The Center For Naturalism

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost informs us of a new web site devoted to the metaphysical belief system called naturalism and offers a rollicking critique of it.

Naturalism is a comprehensive view of life and the world that says that nature is all there is. There's nothing beyond the natural realm, and all phenomena have explanations rooted in the laws of physics. Naturalism is atheistic and materialistic, that is to say it holds that everything can be reduced to matter and its equivalent forms (e.g. energy).

Such a philosophy allows no room for free-will, a soul, or life after death and denies as well the existence of any transcendent God.

The new web site, called the Center For Naturalism (CFN), seeks to clarify and promote the claims of naturalism and to tease out their implications for modern man.

In tracing these implications the CFN folks try hard to avoid contradicting themselves, but in my opinion they're unsuccessful. Their treatment of free-will and determinism is an example. They strongly and repeatedly reject the notion that man has the ability to choose in a way that makes him morally responsible for his choices.

An individual has free will if at any given existential moment there exists for this person at least two possible outcomes or futures. The naturalist denies that this kind of freedom exists and adopts instead a hard determinism that asserts that at any given moment there is really only one possible future, the future that has been preset by our genetics and the totality of extraneous influences which have acted upon us throughout our existence.

On the page which discusses the tenets of naturalism CFN says this:

[I]ndividuals don't bear originative responsibility for their actions, in the sense of being their first cause. Given the circumstances both inside and outside the body, they couldn't have done other than what they did.

If this is true, if no one can act otherwise than how they do act, then we are no more responsible for our behavior, which is determined by factors over which we have no control, than is a sufferer of Tourette's syndrome responsible for his uncontrollable outbursts. This seems an inescapable consequence of the naturalists' determinism, but then they say:

Nevertheless, we still hold individuals responsible, in the sense of applying rewards and sanctions, so that their behavior stays more or less within the range of what we deem acceptable. This is how people learn to act ethically.

This is double talk. They're using the language of responsibility and reward and punishment (they eschew the word punishment in favor of sanctions, but it amounts to the same thing) to give the impression that they don't really absolve people of their behavior simply because they didn't ultimately choose their actions. Yet these terms only make sense, in the determinist context, as conditioners of behavior.

CFN is not actually endorsing reward or punishment, in fact they cannot, because such words connote merit. Rather they are endorsing the use of pleasant and unpleasant reinforcers to train us like seals to do whatever our societal masters deem to be acceptable. If someone cannot respond in ways pleasing to the conditioners he or she bears no genuine responsibility for that failure, and it is disingenuous for CFN to imply that they believe they do:

Naturalism doesn't undermine the need or possibility of responsibility and morality, but it places them within the world as understood by science.

This claim is almost certainly false. The naturalistic determinism CFN promotes does indeed make morality impossible. Moral behavior is based on the notion that a person ought or should do some things rather than others. If, however, a person can only do whatever it is that she does, if there really is no genuine option available to her, as the naturalistic determinist insists, then there can be no genuine moral choices. Morality does not exist, can not exist, in a purely deterministic world any more than personal responsibility exists.

However, naturalism does call into question the basis for retributive attitudes, namely the idea that individuals could have done otherwise in the situation in which their behavior arose.

This assertion makes it clear that in CFN's opinion no one deserves punishment (or reward) as a consequence of his actions because he could not have done other than what he did. If this is so, however, then there can be no personal responsibility and no morality. There are just things that people do, some of which we like and some of which we don't, but our liking them or disliking them does not make them right or wrong, good or evil.

The irony of CFN's above claim is that if someone did mete out retributive punishment to another he would not be wrong in so doing since he couldn't have done otherwise. If society thinks retributive punishment is just fine, the determinist can't say that society is wrong because society has been shaped by forces outside it's control to think retribution is proper, and CFN has been shaped by forces beyond its control to think that it is improper. If determinism is true then whether punishment actually is wrong in any objective sense is unknowable and meaningless.

Naturalists seek to rid the world of belief in a transcendent moral authority and still hold on to benefits which are possible only if that authority exists. The fact is, as Nietzsche and others have clearly seen for over a century now, that if God is dead there really is no freedom, no moral responsibility, and no morality.

The CFN web site raises other important philosophical questions, some of which we'll take up in future posts. Meanwhile, interested readers might want to visit Evangelical Outpost to read what Carter has to say about it.

Oil and the Dollar

John Tamny at National Review Online talks about why oil prices are so high. He notes that the price is a function not only of increased demand but even more importantly, the falling value of the dollar. Since the barrel price of oil is pegged to the dollar, oil producers' profits suffer when the value of the dollar sags. In order to keep their profit margins up as the worth of the dollar sinks, producers charge more for the oil they sell.

Tamny asserts that the problem actually began back in the 70's when President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard and set it afloat, a point that Bill () has emphasized in his posts here at Viewpoint on numerous occasions.

Tamney says:

Since oil is priced in dollars, it was only natural that the oil price rose substantially in the 1970s. Early in that decade, oil "shocks" were a U.S. phenomenon related to the Federal Reserve's failure to maintain dollar stability, and a world phenomenon to the extent that other currencies followed the dollar's inflationary descent.

The reason why oil producers were far more able to meet economic growth with supply between 1947 and 1967 has to do with the U.S. monetary regime at the time and the fact that the dollar was fixed at $35 an ounce of gold due to the Bretton Woods agreement.

Producers could drill for oil during the Bretton Woods era highly confident that they would receive $2.50 a barrel. As evidenced by the fluctuating oil price since 1971, the floating dollar has introduced major instability that made occasional shortages and gluts inevitable. Oil hit a low of $10 a barrel in 1998, and that low price goes far in explaining why today's price has risen across all currencies.

What is needed is a commitment on the part of the Greenspan Fed to dollar stability, ideally in terms of gold. A message like this would give oil producers the confidence to make up for any shortfalls with new supply. As economists Peter Huber and Mark Mills note in their latest book, The Bottomless Well, we're not running out of oil.

This last assertion is interesting. If it's true that shortfalls in oil availability are not the consequence of limited supply in the ground, then they're obviously the result of factors like manipulation of supply or, less insidiously, limited drilling or refining capabilities. We haven't built a new refinery in twenty years in this country, and we're told that our present capacity can't keep up with the demand. We might ask our profit besotted oil executives why they haven't plowed some of their enormous cash harvests from the last two decades back into production enhancement. Or is that a silly question?

Interesting Quote From WND

"The Bush brothers' refusal to prevent Terri's killing will do lasting political damage to them both," writes Wheeler. "As John Fund of the Wall Street Journal points out, if Janet Reno could override a court order and have Elian Gonzalez kidnapped at gunpoint to be returned to Communist Cuba, either Jeb or George Bush could have overridden Greer to save Terri's life. Her death will be an ineradicable stain on GW's presidency and Jeb's chances for the White House.

...

"If any good is to come of this tragedy it would be to catalyze the recognition among Americans that America is no longer a democracy," Wheeler explains. "It has become a krytocracy, a government of judges. We no longer have a government of, by and for the people. America today is ruled not by elected representatives, but unelected judges, governed not by law but by the arbitrary - and in the case of George Greer, homicidal - whims of people in black robes."

Draining the Swamps

According to the Middle East Media Research Institute Yemen has announced that in order to drain the swamps which breed Islamic extremists they intend to close down 20,000 religious schools which are not under government supervision.

On balance, in Yemen, and knowing what kind of hate-filled religious beliefs are often taught in these schools, this is no doubt a positive development, and one wishes Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries would do likewise. On the other hand, of course, we find ourselves uncomfortable applauding the general idea that government should supervise religious instruction.

Our discomfort raises some interesting questions. Will the first amendment right to freedom of religion only work in a predominantly Christian country? More concretely, has there ever been a non-Christian nation (or government) which genuinely guaranteed freedom of religion? Does Israel? Has any officially Muslim or atheistic government ever granted the freedom to worship and preach whatever religious belief we wished?

I confess I don't know the answers. Perhaps a reader might be able to edify us on the matter.

Racial Disparities in Public Schools

The New York Times has a fascinating account of the racial disparity between the percentages of students in upper and lower level classes in a New Jersey high school:

This is a reality at many high schools coast to coast and one of the side effects of aggressive leveling, the increasingly popular practice of dividing students into ability groups.

I'm not sure what the Times means here by "increasingly popular". I'll bet everyone reading this attended a high school where college-bound students took more intellectually demanding courses than students who were on other tracks. School curricula have been structured this way at least since the 1950's. Even so, this is a minor quibble.

But at Columbia High, the students nearly revolted. Two weeks ago, a black organization on campus planned a walkout to protest the leveling system. Word soon spread to the principal, who pleaded with the students not to go. The student leaders decided to hold an assembly instead, in which they lashed out at the racial gap.

Were the students complaining that some of their classmates are not as bright as others? Exactly what is it about leveling that these students find so intolerable? If there's a racial gap why is that the fault of class levels or of the school?

The student uproar is now forcing district officials to take a hard look at the leveling system and decide how to strike a balance between their two main goals - celebrating diversity and pushing academic achievement.

Of course. If minority students are disproportionately represented in the lower level classes then an obvious solution to liberals is to do away with levels. We don't want students having their self-esteem damaged by being placed in the dunderhead classes, even if they really are dunderheads. Better to diminish the quality of education available to all students than to have some students fall hopelessly behind. Let's celebrate our diversity, not strive for academic excellence.

The superintendent of the district, Peter P. Horoschak, acknowledged that there were, in a sense, two Columbias. The de facto segregation is most visible at the extremes. Statistics for this year show that while a Level 5 math class, the highest, had 79 percent white students, a Level 2 math class, the lowest, had 88 percent black students. Levels 3 and 4 tend to be more mixed, though a school board member, Mila M. Jasey, said, "Some white parents tell me that they know their kid belongs in a Level 3 class but they don't want them to be the only white kid in the class."

The flashpoint of the assembly came when Nathan Winkler, a skinny, intense senior who says he wants to be governor some day, grabbed the microphone and announced that he had no sympathy for people in lower levels because all it took was hard work to move up.

His short outburst was like a cleaver, splitting the student body in two. Many blacks booed him. Many whites cheered. He was then accused of using the term "you people" in his speech - though he did not, according to a videotape of the assembly. After the assembly, he said, he was stalked in the hallways.

"I felt extremely isolated during that assembly," he said. "For the first time I was aware of being part of the minority. White kids are outnumbered at Columbia. I knew that, but I hadn't really felt it before."

Poor Nathan. He has the temerity to tell the minority students, who are in fact the majority, that they have every opportunity to improve their academic status through dint of hard work, and he's booed. Indeed, why should they work harder if they can just pressure the administration to get rid of levels? Mr. Winkler so offended the academic malingerers by his suggestion that they actually try studying and doing homework that they were sure he referred to them by the insufferably crushing epithet "you people", and in good "can't-we-all-just-get-along" fashion, sought to intimidate him in the halls.

The debate over leveling here boils down to fairness. Is it fair just to ensure equal access to upper level classes? Or does fairness go farther than that and require administrators to truly level the playing field so that the racial makeup of upper classes better resembles the racial makeup of the school?

Simply to ask the question is to know the answer. Fairness has nothing to do with equal access, it's all about equal outcomes. Critics of academic levels assume that if kids of one race can't compete with kids of another then the system is unfair and needs to be changed. I wonder if these critics think the school should apply the same principle to their basketball program.

"She's got an entire black population that wants to get rid of the leveling system and an entire white population who would leave this town if they did that," he said. "What's she supposed to do?"

What she's supposed to do is to tell those who want to get rid of the levels that their suggestion is so dopey that it could only have originated among people who spent their own high school years wallowing in classes that an average third grader could master.

It is astounding that actually watering down the more difficult courses is a live option at Columbia. The African-American students seem to be of the view that it is an affront to them that courses are offered which other groups seem able to handle but which they can't. Their solution is to eliminate the disparity by eliminating the difficulty of the course.

All manner of hand-wringing goes on in the article about this situation - what's causing it and how to fix it. Throughout the piece everyone seems to dance around the possibility that the lower academic levels are populated by individuals who in fact actually belong there. This just seems unthinkable to some of the interviewees in the account yet it is almost certainly the case.

Students of whatever race who find themselves on the academic ground floor in most schools in this nation have demonstrated throughout their scholastic career that, as Mr. Winkler trenchantly observed, they are either unable or unwilling to do the work necessary to succeed in the more challenging classes.

The concern at Columbia, of course, is that the lower level students are disproportionately black and the tacit assumption is that they are victims of a subtle racism that assumes that they can't handle upper level work. I find this highly implausible. Had these students shown a scintilla of academic potential at anytime along their march through the lower grades they'd have been seized upon by administrators and teachers desperate for opportunities to tout academic success among their black student body, and they'd have been cultivated and nurtured like rare orchids.

The fact is that black students do poorly, to the extent that they do, not because their schools don't encourage them but because they often don't respond to the encouragement. Why they don't respond varies from student to student, but the reasons are generally an impoverished socio-economic status, a dysfunctional family life, a depauperate urban sub-culture, and inherent inability. Any of these by itself is a millstone around the neck of any student. Two of them together pretty much guarantees that that individual will spend his or her youth in the academic netherworld. It is an extraordinary individual that can overcome the disadvantages imposed by these handicaps, and most kids are not extraordinary. Unfortunately, many urban black kids are encumbered by at least two of them and their prospects for success in school are correspondingly dim.

They are often poor because their families are dysfunctional and their families are sometimes dysfunctional because they're poor. They often have only one parent, no father, and the harried mother simply can't, even if she is inclined, provide the environment for her children necessary for healthy intellectual growth and development.

Kids in the inner city often grow up feral, with too little effective discipline, few or no rules, and minds influenced by dysgenic role models from early on. Rarely encouraged to read until they get to pre-school, they adopt the fashions of the street which dictate that they dress like they're intentionally trying to look as stupid as possible, listen to mind-numbing, degenerate music, and adopt speech habits which render them at best marginally articulate. If a white child spoke as unintelligibly as many of our inner city youth he or she would be taken to a speech therapist.

This urban culture too easily accepts these detriments as well as the disastrous phenomenon of teenage unwed motherhood, which is a socio-economic death sentence for most children born into such a circumstance. The child begins life at a tremendous disadvantage, faced with almost insuperable odds, and, in most cases, manages only to fall further behind every year.

Moreover, the sort of aptitudes necessary to succeed in some academic disciplines don't seem to come easily to such children. Black communities have produced men and women of genius, but only rarely is that genius in fields requiring a mathematical turn of mind. Black students are often unsuited both intellectually and temperamentally for the rigors of math and get frustrated early on in their schooling by the fact that they seem to have to work so much harder than their classmates to understand it. Add to this the lack of effective parental expectations and control at home, and the wonder is not that there are so many black kids in the low levels, but that there are as many as there are in the higher levels.

Even though almost everyone who has had at least one eye open for the last thirty years recognizes these problems, it is nevertheless considered totally unacceptable to give voice to them in polite liberal society. Charles Murray was pilloried for suggesting a couple of decades ago in his book The Bell Curve that blacks may not have, on average, quite the same intellectual potential as other racial groups. Murray was practically drawn and quartered for this transgression of the bounds of tolerable opinion.

Liberals assume that if blacks are underrepresented in the more challenging academic settings they must be being discriminated against. They must be the victims of subtle forms of racism. It is the perennial liberal solution to all racial disparities, at least those which work to the detriment of blacks, to look under the bed for lurking racists. Anyone who offers a modest dissent from the orthodox dogma, is, like Nathan Winkler, booed and intimidated, or worse. It's much easier and much less painful to dilute the curriculum so that everyone can succeed rather than admit and confront the sociological causes of black academic failure.

For the sake of African-American children we need to stop playing feckless games with political correctness. We need to stop acting like the characters in the story The Emperor's New Clothes who all knew the emperor was naked but nevertheless clucked and chortled about how marvelous was his finery. We need to be able to speak frankly, like Bill Cosby has done, about the causes of black failure without being reflexively labeled a racist just because some of that frankness may make people feel uncomfortable or may insult their self-image. Until we do, a large percentage of American children will continue to languish in academic purgatory, continue to drop out of school as soon as they can, and continue to perpetuate the whole culture of failure for generations to come.

Nowhere to Run to

Al Qaida evidently blundered when it initiated terror operations in Saudi Arabia. It must have thought that the high density of Islamists and other sympathizers in the Saudi population would be moved by their boldness to rise up with them in revolt against the Royal family. That didn't happen. Instead it seems that many Saudi's, although sympathetic with al Qaida's aims of getting the United States out of Dar al Islam, resent al Qaida's means for accomplishing that goal.

Now al Qaida finds itself with fewer and fewer safe havens as this Strategy Page account of recent developments in Saudi Arabia makes clear. The Saudi's drew up a list of twenty six most wanted terrorists a couple of years ago. Only three remain at large.

Equilibrium Of A Global Economy

A global economy is a dream come true for multi-national corporations. It means they can acquire services and manufacturing from countries that offer the absolute lowest labor costs on the planet. The human rights and environmental issues that prevail in said countries never enter the picture.

There is, however, one significant implication of a global economy that everyone needs to be aware of. The standard of living among all participating countries will eventually and inevitably reach a point of equilibrium. That will happen simply because competition will force the income of those in the richer countries (the US in particular) to decline while the income of those in the emerging countries will rise.

Consider that if someone in the US earns $20 per hour to provide a service or manufacture a product and someone in China, India, or Mexico performs the same service or manufactures the same product for $1.00 per hour, the laws of economics indicate that the US worker will have to take a pay cut to deter the exportation of their job. At the same time, an increase in demand will cause the pay rate in the competing countries to increase. Eventually, all pay rates will stabilize a some point in between the two original rates. For instance the pay rate of the US worker may be $10.00 per hour and that of the worker in the competing country will end up at $10.00 per hour as well.

At that time, there would be little economic incentive to export more jobs to foreign countries but the damage will have already been done and there will be few decent jobs left in the US. The worker in the US that refuses to work for such compensation will find themselves unemployed while the worker in the foreign country will be more than happy to find such an opportunity.

Personally, I suspect I'll survive this impending disaster but the next generation that is coming into the job market will surely be totally decimated.

Mugged by la Rèalitè

The Weekly Standard has a riveting account by Olivier Guitta of a recent celebration of cultural diversity in Paris. It is the sort of celebration Europe is likely to see much more of in the years ahead:

FREDERIC ENCEL, PROFESSOR OF international relations at the prestigious Ecole Nationale d'Administration in Paris and a man not known for crying wolf, recently stated that France is becoming a new Lebanon. The implication, far-fetched though it may seem, was that civil upheaval might be no more than a few years off, sparked by growing ethnic and religious polarization. In recent weeks, a series of events has underlined this ominous trend.

On March 8, tens of thousands of high school students marched through central Paris to protest education reforms announced by the government. Repeatedly, peaceful demonstrators were attacked by bands of black and Arab youths--about 1,000 in all, according to police estimates. The eyewitness accounts of victims, teachers, and most interestingly the attackers themselves gathered by the left-wing daily Le Monde confirm the motivation: racism.

Some of the attackers openly expressed their hatred of "little French people." One 18-year-old named Heikel, a dual citizen of France and Tunisia, was proud of his actions. He explained that he had joined in just to "beat people up," especially "little Frenchmen who look like victims." He added with a satisfied smile that he had "a pleasant memory" of repeatedly kicking a student, already defenseless on the ground.

Another attacker explained the violence by saying that "little whites" don't know how to fight and "are afraid because they are cowards." Rachid, an Arab attacker, added that even an Arab can be considered a "little white" if he "has a French mindset." The general sentiment was a desire to take revenge on whites."

Sometimes petty theft appeared to be the initial motivation. One or two bullies would approach a student and ask for money or a cell phone. Even if the victim complied right away, they would start beating him or her. A striking account was provided by Luc Colpart, a history and geography teacher and member of the far-left union SUD. Colpart said the scenes of violence were so disturbing that he could not sleep for days. He saw students being beaten or pulled by the hair. He stressed that assailants who stole cell phones smashed them in front of their victims: "It was a game. Hatred and fun."

Colpart, who is active in anti-racist causes, confirmed that "these were racial assaults," and the attackers used "far-right slurs, violent and racist." One black student he saw come to the defense of a fellow student under attack by three blacks was called "a white sellout" by the assailants. Some scores of victims were taken to hospitals. Those who were interviewed confirmed that they had been caught up in an "anti-white" rampage and that the cops did nothing to protect them.

By coincidence, last week the French government's human rights commission delivered to Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin its 2004 report on racism and anti-Semitism in France. The report underscores a worrisome pattern of retreat into separate ethnic communities. And the evidence of hostility is sobering: The number of violent acts and threats nearly doubled, from 833 in 2003 to a record 1,565 in 2004. Of these, 62 percent were directed against Jews, who make up just 1 percent of France's population.

There's much more about this ugly episode and related matters at the link.

Such incidents as this are the consequence of pretending that we can all get along, despite our differences, if we're just sufficiently tolerant of the things which divide us. We delude ourselves into thinking that we can avoid Balkanization of Western societies if we just don't offend those who are different by chauvinistically celebrating the things that should unite us.

Unfortunately, a nation with too little confidence in the rightness of its values to insist that those who would dwell within its borders adopt those values will ultimately find itself unable to hold its disparate ethnic and religious factions together. It will eventually become an object of contempt in the eyes of those who see themselves as having no stake in that nation's history, traditions, or principles.

There's a profound lesson here for the United States.

The Mystery of Consciousness

The Philosopher's Magazine recently passed along this quote from Thomas Huxley:

How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinn when Aladdin rubbed his lamp, or any other ultimate fact of nature.

Indeed, and neuroscientists still marvel that something as astonishing as consciousness could be somehow generated by brute matter and could have evolved through purely mechanistic processes acting blindly and by chance.

How this could be so no one has as yet been able to say. Consciousness is a mystery, like life and gravity. It's hard enough to define it, it's devilishly difficult to understand it, and it seems impossible to explain it. How material substance can give rise to what philosophers refer to as the qualia of experience, sensation and awareness, is a bafflement.

Someday it might all be figured out, but we wonder whether it will ever be explicable in purely materialistic terms. We'll be greatly surprised if it is.

More On Social Security

From the inimitable Richard Russell...

On Tuesday President Bush visited the office of the Federal Bureau of Public Debt in Parkersburg, West Virginia. The Prez passed by a cabinet that contained the $1.7 trillion in Treasury securities that make up the so-called Social Security Trust Fund.

Later, in a speech at a nearby university, Mr. Bush announced, "There is no trust fund, just I.O.U.'s, that I saw first hand."

Yeah, Mr. President, we knew that. The government has spent all of the so-called Social Security trust fund, and in its place they have left a load of I.O.U.'s. But listen, Mr. President, the dollar itself is an I.O.U. In the good old days when the U.S. was solvent, a dollar was an I.O.U. which said the Treasury owed you one dollar's worth of gold. Today the dollar is a piece of paper that says a dollar owes you "nothing."

You don't believe it. Then try turning in your dollar to the Treasury and see what you get for it. What you'll get is another dollar with the slogan, "in God we trust." Hey, I already trust God. What I'm worried about is trusting my government.

What's wrong with that picture?

You and me have paid into Social Security all of our working lives only to have those dollars taken by our politicians spent on other programs that fulfilled their fancy. Now we hear that those dollars have been replaced by I.O.U.s of the federal government which means they will tax a future generation to make good on the debt. In other words, all that you and I have paid to Social Security has gone somewhere else. Our politicians have ripped us off. And the next generation will have to make good for it. Where is the outrage?

As long as people continue to support the present two-party system that is hell-bent on leading the American individual to a standard of living far below what currently exists, we will continue to have more of the same. Beyond a few issues, their isn't a dime's worth of difference between the two parties.

I have maintained for years that the two party system in this country is like a highway. The republicans are in the right (cruising) lane and the democrats are in the left (passing) lane. While the democrats may reach the destination before the republicans, the outcome will ultimately be the same. It doesn't really matter which lane you choose, the highway leads, inevitably, to an impoverished American society that will embrace total socialism with open arms.

To Your Health

Fox News has a couple of reports on nutrition that might be of interest.

The first is that researchers have found that pomegranate juice not only appears to prevent hardening of the arteries by reducing blood vessel damage, but the antioxidant-rich juice may also reverse the progression of this disease. So where can we get the stuff?

Another report discusses what are referred to as Superfoods. Salmon, trout and albacore tuna may reduce the risk of heart disease. So may olive oil, almonds, walnuts, Cheerios and Boca Burgers. See the article for more details.

Viewpoint is optimistic that researchers will soon discover that chocolate, potato chips, oreo cookies, and mayonnaise promote weight loss and lower cholesterol. In fact, I'm assuming that this is so and am celebrating the good news by just now eating the ears off of one of my daughter's chocolate Easter bunnies. I feel healthier already.

The Infamous Memo

PowerLine has what appears to be the full story on the infamous "talking points" memo to which Democrats are so fond of adverting and in which Republicans seem to be urged to exploit the Schiavo tragedy for political profit. It turns out that, contrary to what the Washington Post and ABC reported, the memo was not authored by Republican leaders and officials, but was the work of an aide to Republican senator Mel Martinez who has been serving in office for all of three months. Martinez is hardly a Republican heavyweight, much less is his aide, who, it turns out, has resigned. Nor was the memo distributed to other senators as the Post implied.

In other words, an obscure assistant exercised very poor judgment, and the Democrats and their media amplifiers seized upon it to tarnish the reputations of the Republican leadership by falsely accusing them of churlish behavior. They didn't know the truth, nor did they care about the truth, they simply saw an opportunity to exploit the Schiavo tragedy for their political profit (by lying about Republican officials' alleged insensitivity to Terri Schiavo's circumstances), and they grabbed it.

The details are at PowerLine.

Lock and Load

This article suggests that the Florida legislature is about to pass a measure guaranteed to raise the level of uncertainty, and anxiety, among its sizable population of thugs, criminals, and other miscreants:

MIAMI (AFP) - Florida's legislature has approved a bill that would give residents the right to open fire against anyone they perceive as a threat in public, instead of having to try to avoid a conflict as under prevailing law.

Outraged opponents say the law will encourage Floridians to open fire first and ask questions later, fostering a sort of statewide Wild West shootout mentality. Supporters argue that criminals will think twice if they believe they are likely to be promptly shot when they assault someone.

Republican Governor Jeb Bush, who has said he plans to sign the bill, says it is "a good, commonsense, anti-crime issue."

Current state law allows residents to "shoot to kill if their property, such as their home or car, is invaded by an unknown assailant." But it also states that if a resident is confronted or threatened in a public place, he or she must first try to avoid the confrontation or flee before taking any violent step in self defense against an assailant.

The bill, supported by the influential National Rifle Association, was approved by both houses of the Republican-run legislature on Tuesday.

Viewpoint agrees with Governor Bush. There was a time when I thought we needed more gun control, but that was long ago when I was young and dumber. As I examined the arguments for taking guns out of the hands of citizens I realized that they just didn't make much sense. They were emotional rather than rational. Gun crimes are rarely committed by those who are licensed to carry concealed weapons, but those who perpetrate violent crime would hardly scruple to observe laws which prohibited them from possessing, and using, guns. All that gun control would accomplish would be to assure criminals that their intended victims would not pose any threat to them.

The Florida bill takes the right of self-defense one step further and seems eminently sensible. Why should the burden fall upon the victim to avoid a criminal attack? Why should the streets be conceded to the brutes? Why must citizens cringe, cower, and flee the threats of thugs? Why should laws be such that they emasculate the law-abiding and empower the wicked?

Violent crime is a serious threat to civilization. A few intrepid acts of self-defense with a suitable weapon, preferably one whose caliber begins with a four, would have a salutary effect on Florida's recidivism rate and provide a powerful object lesson for those predators contemplating similar assaults on innocent life or property.

The law might also go a long way toward restoring civility to our public intercourse. Bullies and other obnoxious louts might be much more reluctant to appear threatening to others if they think their demeanor might win them a view down the barrel of a semi-automatic. Such an experience can be as chastening as it is thrilling, and there are a lot of people out there who might benefit from a little chastening.

Attack on Abu Ghraib

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail analyzes the significance of the recent attack on Abu Ghraib prison. After discussing the insurgents' evident change in tactics Roggio writes:

Al Qaeda obviously believes it will gain some psychological advantage in attacking American and Iraqi bases, but it may want to weigh the psychological effects on their own troops after repeated failures. The assault on the prison was a military failure. Al Qaeda in Iraq states ten of the attackers were killed in the raid. They also claim to have breached the walls and overtaken a guard tower, but the US military disputes this account. The US military estimates the attacking force suffered over fifty casualties out of an estimated sixty attackers. Continued military defeats and high casualty rates will sap the will of al Qaeda's cannon fodder over time.

If al Qaeda in Iraq and other terrorists want to engage in large scale assaults on US and Iraqi forces, this is their choice. But it will be a bad one. Every large scale engagement against American forces has been a miserable failure for the terrorists, as they cannot match the firepower or flexibility of American forces. Blackfive recently documented the success of an outmanned and outgunned MP convoy escort in routing a numerically superior ambushing force. Phil, a soldier currently serving in Iraq, reports on the effectiveness of an Iraqi unit repelling an assault on their base. The recent assault on a terrorist training camp also highlights the military superiority of Iraqi and Coalition forces. The increased use of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) to provide intelligence on insurgent activities as well as the rapid reaction of air and ground assets when contact is made makes for a tactical nightmare for terrorists attempting to attack in large numbers.

Wretchard at Belmont Club adds some additional thoughts. He quotes one commentator as noting that:

Al Qaeda claimed the raid was a success, but a few more victories like this and their insurgency will be over.

Both Roggio and Wretchard are worth reading in full.

Jim Wallis: Unpartisan Liberal

As liberal democrats (I know. It's a tautology.) cast about for an authentic religious voice with which to persuade the red state voters that they're not all militant secularists eager to destroy everything that evangelical Christians hold dear, they have brought Jim Wallis of Sojourner's magazine to the nation's attention.

As a result he's been the topic of conversation recently in blogs and in journals like the The Weekly Standard. He's also been making appearances on television, most recently on Tim Russert's Face the Nation a week ago.

Jim Wallis presents himself as a man of neither the left nor the right but as one who desires simply to follow the scriptures. Yet, to listen to him speak he sounds for all the world as if he's a liberal first and a Christian second. Consider, for example, his responses on Face the Nation:

MR. RUSSERT: Reverend Jim Wallis, how do you see the Democrats, the Republicans, both of which you have written about, in terms of faith and spirituality and religion, approaching the Schiavo case?

JIM WALLIS: Well, first of all, our hearts go out this morning to Terri Schiavo and the family. It appears she's near the end of her life, and so deep compassion for the family, and all of us care so much about this.

Having dispensed with the necessary amenities, Wallis quickly heads for the fertile political territory Russert's question brought into view, and seeks to score political points by decrying the scoring of political points:

In principle we should always err on the side of life...that's the safer moral course, but we also should worry about the politicizing of any case, and I'm alarmed by memos that talk about firing up the base or defeating the Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida. That's way out of bounds for a case like this.

I think the conversation about life is a good conversation. But then let's talk, as the Catholics do, about a consistent ethic of life. Today a silent tsunami will take the lives of 30,000 children because of hunger. Lives are lost in Iraq. On death row innocent people are executed. The bishops this week launched a new campaign against the death penalty. I think a consistent ethic of life is a good moral guide for politics and it cuts both ways, cuts Republican and Democratic. Religion should be able to critique left and right, not be ideologically predictable or loyally partisan.

Let's not talk about Schiavo, Wallis seems to be urging, since the Republicans were largely on the proper side of that one. Let's talk instead about those issues where we can be tacitly critical of Republicans even as we claim that as Christians we are not ideologically predictable(!), and let's at the same time disavow any intention of trying to score political points off the Schiavo tragedy.

Russert the reminded his audience that during the 2000 campaign candidate Bush was asked to name the political philosopher or thinker he most identifies with and why, to which he responded: "Christ, because he changed my heart."

When asked to elaborate, Bush replied: "Well, if they don't know, it's going to be hard to explain. When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life. And that's what happened to me."

Russert then asked Wallis: "Can you imagine a Democrat responding in the same way?" Given a wonderful opportunity to amplify to a national secular audience George Bush's words about the importance and life-changing effect of a Christian commitment, Wallis quick-kicked, apparently unable to muster much enthusiasm for discussing the implications of Christian conversion on national television if it would make Bush look good:

REV. WALLIS: Well, there's no reason why [Democrats] shouldn't [answer the same way]. The part of that [Bush's answer] that I don't like was when he said, "And if people don't understand that, I'm sorry." As you know, I believe in bringing religious values into the public square. Where would we be if the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. kept his faith to himself? But, you know, religion must be disciplined by democracy. We have to argue on the basis of the common good, not say, "I'm religious, you won't understand, but I'm going to be talking Jesus."

Not only does Wallis misrepresent Bush's perfectly sensible concern that secular listeners might fail to understand the life-transforming power of the gospel if they haven't experienced it themselves, the rest of Wallis' answer is almost indecipherable:

Jesus talked about blessed are the peacemakers. Love your enemy. He talked about the poor over and over and over again. So I want to see the words of Jesus be part of our discourse. But we're a pluralist society now....so how do you argue on the basis of what's best for the common good to convince a very pluralistic nation that what we think is good for all of us, not just the Christians?

He seems to be saying that he doesn't want to talk about how Christ can change peoples' lives, he doesn't want to talk about a personal encounter with Christ, he prefers instead to talk about the corporate political obligations Christianity imposes upon one, and those obligations are evidently to adopt left-liberal social and foreign policies.

So much for being ideologically unpredictable and non-partisan.

Wallis may not mean this, but he certainly seems to imply that the value of employing the language of evangelical Christianity is that it can be used as a code to put the denizens of Jesus Land more at ease and make them more amenable to the left's political project. The value of God talk, Wallis seems to aver, is that it befuddles the unsophisticated into thinking that liberal democrats are really at one with the folks in the pew. It's a way of winning their trust, of deceiving them, actually, so that they won't be so resistant to liberal political candidates and ideology.

Maybe this is unfair to Wallis, maybe he was just clumsy in expressing himself on Russert's show. I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but a visit to the other sites linked above does nothing to reassure one that clumsiness is a satisfactory explanation for Wallis' apparent political partisanship.

Alvin Plantinga

The Washington Times has a story on Alvin Plantinga, one of the most influential of contemporary philosophers and author of what will no doubt come to be regarded a classic work in epistemology and philosophy of religion titled Warranted Christian Belief.

Plantinga, who at 72 still teaches at Notre Dame, has also written a number of other important books and papers and has perhaps done more to change the religious complexion of philosophy departments in American universities than any other living philosopher.

A discipline which was dominated a generation ago by secular materialists is today home to an increasing number of Christians and other theists (see here). It has been a remarkable transformation and Plantinga's influence has been in large measure responsible for it.

China's Plans for Surprise Attack

The Chinese strategy for launching a surprise attack on Taiwan is discussed at The Strategy Page. Some analysts think it's just a matter of time.

The Chinese probably aren't too concerned about our reaction since our economies are so interdependent they probably calculate (correctly) that if they can launch a successful assault on Taiwan before we have a chance to get a carrier battle group to the region that they will have a fait accompli over which we will not be willing to wage all out war.

There will follow grave diplomatic harrumphing, of course, but eventually the imperatives of commerce will cool tempers, and we will grudgingly accept the Chinese takeover (and subsequent executions) of the Taiwanese.

No doubt the biggest concern of the Chinese is whether they would be able to overwhelm Taiwan's defenses swiftly enough to preclude American involvement. This may be quite difficult to accomplish, for reasons discussed at Strategy Page.

It's interesting reading.

The Coming Conservative Crack-Up

Mark Steyn writes a very funny piece on the perennial prognostications of a "conservative crack-up". Here's an excerpt:

Then there's the 59 striped-pants colossi of the Nixon-Ford-Reagan State Department who've sent a letter to the Senate calling on them to reject John Bolton's nomination as U.N. ambassador. According to the Associated Press report, the signatories include:

"Princeton Lyman, ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria under Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; Monteagle Stearns, ambassador to Greece and Ivory Coast in the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations; and Spurgeon Keeny Jr., deputy director of the Arms Control Agency in the Carter administration."

Princeton Lyman? Monteagle Stearns? Spurgeon Keeny Jr.? If Norman Lear's shows had wacky characters like that, they'd still be in syndication. It's a good rule of thumb that anything 59 economists, bureaucrats or diplomats are prepared to sign an open letter objecting to is by definition a good thing. But that goes double when the 59 panjandrums lined up against you are Princeton Monteagle Jr., President Nixon's ambassador to the Spurgeon Islands; Spurgeon Monkfish III, President Ford's ambassador to the Lyman Islands; Dartmouth Monticello IV, President Johnson's personal emissary to His Serene Highness the Monteagle of Keeny; Columbia Long-Playing-Album, the first diplomat to be named by President Carter to the State Department's Name Control Agency; and Vasser Peachy-Keeny, the first woman to be named Vasser Peachy-Keeny. One sees their point, of course: Let a fellow called "John" Bolton become ambassador and next thing you know Earl and Bud will want the gig.

Even Sen. John Danforth, who should know better, got in on the act, taking half a page in the New York Times to give the Full Monteagle to the "religious right." Blog maestro Andrew Sullivan decided that America was witnessing a "conservative crack-up" over Terri Schiavo and the embrace of her cause by extreme right wing fundamentalist theocrat zealots like, er, Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader. Sullivan was last predicting a "conservative crack-up" during the impeachment era, on the grounds (if I recall correctly) that Republican moralizing would dramatically cut into Strom Thurmond's share of the gay vote. In the '90s, the Weekly Standard ran innumerable special editions devoted to the subject: Conservative Crack-Up; Conservative Crack-Up 2; Conservative Crack-Up -- The Musical; Abbott And Costello Meet The Conservative Crack-Up; Conservative Crack-Up On Elm Street; Four Weddings And A Conservative Crack-Up; Rod Stewart Sings Timeless Favorites From The Great Conservative Crack-Up, etc.

Read the whole thing. It's a hoot.

Saudis Take on al-Qaida

There are unconfirmed reports of a major battle raging in Saudi Arabia between government troops and al Qaida mujahideen in the town of Al-Raas.

There's a bit more information on the battle at the link.

Atheists Convene

A CNSNews report tells us of a gathering of about one hundred atheists from California to Connecticut in Philadelphia over Easter weekend to discuss issues of interest to those who call themselves "Godless Americans" and to plan activities to advance their cause. Several items in the report caught our eye. One was a sentence that noted that:

While the 31st National Convention of American Atheists had no official theme, one topic that came up often during the event was the future of "nonbelievers," as well as what's ahead for atheism itself.

The future of nonbelievers is indeed an interesting theological question about which the New Testament has some disquieting things to say, but we suspect that that's not what those who raised the topic at the conference had in mind. If the conference attendees were concerned about the future of atheism in this world, perhaps they might have gleaned some insight from the fact that their nationwide convocation could have been held around the kitchen table.

The news account also mentioned this observation from Boston University anthropologist David Eller:

Because having a "belief" enables a person to claim something is true with no evidence to support it, Eller said he'd like to strike the word from our language altogether. "I have no beliefs," he noted.

Presumably, then, the professor lacks a belief that he has no beliefs, an odd piece of thinking for a university Ph.D. Or maybe not.

Because he works in an academic environment, Eller said he is comfortable "living from the neck up" and acknowledged that atheism "appeals only to the rational few," while religion is a "whole-body experience" that "holds onto people's hearts even as they lose their minds."

Apparently, the exalted rationality of professor Eller has yet to lead him to the realization that if materialism is true then he really has no basis for trusting his reason to lead him to truth. But never mind. There are few sensations more gratifying to an academic than the satisfaction of knowing that one is intellectually superior to one's fellows. We should avert our eyes from professor Eller's unseemly arrogance, acknowledging that the pleasure he derives from flaunting his superior rational gifts doubtless makes the practice of it irresistible for him.