her. I’m sorry.”

For a short time, things got better. Nicole’s grades started to improve. Encouraged, I hectored and cajoled and praised her every small effort. She was an innately bright girl who might, if I dragged her by the heels, eventually survive the rigors of a community college.

Then one morning, her head dropped again. I rapped my knuckles on her desk. “Leave me alone, mister,” she said. “I feel sick.”

There was a sly exchange of looks among the other girls in class, a giggle or two, and then one of them said: “She’s pregnant, Mr. Garibaldi.”

She lifted her face and smiled at her friends, then dropped her head back down. I picked up my grimy metal garbage can and set it beside her desk, just in case. A moment later she vomited, and I dispatched her to the nurse. In the years since, I’ve escorted girls whose water has just broken, their legs trembling and wobbly, to the principal’s office, where their condition barely raises an eyebrow.

Within my lifetime, single parenthood has been transformed from shame to saintliness. In our society, perversely, we celebrate the unwed mother as a heroic figure, like a fireman or a police officer. During the last presidential election, much was made of Obama’s mother, who was a single parent. Movie stars and pop singers flaunt their daddy-less babies like fishing trophies.

None of this is lost on my students.

When unwed motherhood confers status on both mother and father, when young parents see no need to marry in order to raise their children, when our pop culture continually reinforces these attitudes in our children, we have a much more fundamental problem than whether our students all have access to smart boards in their classrooms.

Read the rest of Garibaldi's poignant story at the link, and as you do ponder what a wonderful blessing the sexual revolution has been for so many of our kids.

Poverty in America: Another Story

We've posted a couple of very personal accounts lately concerning our welfare system. One was written by a young woman who has witnessed welfare abuse in her family and at her job and was rightly repelled by it. Another was submitted by a young single mother who's struggling to support a child and make it through college. I'd like to post one more from yet another young woman whose life situation differs from both of the previous writers. What we get from these three stories taken together, I think, is a pretty good look at the problems with, and the need for, a government safety net:

I know there are people out there that try to cheat the system (I live next door to the neighborhood drug dealer; trust me, I know), but there are also a lot of people who genuinely need government help. My family is in that category. I know from experience that people who form this view tend to become judgmental of everyone getting government help. Some people never get a chance to defend themselves, and being presented with a chance to do so, I can't help but explain my family's situation from the beginning. Here's my story:

I come from a long line of hard workers. My parents were married the fall after my mother graduated high school in 1988. She was 18 and my father was 20. They started college but both dropped out when I was born in 1990. My father went to work full-time for RESCAR and my mother worked full-time at a department store. My town is small (pop. of 405 as of 2009) and most people who grow up there marry young and don't go to college. My parents were average. They soon became prominent members of the community. Both served on the borough Council, and my father became fire chief.

When I was two years old my little brother was born, and shortly after my health became a problem. My mother quit her job in order to take of my brother while carting me back in forth to Danville, PA for surgery and doctor appointments. My father worked overtime in order to make up for the lost income from my mother. In 1994, my sister joined the family, making us a family of five on one income with a mass amount of bills to pay. My parents had horrible health insurance and the bills from my doctors began to pile up. My mother took up babysitting jobs (nine children in addition to us at once....I'm sure that wouldn't be allowed today) so that we could keep the house heated. We were on food stamps for a while, but my father hated it. Soon he refused to use them.

In 1998 my family's whole world was turned upside down. My father was climbing out of a train car when he slipped off a chemical-soaked ladder and fell to the bottom. For a year his employers sent him to chiropractors. Then, one night in early '99, my father was rushed to the hospital in excruciating pain. It turns out that the fall had broken his back and the chiropractic therapy had made it worse. He went into surgery in Pittsburgh to get rods placed in his spine. After many complications and 6 surgeries later, my father was left with severe pain and limitations for the rest of his life.

My mother picked up a full-time job and a part-time job on top of that. At nine years old I was left to take care of a father confined to a hospital bed for 6 months, a seven year old brother, and a five year old sister. My grandmother would stop by when we were at school to make sure my father ate and sometimes left meals for us. My father received workers compensation for two years while he healed from his surgeries.

Then came the lawsuits. Worker's comp. began sending people out to snoop around my neighborhood and interview neighbors. My grandparents had helped my mother in buying a hot tub for my father's physical therapy so that he wouldn't have to endure the long rides to Pittsburgh every week. They also bought a pool table for him for his birthday to try to bring him out of his depression (he loves playing). The people in my neighborhood began to ridicule my family. RESCAR tried to fire my father so they would no longer have to support my family. He hired a lawyer and finally settled, getting little money. We began to receive government benefits that year.

I knew people were still talking, but I didn't feel the full brunt of it until last year. I was home from college and my dog got loose. I yelled to a woman up the street to grab his collar, and she grabbed her arm and screamed, "He bit me!" When I laughed and explained he didn't bite; she snapped at me, "I know, I'm just faking it like your father." The doctors still refuse to release my father for work. He can't sit or stand for more than 30 minutes. He is in constant pain. For years he suffered from depression. Often I hear him mutter to himself about being worthless. He is no longer the "bread winner" and feels as if he has let everyone down. Their words cut deeper than they themselves will ever know.

To wrap up this long, long story, I have an access card. It's for medical purposes only. I go to college for free. My FAFSA placed my EFC at $0.00, so I receive thousands in grants, but make no mistake, it's not entirely government. I am the recipient of the national Spina Bifida Association $20,000 scholarship awarded for my involvement in advocacy for my own disability. I also hold a vast amount of academic scholarships, and even a Junior Borough Council Members of PA scholarship. I worked hard for that money. It was no hand out, and I am very blessed.

My mother has held the same full-time job since my father was injured. Because of that, my family now has health insurance, although we still have to use our access cards to get by. My brother graduated high school and works as a full-time auto mechanic, so there is now a second income once again in my household. I'll never forget the times my parents had to sell the hot tub or vehicles for coal to heat the house. My family still struggles sometimes to make ends meet, but we have each other. Right now, that's all that matters. So, not everyone [who receives assistance] is looking for a free handout.

There are some in our society who do everything in their power to get by, but because of the vicissitudes of life still need someone to help. There are others who are in difficult straits because of bad choices they've made in their lives, but who are trying to climb out of their predicament. And there are still others who are perfectly content to game the system in any way they can and exploit it for as long as they can.

Everyone wants to help the first group. Many want to help the second, and no one wants to help the third. Unfortunately, it's very difficult for a government bureaucracy to distinguish between them.

The War in Waziristan

The war against Islamist terrorists goes on largely out of sight. One aspect of it that does now and then seep into media reports is the war on Taliban forces in northwestern Pakistan. This conflict is waged using UAVs armed with satellite guided munitions and according to this report at Strategy Page, is taking a fearsome toll on the Taliban.

One of the troubling aspects of these attacks, however, has been the deaths of civilians. The article discusses why this is and what measures the military is using to minimize civilian casualties:

While there are more attacks, fewer civilians have been killed. It's difficult to tell who is an innocent civilian in these circumstances, but since the Taliban have rarely claimed, and identified civilian deaths from these attacks, there are apparently very few civilians killed.

There are several reasons for this. One is better intel, but there's a new weapon in use. The CIA controlled UAVs are now using a smaller missile; the Griffin. This enables targets to be destroyed with less risk to nearby civilians.

In the last three years, the UAV campaign in Pakistan has killed about a thousand people. Some 30 percent of the dead were civilians, largely because the terrorists use human shields, and try to surround themselves with women and children. Many of these civilians were wives and children of the Islamic radicals.

As the CIA intelligence got better, and the locals more insistent on not being human shields, more and more of the civilians were close kin of the terrorists, and at least aware of the danger they were in because of their husband's line of work.

Civilian deaths are minimized by trying to catch the terrorists while traveling, or otherwise away from civilians. Journalists visiting the sites of these attacks later, find few locals claiming lots of civilian casualties.

There's much else of interest in the Strategy Page report. Check it out.

Basic Economics

Perhaps you've heard media folks talking about debt, deficit, big government, etc. and not being particularly well-versed in economics you didn't really understand what they were saying or why you should care. Well, below, by way of Hot Air, is a video which in five minutes will answer a lot of your questions about the perils of big government.

It's a basic guide to why many people are dismayed by what our government has done over the last two or three years. I hope you'll take the time to watch it. It's important that every American understand the ideas this student presents:

Egyptian Moderates

There's been a lot of reporting from Egypt about what the people there want. Much of the reporting and media commentary would lead us to think that the mass of Egyptian people are moderates eager for Western-style freedom and democracy. Pew Research Center, however, has a report on the opinions of Egyptians and others in the Muslim world which gives a much different view of what the Egyptian people think, and it's not encouraging.

In Egypt 31% of Muslims see a struggle between moderate modernizers and hard-line fundamentalists and of that cohort 59% identify with the fundamentalists.

Majorities of Muslims in Egypt, as well as Jordan, Pakistan and Nigeria, say they favor imposing harsh punishments for adultery, robbery, and converting to another religion. Eighty two percent of Egyptians favor stoning people who commit adultery. Seventy seven percent favor whipping and cutting the hands off people who commit theft. Eighty four percent of the Egyptian people believe those who leave the Muslim religion should be executed.

Egypt and Pakistan were the two countries surveyed in which the percentage of people holding these views was highest. In some of the other predominantly Muslim countries surveyed – Turkey, Lebanon and Indonesia, for instance – most Muslims oppose these measures.

I suppose it's reassuring that something less than half of the people in these countries favor death sentences for those who convert from Islam. No wonder Muslim emigrants to Europe and elsewhere often have such a hard time assimilating.

Anyway, the take-away here is that, at least in Egypt, the overwhelming number of people are not at all what most people think of when they think of "moderates".

The President and the King

In the classic story by Antoine de Saint Exupery titled The Little Prince the prince meets a king who feels he must exert his authority even though no one heeds his orders. Thus the king orders people (and other things) to do what they were going to do anyway so that he would have the satisfaction of seeing his orders obeyed.

The little prince was tired so he yawned. "It is contrary to etiquette to yawn in the presence of a king" the monarch said to him. "I forbid you to do so."

"I can't help it. I can't stop myself, " replied the little prince, thoroughly embarrassed. "I have come on a long journey, and I have had no sleep..."

"Ah, then," the king said. "I order you to yawn. It is years since I have seen anyone yawning. Yawns to me are objects of curiosity. Come now! Yawn again! It is an order."

"That frightens me...I cannot, any more..." murmured the little prince, now completely abashed.

"Hum! Hum! replied the king. "Then I --- I order you to sometimes yawn and sometimes to ---." He sputtered a little, and seemed vexed.

I thought of this king while reading about President Obama's shifting demands to Hosni Mubarak. First the President demanded that Mubarak immediately begin the transition to a new government, i.e. resign, but Mubarak replied that he didn't think that would happen any time soon. So the President then demanded that Mubarak begin a gradual transition to a new government, but it looks now as if Mubarak will begin the transition when he's good and ready, which may be never:

In a shift on the crisis in Egypt, the Obama administration on Saturday gave its support to a gradual transition in government to prepare for new elections in September.

[This] was a departure from President Obama's demands as recently as Friday afternoon calling on the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, to make immediate changes and step down in the face of the 12-day-long popular uprising and violent clashes in his country.

Perhaps President Obama, like Saint Exupery's king, will next be demanding that Mubarak stay in office as long as he wants so as to keep Egypt stable.

Teaching Evolution

A recent article in Science Daily has received a lot of attention, mostly because it has revealed some surprising statistics about American high school biology teachers. The article, or rather the research the article reports, implicitly raises a lot of questions, most of which are left unanswered. I'd like to make some of those questions explicit because I think they're important. The article begins with this paragraph:

The majority of public high school biology teachers in the U.S. are not strong classroom advocates of evolutionary biology, despite 40 years of court cases that have ruled teaching creationism or intelligent design violates the Constitution, according to Penn State political scientists. A mandatory undergraduate course in evolutionary biology for prospective teachers, and frequent refresher courses for current teachers, may be part of the solution, they say.

"Considerable research suggests that supporters of evolution, scientific methods, and reason itself are losing battles in America's classrooms," write Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer, professors of political science at Penn State, in the January 28 issue of Science.

Well, how are supporters of "reason itself" and "scientific methods" losing battles in America's classrooms? The article never says. It simply implies that since a lot of biology teachers are refusing to indoctrinate their students that therefore reason and science are taking a beating.

The researchers examined data from the National Survey of High School Biology Teachers, a representative sample of 926 public high school biology instructors. They found only about 28 percent of those teachers consistently implement National Research Council recommendations calling for introduction of evidence that evolution occurred, and craft lesson plans with evolution as a unifying theme linking disparate topics in biology.

In contrast, Berkman and Plutzer found that about 13 percent of biology teachers "explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design by spending at least one hour of class time presenting it in a positive light." Many of these teachers typically rejected the possibility that scientific methods can shed light on the origin of the species, and considered both evolution and creationism as belief systems that cannot be fully proven or discredited.

There's something wrong with this? Evolution can be fully proven? Creation can be fully discredited? What do these words even mean? What is meant here by the words evolution, creationism, proven and fully discredited? The article doesn't tell us. It just allows the reader to wander in confusion through this thicket of imprecise and undefined terminology.

Berkman and Plutzer dubbed the remaining teachers the "cautious 60 percent," who are neither strong advocates for evolutionary biology nor explicit endorsers of nonscientific alternatives. "Our data show that these teachers understandably want to avoid controversy," they said.

The researchers found these teachers commonly use one or more of three strategies to avoid controversy. Some teach evolutionary biology as if it applies only to molecular biology, ignoring an opportunity to impart a rich understanding of the diversity of species and evidence that one species gives rise to others.

More vagueness. What is a species, exactly? Is the evidence that species, whatever they are, evolve into other taxa unambiguous and dispositive? Is there no reason to question it? We're not told, but the answers to these questions matter if we're to properly assess the significance of the statistics the researchers are reporting.

Using a second strategy, some teachers ... "tell students it does not matter if they really 'believe' in evolution, so long as they know it for the test," Berkman and Plutzer said.

How many teachers do that? Many of them or just one?

Finally, many teachers expose their students to all positions, scientific and otherwise, and let them make up their own minds.

This is unfortunate, the researchers said, because "this approach tells students that well established concepts can be debated in the same way we debate personal opinions."

Do the authors mean to say that we do our students a disservice when we show them both the pros and the cons of a particular explanation in science? What are the well-established concepts the researchers have in mind here? The concept that evolution is a purely natural process? The concept that evolution has been "fully proven"? The concept that change happens? What?

Berkman and Plutzer conclude that "the cautious 60 percent fail to explain the nature of scientific inquiry, undermine the authority of established experts, and legitimize creationist arguments." As a result, "they may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists."

This claim about undermining the authority of experts leading to hindering scientific illiteracy is very odd. Studies have shown that it's precisely those students who have strong beliefs in creation or intelligent design (they're not the same thing despite repeated attempts by the media to conflate them in the public mind) are often the students in any biology class who also have the best understanding of Darwinian evolution. The students who simply accept the evolutionary point of view without question often know the least about it.

Berkman and Plutzer say the nation must have better-trained biology teachers who can confidently advocate for high standards of science education in their local communities. Colleges and universities should mandate a dedicated undergraduate course in evolution for all prospective biology teachers, for example, and follow up with outreach refresher courses, so that more biology teachers embrace evolutionary biology.

Does this mean that deviant biology teachers will be subjected to some sort of aversion therapy, like the sociopath Alex in Clockwork Orange, or "reeducation" such as Winston Smith was forced to undergo in 1984? What if this doesn't work, do Berkman and Plutzer think we should employ electroshock treatments to correct the thinking of recalcitrant educators?

"Combined with continued successes in courtrooms and the halls of state government, this approach offers our best chance of increasing the scientific literacy of future generations," they conclude.

Indoctrination of students doesn't lead to scientific literacy. It merely makes them uncritical parrots of whatever their masters want them to say. What leads to scientific literacy is teaching them to impartially evaluate evidence, which is precisely what these researchers don't want. Perhaps they know that the more students are encouraged to sift the evidence and subject it to critical analysis the less inclined they are to buy into the Darwinian paradigm.

Asininity

According to No Left Turns a fifth-grader in California had to hire a lawyer last week in order to overcome the public school's unwritten prohibition on singing religious songs in a talent show. Meanwhile, a Michigan public school this week voluntarily amended their no weapons-in-school policy so as to permit Sikh students to carry daggers on their persons.

Let's try to understand this. A student talent show competitor is not allowed to sing a song with a Christian theme because expressions of religious sentiment are proscribed in our public schools, but a Sikh is allowed to bring a weapon to school because it's an expression of religious devotion.

This is the sort of wretched reasoning that contemporary liberalism has foisted upon us. Is it any wonder that politicians are embarrassed to identify themselves as liberals?

Multiculturalism Has Failed

British Prime Minister David Cameron, following the lead of German Prime Minister Angela Merkel's speech last year, declares that the doctrine of state multiculturalism has failed.

Cameron argues that we must distinguish between the religion of Islam and the ideology of Islamic extremism. A lot of people in the West hope that such a distinction, a distinction between liberals, moderates, and extremists in Islam, is realistic, but I wonder whether Muslims themselves see this as a legitimate distinction.

Reports like one at The Daily Caller offer hope that many do.

The Thrill Is Gone

BillT writes to call our attention to the recent Morning Joe segment in which Chris Matthews, the man who once said that listening to President Obama sent a tingle up his leg, expresses his anger over the administration's willingness to throw Hosni Mubarak under the bus. He states that the way the administration has handled the Egyptian crisis makes him ashamed as an American.

This, of course, doesn't mean that the White House is losing Matthews who speaks for a lot of liberal Democrats and independents, but I'm sure it gives them pause. In the exchange with Pat Buchanan at the end of the segment Matthews sounds like a neo-con:

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Matthews is disturbed that President Obama seems to abandon so quickly and insouciantly a friend of thirty years, but he shouldn't be surprised. Mr. Obama has done it before. Ask Jeremiah Wright.

Obligatory Super Bowl Post

I don't wish to be a killjoy, but when people ask me who I think is going to win a pro football game I always answer that such prognostications are just guess-work and that I have no idea. Predictions amount to little more than a statement about which team a person thinks would win most often if the two teams played each other 10 times in a season. Trying to pick the winner of any particular game is futile given that many, perhaps even most, pro games are decided by four things, none of which have much to do with talent and coaching - turnovers, penalties, in-game injuries and biorhythms - and none of these are predictable.

I don't mean to suggest that talent and coaching are irrelevant, only that, unless the disparity between the two clubs is great, they're often of secondary importance in deciding the outcome of the game.

A team whose biorhythm is peaking will often clobber an equally talented team whose biorhythm is tanking. In fact, an inferior team at its biorhythmic peak will often defeat a more talented squad whose biorhythm is ebbing. That's why there are stunning upsets. That's why a team can lose badly to an opponent in one game and play them again later and beat them.

So tell me which team in today's Super Bowl will have significantly fewer turnovers, significantly fewer penalties, fewer injuries to key players, and a biorhythm on its upward swing, and I'll predict that that team will probably win. But who can tell those things?

Bishnu Shrestha and the Forty Thieves

Strategy Page has an amazing article about a retired Indian Gurkha soldier named Bishnu Shrestha. Shrestha was a passenger on a train that was set upon by a gang of some forty thieves (which sounds like a story out of The Arabian Nights). The odds, evidently, were still in Shrestha's favor. Here's the lede:

For the last five months, India has been celebrating and honoring a retired Gurkha soldier (Bishnu Shrestha) who, singlehandedly killed three bandits, wounded eight and drove off another 30. Snce then Shrestha has been given medals, cash and accolades for his outstanding valor and prowess. The Indian Gurkha regiment he recently retired from persuaded him to return to active duty so he could receive a cash award and a promotion. Bishnu Shrestha's father had also served with the same unit, and retired from it 29 years ago.

If you read the rest of Shrestha's story at the link continue to read about the Gurkha fighting in Afghanistan who was arrested by the British authorities who couldn't do enough to mollify the Taliban and demonstrate to them their eagerness to appease. Sadly, the British are not the people they once were. I can't imagine Winston Churchill or Maggie Thatcher being so obsequiously solicitous of Taliban sensibilities, although I guess I can imagine Neville Chamberlain doing it.

Repressing Dissent

David Klinghoffer over at NRO considers the alarming trend toward religious discrimination in taxpayer supported institutions. He notes that the recent case of Martin Gaskell, the eminently qualified astronomer who was denied a job supervising the University of Kentucky's astronomical observatory because emails showed that the committee charged with filling the position feared he was one of those nutty Christians who believed in intelligent design.

Gaskell sued and the university chose to pay a $125,000 settlement. Committee emails revealed that one of Gaskell's colleague's complained that Professor Gaskell was “potentially Evangelical,” a condign disqualification if ever there was one.

A supporter on the committee, an astrophysicist, protested that the committee was about to reject Gaskell “despite his qualifications that stand far above those of any other applicant.”

Klinghoffer writes:

This is no isolated incident. An enormous, largely hidden transformation has taken place in what we mean when we speak of “science.” For centuries, the free and unfettered scientific enterprise was fueled by a desire to know the mind of God. “The success of the West,” writes historian Rodney Stark in his important book The Victory of Reason, “including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians.” Now, increasingly, voicing such a desire is likely to get you excluded from the guild of professional scientists.

He goes on to give some other egregious examples of how academia blacklists and persecutes those who demur to the scientific establishment's metaphysical orthodoxy:

Last month, a top-level computer specialist on the NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn, David Coppedge, got fired after he sued JPL for religious discrimination. Coppedge had occasionally chatted with interested colleagues about the scientific case for intelligent design, which made good sense since JPL’s officially defined mission includes the exploration of questions relating to the origin and development of life on Earth and elsewhere. For this, his supervisor severely chastised him for “pushing religion” and humiliated and demoted him.

At Iowa State University, astrophysicist Guillermo Gonzalez was refused tenure, despite a spectacular research publication record, because of a book he co-authored arguing that life is no cosmic accident.

At the Smithsonian Institution, supervisors harshly penalized evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg for editing a pro–intelligent design essay in a peer-reviewed technical-biology journal. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel examined the 2005 case, finding that Smithsonian colleagues investigated his religious beliefs and created a “hostile work environment” aimed at “forcing [him] out.”

Similar incidents have occurred at the University of Idaho, George Mason University, and Baylor University.

Such heresy-hunting has the effect of intimidating skeptical scientists who are in increasing numbers growing doubtful of materialist dogma. The Darwinian materialists find the intelligent design arguments difficult to counter so they're seeking to stifle and repress them by making their proponents afraid to speak out for fear of losing their job or future promotions.

This is, of course, how the losing side, or at least the side that deserves to lose, always behaves. Like dictators in the Middle Eastern countries we read about in today's news, materialistic Darwinists have long managed to suppress opposition by exercising a kind of tyranny over what will be allowed to be said and taught. Now, however, they find their power and authority fading with almost every new discovery, and, like those Middle Eastern despots, they're striving desperately to stave off the collapse of their belief system by ratcheting up the repression.

It may work for a while, but eventually the despots and dogmatists will pass on and those who succeed them will wonder how their theories and arguments could ever have had such a tenacious hold on them.

Racism, Hate, and Violent Rhetoric

Progressives rallied recently in Palm Springs California to protest the billionaire Koch brothers who are strong supporters of libertarian causes. It was their support of the tea party in particular which presumably roused the ire of the gentle progressives gathered in Palm Springs. When next one hears from progressives, as we do from Van Jones in the prelude to this video, about right-wing hate it might be good to remember how at least some ordinary liberals talk when they think they're among friends:

I don't know how Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas managed to get dragged into this, but no matter. It's amusing to hear lefties accuse tea party members, without a single shred of evidence, of being racist when there's ample evidence that there's plenty of racism circulating among your average progressive.

I wonder what the reaction would be if at a tea party rally there were calls to "string up" say, Elena Kagan or Sonia Sotomayor. Given that we all know, of course, what that reaction would be why has this video not been shown on our cable news nets or dissected by the writers of the New York Times?

Never mind. It's a silly question.

Meanwhile, Robin of Berkeley explores the strange way of thinking that pervades the left on matters ranging from victimhood to infanticide to vitriolic rhetoric. Give her article a look and ask yourself as you read whether you don't agree that some of these people just seem to suffer from an empty soul.

Inhuman

Lest anyone doubt the cruelty of the people who would rule Afghanistan (and some of those jockeying for power in Egypt) if we are unable to accomplish our task there this report should quell their doubts. In a story that could have come right out of Kaled Hosseini's Thousand Splendid Suns we're told that:

Horrific video footage (the video is at the link but the violence is edited out) has emerged of Taliban insurgents stoning a couple to death for alleged adultery in northern Afghanistan.

Hundreds of villagers can be seen on the video standing around as the woman, Siddqa, is buried up to her waist in a four foot hole in the ground.

Two mullahs pass sentence before the crowd begins to throw rocks at her head and body as she desperately tries to crawl free.

But the 19-year-old collapses to the ground, covered in blood - but miraculously still alive.

At this point a Taliban fighter shoots her three times in the head with an AK-47. The crowd can be heard shouting allahu akbar as she is killed.

Her lover, Khayyam, is then marched in front of the crowd with his hands tied behind his back. He is blindfolded with his own tunic and crouches down close to the ground as he tried to protect his body from the stones.

But he is battered to the floor by a barrage of rocks. He can be heard sobbing before eventually falling silent.

The stoning - the first to be documented on film since the Taliban were ousted from power - took place in the district of Dashte Archi, in Kunduz, last August.

Officials said that Siddqa had run away after being sold into an arranged marriage for $9,000 against her will.

She ran away to be with Khayyam, who was already married and had two children, and the pair eloped to Pakistan.

But it is understood that they returned to their home village after being reassured by leaders that they would be unharmed.

It was a terrible mistake. They were dragged from their families' homes at 2 am by Taliban fighters and then put before a kangaroo court before being executed.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid defended the stoning.

He told the BBC: "Anyone who knows about Islam knows that stoning is in the Koran, and that it is Islamic law. There are people who call it inhuman - but in doing so they insult the Prophet. They want to bring foreign thinking to this country."

Heaven forbid that anyone should bring foreign thinking to Afghanistan. If they did the place might progress all the way to the 10th century.

Anyway, as you contemplate this horrifying execution of a 19 year-old girl think of Jesus' words to those who were about to stone a woman under very similar circumstances: "The one among you who is without sin should throw the first stone".

Adultery is a very serious matter, to be sure, but the Taliban spokesman is right. To execute people for it, and in such a cruel and savage manner, is indeed inhuman.

Elsewhere, Iran has hanged a Dutch-Iranian woman arrested for participating in the protests that followed in the wake of their phony election in the summer of 2009. If the demonstrations in Egypt inspire anyone else in the Mid-East let's hope they inspire the Iranians to try once again to rid themselves of a regime that's at least as bad as, and probably much worse than, that of Hosni Mubarak.