Moral Non-Sense

John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice writes:

Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals, and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the form of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case.

Rawls may be certain that cruelty is wrong and that extirpation of a species is an evil, but where on earth does his certainty come from? Exactly why is cruelty to animals or humans evil? Because it's wrong to cause gratuitous pain and suffering? Why is it wrong to do that?

Rawls seems to be asking us to consult some sort of moral sense that is hard-wired into the human species and which condemns such acts, but we might well ask where such a sense comes from and why we should pay it any heed.

There are really only two plausible accounts of the provenience of such a sense. Either the moral sense is instilled in us by an intelligent, omniscient, perfectly good creator, or it is the product of physico-chemical forces which blindly and purposelessly selected them to suit us for life in the environment we found ourselves in during the paleolithic period of human history.

I don't know which of these Rawls would opt for, although I suspect he would choose the latter. Whatever his choice, why should anyone who holds that our moral sense is the product of some purely physical Darwinian process believe that cruelty to animals is evil? Why should they believe that anything at all is evil? If our moral sense is simply an epiphenomenon of our evolutionary history then there is no such thing as evil.

If human moral values are somehow a genetic phenomenon which evolved to assist us in the survival of our species, if that's all they are, then why should anyone feel bound by them? Why should an individual person care about the survival of the species? More to the point, what does the survival of some animal species like the snail darter have to do with the survival of humans?

A reader might reply that an individual should reject all forms of cruelty for the simple reason that he wouldn't want himself to be treated cruelly. It is no doubt true that most people wouldn't want to be treated cruelly, but that is not a reason why the individual in question should not be cruel to others, especially if he can get away with it, and it is certainly not a reason why he shouldn't be cruel to animals.

Rawls' belief that cruelty to animals is evil is intelligible only if our moral sense was "written on our hearts" by God. Otherwise, it is completely illusory and might just as well be treated like some vestigial appendix whose retention is purely optional. Absent a transcendent moral authority, moral judgments such as Rawls makes are utterly meaningless except that they reveal something about the subjective states of the person who makes them. They are not unlike declaiming that it is evil to prefer chocolate ice cream to almond swirl.

It is ironic to read naturalists like Peter Singer, and perhaps John Rawls, condemn the mistreatment of animals while simultaneously rejecting the only plausible basis they could have for making such moral judgments. Naturalists frequently perform a moral piggy-back on theism, tacitly using the assumptions of theism to support their moral claims, while at the same time declaring in vociferous accents that the belief system they're exploiting in order to smuggle in their asseverations that cruelty is wrong, is really just myth and superstition.

Naturalists are like heavy cigarette smokers. They know their habit is killing them but they just can't give it up. Naturalists know that they can't live with the logical entailments of their atheism, but they refuse to quit. Instead, like parasites unable to provide their own moral sustenance, they fasten on to the hide of theism and ride it as long as they can, sucking their nourishment from it. Then, just before they have to admit to what they're doing, they leap off and proceed to boast about what free-thinkers they are and how unnecessary the steed whose life they've been depending upon is. They act as if neither they, nor anyone else, recognizes the metaphysical free-loading they've just been engaged in.

And these folks teach at places like Princeton and Harvard.

Courage - Real and Imagined

A Syrian blogger shares his fears and hopes for the future of his country and his people. The courage of the people in the Middle-East who yearn for freedom and are willing to risk their lives for it is astonishing. In an atmosphere of arrests and imprisonments this man makes it just too easy for the Baathist thugs to find him and his family. He fully identifies himself on his blog. It's hard to find words to express the depth of one's admiration for this kind of bravery.

Consider by contrast the number of times we've heard someone in this country, someone for whom there is no risk of anything except becoming rich and famous, called courageous merely for expressing a dissenting political opinion. People who, at no cost to themselves, buck the political powers that be are deemed brave, bold, and heroic for doing something which places them in no jeopardy whatsoever.

It took courage, we were informed, for Michael Moore to make Fahrenheit 9/11. It took courage, his supporters told us, for Ward Churchill to blame America for the 9/11 attacks. If Moore and Churchill are exemplars of courage then the word has become so debased as to mean nothing at all, and the genuine courage of those who live defiantly under real tyranny is trivialized.

Those who are complicit in this trivialization should be deeply ashamed and embarrassed.

The Least Bad Option

Jeffrey Bergner at The Weekly Standard argues that the military strike option against Iran's nuclear production facilities is the least bad of several bad options. It entails numerous risks that the other options don't, but, unlike them, it also has a singular benefit: It is the only course of action, short of a military invasion, that has any chance at all of ending or delaying Iran's quest for nuclear weapons.

The Armanious Murders

Here's the story of the brutal murders of the Armanious family in Jersey City, New Jersey late last year. It turns out that fears, including our own, that this horrific crime was committed by Muslims for religious reasons were unfounded. The perpetrators were two low-lifes looking for easy money. Both of them should have been in prison at the time but were out on the streets. The New York Post reports that:

The pair met at the federal prison in Fort Dix, N.J. Sanchez was sent there in 2000 after being sentenced in 1995 to 121/2 years in prison for conspiracy to import more than three kilos of cocaine and a kilo of heroin. McDonald was sent there after a 2001 drug conviction.

So why were they not in jail? The story doesn't tell us, but it prods us to make a suggestion. Perhaps one of the legal reforms Republicans ought to enact this session is the establishment of civil liability for any official who releases a convicted felon from prison prior to the conclusion of his sentence, if that individual commits another felony before his sentence would have expired. If the victims of felons who were granted early releases could sue the people responsible for turning these predators loose, two things would ensue: It would hold the bureaucrats accountable for their decisions and force them to be much more thorough and circumspect in selecting the people to be returned to the streets, and it would, therefore, severely reduce the number of criminals living among us.

It would also, of course, please trial lawyers whose universe of potential litigants would expand handsomely, but that's an unfortunate and unavoidable side-effect.

The Post's story has details of the crime and explains who the two slugs were who perpetrated it. Thanks to Powerline for the tip.

The Dominos Keep Falling

Adventures With Chester tips us to an article in The American Thinker titled The Next Domino. In the essay Douglas Hanson discusses elements of the United States' war on terror that the media apparently know nothing about. There are interesting operations afoot both in the Horn of Africa and Abu Musa Island off the coast of Iran in the Straits of Hormuz. Here are some highlights from the article:

With virtually no attention from the mainstream media, the United States has been taking actions calculated to ratchet-up pressure on the mullahs of Iran. A complex plan has been carefully crafted to avoid a direct military attack on Iran, which would inflame nationalism and build support for the mullahs. Once again, the scope, subtlety, and vision of President Bush's foreign policy confounds his carping critics.

Iran has been aggressively moving to export terror and build-up its ability to threaten the world in two places: the Horn of Africa, and the vital Straits of Hormuz, where the Persian Gulf's oil riches must pass on their way to market. There are now some serious indicators that the Coalition, including both French and German military elements, has been deftly executing a combined political and military operation to roll back Iranian gains from the last 12 years.

There are strong indications that the efforts of Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) are starting to push Iranian operators out of the Horn, if they have not gone already. United States naval and ground forces, French commandos, and Die Deutsche Kriegsmarine (German Navy), through a combined series of special and conventional operations, naval power, and humanitarian assistance projects, have established the conditions for the introduction of up to 7,500 troops from the African Union and the Arab League. This is a watershed event for the Coalition in this area, and shows that the Somali people are anxious to finally rid their country of bandits, terrorists, and Iranian agents, and are looking forward to having the government-in-exile return to Mogadishu.

The other prong of CENTCOM's operations against Iran involves Abu Musa Island. The island had been the object of a long-running dispute between Iran and the UAE because of its oil reserves and its strategic location midway in the narrow channel of the Straits of Hormuz. In 1992, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps took complete control of the island , and proceeded to fortify it and deploy thousands of troops, modern air defense batteries, sophisticated anti-ship missile systems, and, according to former SecDef William Perry, chemical weapons. For over a decade, the Iranians have had the capability of shutting down the shipping lane and paralyzing shipment of over one-fifth of the world's oil supply.

This past week, Expeditionary Strike Group 5 (ESG-5) completed an amphibious exercise on the coast of Kuwait. Keep in mind that a rehearsal is a phase of any amphibious operation, and allows the afloat Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) and the Navy to test the communications links, practice disembarkation, exercise the procedures for naval surface fire support and air support, and, of course, practice the assault itself.

Rather than risk a popular backlash by the citizens of Iran against the US by conducting a direct air or land campaign against the Iranian homeland, seizure of an island that has been disputed for decades would show the Iranians we were willing to support their fight against the mullahs without putting their lives at risk or destroying their infrastructure. The mullahs launched their gambit as an act of aggression; reversing it would demonstrate strength, but indicate no hostility to the Iranian people.

This analysis doesn't even include any possible covert Special Operations Force activities designed to foment rebellion in what is viewed as an increasingly restive Iranian population. Because of the pressure being applied in the Horn of Africa and the Persian Gulf, it may require only a slight push from the freedom-loving people in Iran to rid themselves of this oppressive regime, following through on the very visible promise to them made by President Bush in his State of the Union Address.

Bush's critics often seem to assume that because they're not informed by the MSM of any developments in the GWOT that therefore the administration must not be doing much. One might think that they'd learn not to "misunderestimate" the man, but in the hearts of some of them there is an invincible hope that he'll turn out to vindicate all their declamations of his utter ineptitude. Nevertheless, the dominos keep falling. Let's pray that that happy state of affairs continues.

The Ten Commandments

The Supreme Court will spend several months deciding whether it wants to ban the ten commandments from all public property. It apparently will take that long for them to check with the European Union to get their opinion on what our laws should be.

Some commentators have envisioned phalanxes of bulldozers unleashed all across the land this summer smashing existing monuments to powder, while others think this scenario is too alarmist:

The bigger danger to society would be if the monuments were allowed on public land, putting a huge crack in the wall between church and state, say opposition groups. "Our concern is that they would start increasing and the religious right would start marking places," said Christopher Arntzen, chair of the Gay and Lesbian Atheists and Humanists. "There's a danger to civil liberties. A lot of the religious right is directed against non-believers."

Christopher Arntzen has a point. If we allow the Ten Commandments to grace our public spaces as we have for the last two centuries, why, then the wall of separation between Church and state will surely crumble. Indeed, it's a miracle that it hasn't collapsed before now since all sorts of people have been inspired to turn this country into a theocracy by public displays of the Ten Commandments.

Why, we heard of a gentleman on a tour of the Supreme Court building where, ironically enough, the Ten Commandments are in evidence, who upon seeing them with his own eyes fell to his knees and swore an oath that he would single-handedly, if necessary, restore Christendom to the throne of government. We've also heard of countless schoolchildren who have let their gaze fall upon the Ten Commandments and consequently reverted to thumb-sucking and bed-wetting at night. We simply can't tolerate this sort of thing in a pluralist society.

Once the Court has banned the Ten Commandments, of course, there will be no stopping it. It will have no grounds for failing to abolish the under God phrase in the pledge, it will certainly have to ordain that all currency bearing the motto In God We Trust be removed forthwith from circulation, and it will perforce be compelled to prohibit all prayer, all mention of God, in public spaces and public events.

Thus will the secularists have succeeded in imposing their vision of a sanitized public square, scrubbed free of all residue of religious belief, upon the rest of the nation. A glorious future awaits us.

More on the Guiliana Sgrena Story

Little Green Footballs is all over the Guiliana Sgrena story, a story which seems to be something of a work in progress.

Segrena had originally insisted that the car in which she was traveling was moving at "normal speed", but now she acknowledges that they were swerving to miss puddles and going fast enough that they had almost lost control of the vehicle at one point.

She had also earlier denied that there were any lights or signals from the troops who opened fire, but now admits that the Americans had shone a flashlight at them as they approached the checkpoint.

She also claims that the soldiers fired 300 to 400 rounds from an armored vehicle at their car, but that many rounds would surely have shredded the vehicle and killed everyone inside.

If this keeps up her story and the account we've been given by American authorities (that the vehicle was rapidly approaching the checkpoint and failed to respond to commands and signals to stop) will be indistinguishable.

Giuliana Sgrena

That an Italian secret service agent died in the horrific events on the road to Baghdad airport is tragic. That Giuliana Sgrena, the released hostage and journalist who works for the communist daily Il Manifesto, is saying the things she is is execrable:

"The fact that the Americans don't want negotiations to free the hostages is known," Sgrena told Sky TG24 television by telephone, her voice hoarse and shaky. "The fact that they do everything to prevent the adoption of this practice to save the lives of people held hostages, everybody knows that. So I don't see why I should rule out that I could have been the target."

When the firing began she said that she remembered her captors' words, when they warned her "to be careful because the Americans don't want you to return."

Sgrena wrote that her captors warned her as she was about to be released not to signal her presence to anyone, because "the Americans might intervene." She said her captors blindfolded her and drove her to a location where she was turned over to agents and they set off for the airport.

She thinks she might have been the target. To what end? On whose authority? How did the soldiers know that she was in that car? If she was indeed the target then why did they let her survive and why did they render her first aid? Why does she credit the vague words of terrorists who kidnapped her and threatened her life, but discount the explanation of the Americans.

Sgrena states in the article that she thinks she may have been the target because the Italians apparently paid a high ransom for her release and the American policy is to not negotiate with terrorists. Does she think that therefore she was targeted for assassination? What would be the point? Does she really think Americans were willing to kill agents of an allied government, one which has been fairly steadfast in its support of the American effort in Iraq, out of pique?

Even if someone in the American chain of command did resent her and knew she would be in that vehicle, does Sgrena really think they would be so stupid as to risk being exposed by the troops who carried out the order? Does she really think that an American commander would be willing to risk an international incident by killing her? Does this woman even think at all?

She's a woman of the Left so we expect her to be eager to discredit the U.S., but to slander American military personnel with no evidence and without offering any answers to the above questions is simply beneath contempt.

The Metastasizing Culture of Death

There was a time when everyone, even the pro-choice proponents of abortion on demand, agreed that abortion was unfortunate, perhaps even tragic. They would nevertheless argue, of course, that the mother should have the right to terminate a pregnancy to avoid even greater tragedy. The victim, they maintained, was just a blob of tissue. It wasn't as if an actual child were being destroyed. They would never support such a horrific practice as infanticide nor would anyone but a moral monster ever imagine doing such a thing.

Well, times have changed. Now we're being told that abortion should no longer be seen as a necessary evil, nor even something regrettable. Instead, it is, the pro-choice spokespersons now declare, meritorious, something to be celebrated, a deed worthy of boasts.

The culture of death is metastasizing through the body politic. Read these excerpts from a piece by George Neumayr of The American Spectator and reflect upon how children are being dehumanized, delegitimized, and stripped of their worth:

Even in extending a thorn branch to pro-life groups, Hillary Clinton draws gasps, head shaking, and troubled silence from pro-abortion activists. So reported the press after she said earlier in the week that "We can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic, choice to many, many women." Notice that she didn't say it is a tragic choice for the aborted babies, only for the women who get abortions.

But this was still too much for the crowd. To them abortion is a cause not for tears but for sighs of relief. After the speech, Martha Stahl, director for public relations and marketing for Northern Adirondack Planned Parenthood, disputed the characterization of abortion as a tragic choice, telling the New York Times that "we see women express relief more than anything else that they have the freedom to choose."

This sentiment, not Clinton's rhetorical repositioning in the wake of a bewildering defeat [in November], represents the real feeling on the pro-abortion side. In fact, leading pro-abortion theorists have been arguing recently that unless abortion is seen as an unambiguous good the movement will die. They reason that if abortion is increasingly seen as a tragedy, then society will question the practice and ultimately ban it. Feelings of remorse invite the political order to scrutinize the source of the remorse. So Planned Parenthood is urging women to take pride in their abortions.

The "I Had An Abortion" T-shirts Planned Parenthood sold online last year were an attempt to "demystify and destigmatize it," said a spokesman for the group. The strategy here is to normalize abortion, make it so commonplace that no one will think to question it. If you can talk happily and casually about your abortions - as Barbara Ehrenreich did in the New York Times last year in a piece titled "Owning Up to Abortion" -- then how bad can the practice be?

Understanding this psychology, Alexander Sanger, the grandson of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, has been emphasizing that abortion advocates should go beyond "choice" - an insipid, evasive rhetoric, he thinks - and celebrate abortion unapologetically. After all, he says, the unborn child is an interloper who deserves death. "The unborn child is not just an innocent life," he writes, but a "liability, a threat, and a danger to the mother and to the other members of the family."

Imnotsorry.net is a website that reflects the culture of abortion without apology that Sanger believes essential to the movement's survival. According to its founders, the website - which allows women to post testimonials expressing their "relief" and "joy" after an abortion - "was created for the purpose of showing women that exercising their legal right to terminate their pregnancy is not the blood-splattered guilt trip so many make it out to be."

Ron Fitzimmons, president of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, has told the press, "We have nothing to hide. The work we're doing is good. We are there to help women, and it's important to talk about abortion so that it's not a stigma." Like Sanger, Fitzimmons eschews "choice" talk as too weak and vague to protect abortion. He implies that since everybody now knows that abortion means killing a child abortion advocates will have to sell the public on abortion not just as a choice, but as a good choice - it is better that unborn babies die. "We can no longer respond to [pro-life arguments] with 'it's your right to choose.' We need to recapture the notion that abortion is a difficult moral choice for women, but one that is, in fact, a moral choice."

Whatever happened, we wonder, to the Clintonian rhetoric of making abortion safe, legal and rare?

Sanger's claim that "The unborn child is not just an innocent life," but a "liability, a threat, and a danger to the mother and to the other members of the family," is shocking and repulsive, but it's also an expression of the logical evolution of the culture of death. His words are like distant thunder presaging the coming storm, a storm which will bring with it a concerted assault by the Left on the right to life of newborns, infants, and the elderly.

Alexander Pope penned these lines in his Essay on Man some two hundred and seventy years ago, and they are as apposite today as they were then:

Evil is a monster of such frightful mein, that to be hated needs but to be seen; But seen too oft, familiar with her face, First we endure, then pity, then embrace.

Free Lecture Tapes

Evangelical Outpost tips us to an extensive collection of MP3 audiotapes of past lectures at the MacLaurin Institute available for free download. These lectures cluster around themes dealing with the reliability of the Bible, philosophical and scientific issues which bear upon religion, faith in the marketplace, and what they call the heart of the matter. The speakers are mostly A-list, and the topics are intriguing. Check it out.

Unimagined Consequences

Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters offers this assessment of the developments in Lebanon:

CNN reports that the Lebanese Army has taken positions around the Syrian intelligence headquarters in Beirut, an ominous development in the Cedar Revolution.

This could mean one of two things. It could mean that the Lebanese Army plans on protecting Syrian intelligence assets as the Syrian Army pulls out, a scenario that appears most likely given the close nature of the Syrian and Lebanese military up to this point. It could, however, also mean that the Lebanese Army has decided to impose its own will on the Syrians to up the pressure on Bashar Assad to not only withdraw all of its army but their spies as well.

If the former is the case, the demonstrators in the streets of Beirut should redouble their peaceful efforts to remove the last vestiges of the collaborationist government and elect new leaders as soon as possible. They need to know if the Army can be trusted not to start taking orders from Syria's Mukhabarat and attempt a military coup to put Assad back in the driver's seat by proxy.

On the other hand, if this move by the Lebanese Army demonstrates that they intend to throw in with the Cedar Revolution, Assad and his Mukhabarat are finished, and not just in Lebanon. Getting chased out of Beirut in three weeks by a few thousand civilians and the Lebanese Army will destroy any credibility Assad has left, including domestically, leaving him vulnerable to enemies across the spectrum of Syrian and Arabian politics. There won't be any more talk of a pullback or phased withdrawal - the Syrians will have to retreat, and retreat quickly, in order to avoid a military clash that would threaten to bring in the Americans from the east and possibly the French from the west, over the Mediterranean.

Either way, the situation has just about reached critical mass in Beirut. The rest of the weekend should provide some answers.

Let's hope that the Lebanese army has had its fill of its Syrian masters and are signaling that they've overstayed their welcome. A Syrian retreat in Lebanon will reverberate across the entire Arab world, giving oppressed people throughout the region genuine hope that they too can breathe free.

We bet that Osama never envisioned the magnitude of the fallout he was bringing upon the Islamic world when he was planning his attack on a couple of American skyscrapers.

Well-Qualified for Axis of Evil Status

If you've ever wondered why George Bush lists North Korea as part of the Axis of Evil check out this report from the U.S. Commission on Human Rights in North Korea. Following is just a small portion of the total report:

There are between 5,000 and 50,000 prisoners per kwan-li-so (prison compound), totaling perhaps some 150,000 to 200,000 prisoners throughout North Korea. Both perceived wrongdoers and up to three generations of their extended families are "arrested," or, more accurately, abducted by police authorities and deposited in the kwan-li-so, without any judicial process or legal recourse whatsoever, for lifetime sentences of extremely hard labor in mining, timber-cutting, or farming enterprises. The prisoners live under brutal conditions in permanent situations of deliberately contrived semi-starvation.

The encampments include self-contained, closed "village" compounds for single persons, usually the alleged wrongdoers, and other closed, fenced-in "villages" for the extended families of the wrongdoers. Some of the camps are divided into sections called wan-jeon-tong-je-kyuk (total-control zones), where the sentences are lifetime, and sections called hyuk-myung- hwa-kyuk (best translated as "revolutionizing zones"), so-called "re-education" areas from which prisoners eventually can be released. In the total-control zones, if the families are together, only privileged prisoners are allowed to marry and have children.

With the only known exception of Camp No. 18, prisoners have no correspondence or contact with the world outside the political penal-labor colony, except for news provided by newly arriving prisoners. The kwan-li-so are also sometimes referred to as teuk-byeol- dok-je-dae-sang-gu-yeok, which translates as "zones under special dictatorship." The most strikingly abnormal feature of the kwan-li-so system is the philosophy of "collective responsibility," or "guilt by association" - yeon-jwa-je - whereby the mother and father, sisters and brothers, children and sometimes grandchildren of the offending political prisoner are imprisoned in a three-generation practice.

[P]risoners are not arrested, charged (that is, told of their offense), or tried in any sort judicial procedure, where they would have a chance to confront their accusers or offer a defense with or even without benefit of legal counsel. The presumed offender is simply picked up and taken to an interrogation facility and frequently tortured to "confess" before being sent to the political penal-labor colony. The family members are also just picked up and deposited at the kwan-li-so, without ever being told of the whereabouts or wrongdoings of the presumed wrongdoer.

The most salient feature of day-to-day prison-labor camp life is the combination of below-subsistence food rations and extremely hard labor. Prisoners are provided only enough food to be kept perpetually on the verge of starvation. And prisoners are compelled by their hunger to eat, if they can get away with it, the food of the labor-camp farm animals, plants, grasses, bark, rats, snakes - anything remotely edible.

Persons who try to escape and other major rule-breakers are publicly executed by hanging or firing squad in front of the assembled prisoners of that section of the camp.

Former prisoners - mostly those from the "revolutionizing zone," at Kwan-li-so No. 15 Yodok - and former prison guards report that upon arrival, they were struck by the shortness, skinniness, premature aging, hunchbacks, and physical deformities of so many of the prisoners. They also report that there were large numbers of amputees and persons disabled from work accidents, and persons with partial amputations owing to frostbite of the toes, feet, fingers, and hands.

The report goes on to say that these conditions go back to the 1950s, and that most of the prisoners receiving the harshest treatment are political opponents of the regime.

Of course, these atrocious conditions are ignored by the Left around the world. They are perfectly content to pretend that they don't exist while working themselves into a lather over Americans photographing humiliated Iraqi terrorists at Abu Ghraib and shackling other terrorists at Guantanamo. We can imagine what they would say if they took the trouble to read this report:

"If one wishes to see real abuse one need only look at the Americans who use methods like sleep deprivation and sexual insults, for heaven's sake. They actually threaten people sometimes and, if you can imagine it, deny them access to their Korans if they misbehave. Before we condemn the North Koreans for their unfortunate system we better first remove the log from our own eye." And so on.

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for the tip.

New Radiation Detector

Wretchard at Belmont Club tips us to an an article in the Chicago Tribune that describes a new device developed by scientists at Los Alamos to detect fissile material in shipping containers and vehicles. Use of the detector would take only twenty seconds per shipping container or truck, and it is expected to go into production this summer at a cost of one million dollars per unit. We expect they'll have trouble keeping up with demand.

The Tribune article includes a description of how the detector works as well as some other pertinent information.

The Iraqi Security Situation

Strategy Page offers some insight into how a suicide bomber was able to get a car close enough to a crowd of police recruits to kill 125 of them last week.

Vive La Revolutione

Michael Ledeen gives us a good lesson in the recent history of democratic revolutions and urges that we pick up the pace:

It was the beginning of the Age of the Second Democratic Revolution. Spain inspired Portugal, and the second Iberian dictatorship gave way to democracy. Spain and Portugal inspired all of Latin America, and by the time Ronald Reagan left office there were only two unelected governments south of the Rio Grande: Cuba and Surinam. These successful revolutions inspired the Soviet satellites, and then the Soviet Union itself, and the global democratic revolution reached into Africa and Asia, even threatening the tyrants in Beijing.

The United States played a largely positive role in almost all these revolutions, thanks to a visionary president - Ronald Reagan - and a generation of other revolutionary leaders in the West: Walesa, Havel, Thatcher, John Paul II, Bukovsky, Sharansky, among others.

There was then a pause for a dozen years, first during the presidency of Bush the Elder, who surrounded himself with short-sighted self-proclaimed "realists" and boasted of his lack of "the vision thing," and then the reactionary Clinton years, featuring a female secretary of state who danced with dictators. Having led a global democratic revolution, and won the Cold War, the United States walked away from that revolution. We were shocked into resuming our unfinished mission by the Islamofascists, eight months into George W. Bush's first term, and we have been pursuing that mission ever since.

[T]he defeats of the fanatics in Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by free elections in both countries, destroyed two myths: of the inevitability of tyranny in the Muslim world, and of the divinely guaranteed success of the jihad. Once those myths were shattered, others in the region lost their fear of the tyrants, and they are now risking a direct challenge. The Cedar Revolution in Beirut has now toppled Syria's puppets in Lebanon, and I will be surprised and disappointed if we do not start hearing from democratic revolutionaries inside Syria - echoed from their counterparts in Iran - in the near future.

For anyone to suggest to this president at this dramatic moment, that he should offer a reward to Iran for promising not to build atomic bombs, or that we should seek a diplomatic "solution" to Syria's oft-demonstrated role in the terror war against our friends and our soldiers, is a betrayal of his vision and of the Iranian, Israeli, Lebanese and Syrian people.

Our most lethal weapon against the tyrants is freedom, and it is now spreading on the wings of democratic revolution. It would be tragic if we backed off now, when revolution is gathering momentum for a glorious victory.

These are exciting times, but we must not lose sight of the fact that success is far from assured. It will take perseverance and steady resolve to carry us through the inevitable setbacks ahead. Yet who can doubt the rightness of the cause? Who can seriously argue that we should give up, turn around, and go home, that a free and democratic Middle East and a severely truncated terrorist threat is not worth the cost? Who can today insist that our intervention, as clumsy as some aspects of it may have been, was a mistake?

If things fall apart, of course, then there will be recriminations aplenty, but if freedom really is "on the march" and if down the road Iran and Syria become true democracies at relative peace with their neighbors, the Bush administration, despite its mistakes, is going to go down as the most visionary, the greatest, administration in the history of this country.

Snare and Delusion in the Middle East

The more things change with the Palestinians the more they stay the same. This article in the Jerusalem Post suggests that everything in the Middle-East is back very nearly to square one. Syria and Iran are sponsoring the murders of Israelis, and the PLO isn't inclined to do much about it:

Delegations from the Israeli defense establishment embarked Monday to Washington, Paris and London, in order to present intelligence information which Israel has collected against Syria revealing its role in the deadly bombing in Tel Aviv Friday night, which killed five people.

Israel said Sunday that it would use intelligence information to prove Syria was behind Friday night's suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told the cabinet Sunday.

"We have intelligence information that the orders came from the Islamic Jihad in Syria," a senior source close to Sharon said. "We know where the orders for the attack were issued, we know where they were sent, and we know Syrian intelligence was involved and provided logistical support."

Mofaz told the cabinet that an Islamic Jihad cell in Jenin recruited the bomber from Tulkarm under orders from Damascus. Mofaz said that Israel had arrested Islamic Jihad operatives in Tulkarm, but both Mofaz and Sharon emphasized that the PA had taken no action yet against the group, even though Israel had given the PA names of wanted Islamic Jihad operatives.

"Although we know for a certainty that the orders came from Islamic Jihad elements in Syria, that fact is not enough to absolve the PA of its responsibility for the departure of the terrorist and of its obligation to act against his partners in the crime," Sharon said.

Sharon told US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday that Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas had not taken any practical measures against terror. He said that without active steps on the part of the Palestinians, there would be no transition towards implementing the first stage of the road map.

Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) chief Avi Dichter told the cabinet that the timing of the attack was set by Islamic Jihad officials in Syria to send a message to Abbas's new government. He said intelligence officials had enough information about the bombing even to know where the bomb was made.

In pointing a finger at Islamic Jihad, Israeli security officials noted that the movement receives millions of dollars from Iran. "The headquarters in Damascus sends instructions to operatives in the West Bank regarding the type of attack and how it should be planned. Local operatives then begin preparing the explosives and plot the route and recruit the suicide bomber who will carry out the mission. The entire operation from beginning to end is funded by Iran," an official said.

So much for the hope that somehow now that Arafat is gone things would be different for the Palestinians and Israelis. The only way genuine change will occur in the Middle-East is if the tyrannical regimes in Syria and Iran are overthrown and replaced by functioning democracies. The end of the Baathists in Damascus and the mullacracy in Tehran is a necessary condition for peace in the region, and it's the only hope for both the Israelis and the Palestinians. Everything and anything else is simply a snare and a delusion.

Bush and Putin at Bratislava

David Adesnik at Oxblog has a good analysis of what was going on between Bush and Putin in Bratislava the other week. A lot of commentators said that Bush buckled under to Putin on the matter of Putin's indifference to democratic principles in Russia. I like Adesnik's take, however:

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED AT BRATISLAVA? As I mentioned yesterday, America's top journalists are having a hard time figuring out what the Bush-Putin press conference was really all about. One interpretation of the event I didn't mention was that of the WaPo editorial board, which lambasted President Bush for knuckling under to a liar and a thug like Putin.

In general, I am quite sympathetic to anyone who insists that Putin is a liar and a thug and that America should start getting tough with Moscow. Moreover, I have had harsh words in the past for both the WaPo and for our president when they seemed to go soft on the Russian president. In fact, given my unrepentant criticism in the past of both Bush and the WaPo, I think I have the credibility this time around to say that Bush did a superb job at Bratislava and that the WaPo's good intentions have resulted in some very poor analysis. The WaPo observes that:

Lauding the Russian ruler as a man who means what he says, Mr. Bush declared that "the most important statement . . . was the [Russian]president's statement when he declared his absolute support for democracy in Russia."

The problem, as Mr. Bush should know, is that nearly the opposite is true. The record shows that Mr. Putin has reversed Russia's progress toward democracy in almost every respect while consistently distorting that record.

No question that Putin is an unrepentant liar and an emerging dictator. But I think the Post misunderstands what President Bush was trying to achieve. This was his first meeting with Putin after an inaugural address that committed the United States to an unmitigated policy of global democracy promotion. Thus, W. wasn't going to demand an abject (and highly public) surrender from the Russian thug. Rather, he wanted to feel him out and make clear on a very personal level that he, Bush, cares a lot about democracy promotion. From where I stand, the crucial statement from Bush was this:

I think the most important statement that you heard, and I heard, was the President's [Putin's] statement, when he declared his absolute support for democracy in Russia, and they're not turning back. To me, that is the most important statement of my private meeting, and it's the most important statement of this public press conference. And I can tell you what it's like dealing with the man over the last four years: When he tells you something, he means it.

By itself, that last sentence is absurd. When Putin's tells you and I something, he is probably lying through his teeth. But Putin is smart enough to know that he can't constantly lie to Bush and get away with it. He can lie to the Russian public and to the American public without consequences. But every gangster knows better than to f*** with the godfather.

Like Reagan, Bush has a very personal diplomatic style. Again like Reagan, Bush pretty much speaks his mind, both on the record and off. Thus, when Bush says that Putin made a serious commitment to democracy at a private meeting with the President of the United States of America, that is exactly what Bush means. He has put Putin on the record and expects him to live up to his word, the same way that Bush lives up to his.

....Bush...got Putin to concede that:

We are not going to make up - to invent any kind of special Russian democracy; we are going to remain committed to the fundamental principles of democracy that have been established in the world. But, of course, all the modern institutions of democracy - the principles of democracy should be adequate to the current status of the development of Russia, to our history and our traditions.

Putin has...acknowledged that democracy has a universal essence. What matters isn't whether Putin really believes this. What matters is that he told it to the President of the United States, who will be very angry if Putin goes back on his word.

For the reasons given above, I think Bush did a superb job at Bratislava. Now comes the hard part. For the first time, however, I am confident that Bush really understands what is at stake in Moscow.

Adesnik's take on the press conference makes far more sense to us than the commentary we read and heard last week to the effect that George Bush, who hasn't flinched from much of anything in the years he's been president, caved to Vladimir Putin. It's much more likely that he was very diplomatically telling Putin that the whole world now knows what he has committed to. It pretty much locks him in to it, at least psychologically, and makes him look very bad if he reneges.

Don't Ask Why

In a post a few days ago titled Skewering Academic Feminists we had written that it is distressing that so many students, particularly females, take umbrage when their views are challenged or when they're asked to support them with reasons. We noted that:

"It is not the tone or the demeanor that puts them off, mind you. It is the insistence that they be able to state the reasons behind their opinions, the premises supporting their conclusions, that makes them uncomfortable. In their view, all opinions should be respected and accepted, and to question their claims is to make them feel almost like they have been personally assaulted. It would be amusing were it not so sad."

A reader e-mailed to share his thoughts on this phenomenon. Adam C. writes:

I think there is in many cases another explanation for which their feeling that all opinions should be respected is a symptom. That is they have no awareness of their premises or of the origins and connections of their thoughts with a larger, historical, body of ideas.

In short, they say all opinions should be equally respected because they are ignorant of the history of ideas.

They feel assaulted because they feel, but do not comprehend, the shame and humiliation of not being masters of their own thoughts. If they understood, they could, and would, do something about it. As it is, they feel assaulted and strike back.

There's a lot to what Adam says. Ignorance of intellectual history deprives us of an awareness of the best that has been thought and written so we are oblivious to how banal, or insightful, our opinions are relative to the conclusions of those who have thought most deeply about things. Students who lack this intellectual reference point have no way to judge the worth of their opinions nor do they understand that good opinions are often the product of a kind of Darwinian selection that involves testing and challenge.

This lack of understanding leaves us susceptible to the attitude that as long as I feel strongly about an idea it is valuable in its own right. My idea is respectable simply by virtue of its being mine. For a teacher to challenge my opinions on politics or morality or whatever, is like challenging my opinion of my boyfriend or girlfriend - it's somehow impolite, disrespectful, and offensive.

No doubt this is partly a by-product of the relativization or subjectivization of truth. When truth is seen as a matter of personal affinity, when it's regarded as solely a matter of one's personal perspective, then challenging or questioning it is an odd thing for an instructor to do. It's like questioning someone's taste in ice cream flavors or the color they chose for their new car.

So it is unfortunate but unsurprising that students get a little miffed and flustered when they're asked to explain why they believe what they believe. Their opinions are based less upon reasons and more upon feelings that they can't easily articulate or explain. To ask them for reasons why they believe what they do is like asking them why they like chocolate ice cream more than vanilla. There's no satisfying way for them to answer other than to say that they just do.

The Damascus Road on 9/11

Little Green Footballs tips us to this outstanding essay by a Bay Area writer named Cinnamon Stillwell who eloquently describes her political conversion from Left/liberal Naderite to conservative Republican. Her story is captivating and we copy it here in its entirety:

As one of a handful of Bay Area conservative columnists, I'm no stranger to pushing buttons. Indeed, I welcome feedback from readers, whether positive or negative. I find the interplay stimulating, but I am often bemused by the stereotypical assumptions made by my critics on the left. It's not enough to simply disagree with my views; I have to be twisted into a conservative caricature that apparently makes opponents feel superior. They seem not to have considered that it's possible to put forward different approaches to various societal problems and not be the devil incarnate.

But in some ways I understand where this perspective comes from, because I once shared it. I was raised in liberal Marin County, and my first name (which garners more comments than anything else) is a direct product of the hippie generation. Growing up, I bought into the prevailing liberal wisdom of my surroundings because I didn't know anything else. I wrote off all Republicans as ignorant, intolerant yahoos. It didn't matter that I knew none personally; it was simply de rigueur to look down on such people. The fact that I was being a bigot never occurred to me, because I was certain that I inhabited the moral high ground.

Having been indoctrinated in the post-colonialist, self-loathing school of multiculturalism, I thought America was the root of all evil in the world. Its democratic form of government and capitalist economic system was nothing more than a machine in which citizens were forced to be cogs. I put aside the nagging question of why so many people all over the world risk their lives to come to the United States. Freedom of speech, religious freedom, women's rights, gay rights (yes, even without same-sex marriage), social and economic mobility, relative racial harmony and democracy itself were all taken for granted in my narrow, insulated world view.

So, what happened to change all that? In a nutshell, 9/11. The terrorist attacks on this country were not only an act of war but also a crime against humanity. It seemed glaringly obvious to me at the time, and it still does today. But the reaction of my former comrades on the left bespoke a different perspective. The day after the attacks, I dragged myself into work, still in a state of shock, and the first thing I heard was one of my co-workers bellowing triumphantly, "Bush got his war!" There was little sympathy for the victims of this horrific attack, only an irrational hatred for their own country.

As I spent months grieving the losses, others around me wrapped themselves in the comfortable shell of cynicism and acted as if nothing had changed. I soon began to recognize in them an inability to view America or its people as victims, born of years of indoctrination in which we were always presented as the bad guys.

Never mind that every country in the world acts in its own self-interest, forms alliances with unsavory countries -- some of which change later -- and are forced to act militarily at times. America was singled out as the sole guilty party on the globe. I, on the other hand, for the first time in my life, had come to truly appreciate my country and all that it encompassed, as well as the bravery and sacrifices of those who fight to protect it.

Thoroughly disgusted by the behavior of those on the left, I began to look elsewhere for support. To my astonishment, I found that the only voices that seemed to me to be intellectually and morally honest were on the right. Suddenly, I was listening to conservative talk-show hosts on the radio and reading conservative columnists, and they were making sense. When I actually met conservatives, I discovered that they did not at all embody the stereotypes with which I'd been inculcated as a liberal.

Although my initial agreement with voices on the right centered on the war on terrorism, I began to find myself in concurrence with other aspects of conservative political philosophy as well. Smaller government, traditional societal structures, respect and reverence for life, the importance of family, personal responsibility, national unity over identity politics and the benefits of living in a meritocracy all became important to me. In truth, it turns out I was already conservative on many of these subjects but had never been willing to admit as much.

In my search for like-minded individuals, I also gravitated toward the religiously observant. This was somewhat revolutionary, considering my former liberal discomfort with religious folk, but I found myself in agreement on a number of issues. When it came to support for Israel, Orthodox Jews and Christian Zionists were natural allies. As the left rained down vicious attacks on Israel, commentators on the right (with the exception of Pat Buchanan and his ilk) became staunch supporters of the nation. The fact that I'm not a particularly religious person myself had little bearing on this political relationship, for it's entirely possible to be secular and not be antireligious. Unlike the secular fundamentalists who make it their mission in life to destroy all vestiges of America's Judeo-Christian heritage, I have come to value this legacy.

So I became what's now commonly known as a "9/11 Republican." Living in a time of war, disenchanted with the left and disappointed with the obstructionism and lack of vision of the Democratic Party, I threw in my hat with the only party that seemed to be offering solutions, rather than simply tearing away at our country. I went from voting for Ralph Nader in 2000 to proudly casting my ballot for George W. Bush in 2004. This doesn't necessarily mean that I agree with Bush on every issue, but there is enough common ground to support his party overall. In the wake of this political transformation, I discovered that I was not alone. It turned out that there are other 9/11 Republicans out there, both in the Bay Area and beyond, and they have been coming out of the woodwork.

Like many a political convert, I took it on myself to openly oppose the politics of those with which I once shared world views. Beyond writing, I put myself on the front lines of this ideological battle by taking part in counterprotests at the antiwar rallies leading up to the war in Iraq. This turned out to be a further wake-up call, because it was there that I encountered more intolerance than ever before in my life. Holding pro-Iraq-liberation signs and American flags, I was spat on, called names, intimidated, threatened, attacked, cursed and, on a good day, simply argued with. It was clear that any deviation from the prevailing leftist groupthink of the Bay Area was considered a threat to be eliminated as quickly as possible.

It was at such protests that I also had my first real brushes with anti-Semitism. The anti-Israel sentiment on the left -- inexorably linked to anti-Americanism -- ran high at these events and boiled over into Jew hatred on more than one occasion. The pro-Palestinian sympathies of the left had led to a bizarre commingling of pacifism, Communism and Arab nationalism. So it was not uncommon to see kaffiyeh-clad college students chanting Hamas slogans, graying hippies wearing "Intifada" T-shirts, Che Guevera backpacks, and signs equating Zionism with Nazism, all against a backdrop of peace, patchouli and tie-dye.

Being unapologetically pro-Israel, I was called every name in the book, from "Zionist pig" to "Zionist scum," and was once told that those with European origins such as myself couldn't really be Jewish. In the end, the blatant anti-Semitism on the left, even among Jews, only strengthened my political transformation. I was, in effect, radicalized by the radicals.

But more than anything, it was the left's hypocrisy when it came to the war on terrorism that made me turn rightward after 9/11. I remember, back in my liberal days, being fiercely opposed to the Taliban and its brutal treatment of women. Even then, I felt that Afghanistan should immediately be liberated, as Malcolm X once said in another context, by any means necessary. But when it came time, it turned out that the left was mostly opposed to such liberation, whether of the Afghan people or of the Iraqis (especially if America and a Republican president were at the helm).

Indeed, liberals had become strangely conservative in their fierce attachment to the status quo. In contrast, the much-maligned neoconservatives (among whose ranks I count myself) and Bush had become the "radicals," bringing freedom and democracy to the despotic Middle East. Is it any wonder that in such a topsy-turvy world, I found myself in agreement with those I'd formerly denounced?

The war on terrorism is nothing more than the great struggle of our time, and, like the earlier ones against fascism and totalitarianism, we ignore it at our peril. Whether or not one accepts that we are engaged in a war, our enemies have declared it so. It took the horrors of 9/11 to awaken me to this reality, but for others, such lessons remain unlearned. For me, it was self-evident that in Islamic terrorism, America had found a nihilistic threat that sought to wipe out not only Western civilization but also civilization itself.

The Islamists have been clear all along about their plans to form an Islamic caliphate and inhabit the entire world with burqas, stonings, amputations, honor killings and a lack of religious and political freedom. Whether or not to oppose such a movement should have been a no-brainer, especially for self-proclaimed "progressives." Instead, they have extended their misguided sympathies to tyrants and terrorists.

In the end, history will be the judge, and each of us will have to think about what legacy we wish to leave to future generations. If there's one thing I've learned since 9/11, it's that it's never too late to alter one's place in the great scheme of things.

The only question we have is what is it that motivates those who have treated her so shabbily? What kind of people are they?

Cheney in '08

For the past several months I've been telling anyone who would listen (an audience made up mostly of house pets and young grandchildren) that I thought the best candidate the Republicans could offer for the presidency in 2008 is Dick Cheney. I know, I know, he doesn't want it. All the more reason to urge him to accept. As Plato writes in his Republic anyone who actually wants the job should be suspected of base motives. Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard agrees:

As professions of lack of interest in the presidency go, Cheney's is unusually strong. Yet there's every reason he should change his mind. He's not too old. President Reagan was 69 when he took office. Despite past heart trouble, Cheney hasn't had a serious health problem for years. Besides, his health has nothing to do with his refusal to consider running in 2008. He's an experienced candidate at the national level and an effective debater with a wry sense of humor.

But there's a larger reason Cheney should seek to succeed Bush. In all likelihood, the 2008 election, like last year's contest, will focus on foreign policy. The war on terror, national security, and the struggle for democracy will probably dominate American politics for a decade or more. Bush's legacy, or at least part of it, will be to have returned these issues to a position of paramount concern for future presidents. And who is best qualified to pursue that agenda as knowledgeably and aggressively as Bush? The answer is the person who helped Bush formulate it, namely Cheney.

Cheney should not commit to run, in our view, but the party should ask him, behind the scenes, to be its candidate in the event no one else of comparable consequence emerges. Right now, no one on the Republican horizon has the star power, expertise, credibility, and "gravitas" (forgive me) that Cheney has. He would be a shoo-in for the nomination, and perhaps best of all, a Cheney candidacy would drive the Left to stratospheric altitudes of hate-inspired insanity and heretofore unplumbed depths of political depravity. It would be great fun to watch.