Films Every Child Should See

Gideon Strauss (scroll down to July 23rd) has a list of ten movies that the British Film Institute says every child should see before they are fourteen years old. The list:

1. Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948, Italy)

2. ET The Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982, USA)

3. Kes (Ken Loach, 1969, UK)

4. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955, USA)

5. Les Quatre Cents Coups (Fran�ois Truffaut, 1959, France)

6. Show Me Love (Lukas Moodysson, 1998, Sw/Dk)

7. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001, Japan)

8. Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995, USA)

9. Where is the Friend's House? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987, Iran)

10. The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939, USA)

How many did you see by the age of fourteen? How many have you seen altogether? Personally, I never even heard of six of them, I'm ashamed to say.

Taking From the Poor

Air America, the liberal talk radio network, has enough woes, due both to poor programming and dismal finances, without being implicated in a scandal involving "borrowing" money that was supposed to go to inner city kids and alzheimer's sufferers.

We thought liberals believed in taking from the rich to give to the poor, not the other way around.

Read the details at Michelle Malkin's blog.

The Inquisition of John Roberts

WuzzaDem has a humorous pictorial satire on the upcoming senate judiciary committee hearings on John Roberts' Supreme Court nomination. It's pretty funny, especially Senator Feinstein.

Thanks to Cheat-Seeking Missiles for the tip.

Simply Irresistible

In an earlier post we noted that it's very difficult for Darwinists to avoid the language of intelligent design. Here's an example courtesy of Telic Thoughts:

Khammash and collaborators...have used mathematical modeling to show how the complex workings of the heat-shock [of E. coli] response reflect features that make the protein repair fast, robust and efficient. "It is how, if you had a good engineer, the process would be designed," he says.

Darwinists are not unaware of the public relations problem this sort of loose talk poses for them as they wage the war against the intrusions of Intelligent Design thinking into their domain. Paul Nelson quotes one writer, Rudy Raff, who urges his fellow materialists to avoid "play[ing] into the hands of ID propagandists. For instance, be careful about using teleological words to describe biological entities in our teaching and writing. Calling cells 'machines that do X,' or describing biological structures as 'well-designed to do Y' will be duly cited in ID propaganda as one more biologist supporting design."

Nelson has a little fun with this in his blog, but the point is that it is almost impossible for biologists to do what Raff enjoins. Biological systems are so obviously designed that the language of purpose and intention cannot be avoided. The only refuge for the Darwinian is to argue that the design is only apparent, not real.

This is the reason that, as Richard Lewontin once put it, materialists cannot "let a divine foot in the door" of our public schools. Students are given to believe by their teachers that natural selection and mutation can work miracles of organization and complexity. If, however, they're told that there is dissent about this among scientists, that many believe that the wonders of living things point to an intelligent agent, many, if not most, students would find that hypothesis irresistible.

The Darwinists' greatest fear is that if ID is allowed an official mention in American classrooms, there will be wholesale defections among young people from the Darwinian assertion that natural processes are sufficient to explain all of life and that no Mind is needed.

Resistance to ID is not motivated by a desire to protect science from the intrusions of religion, as we are commonly told. It's motivated by a desire to insulate one philosophical view of life, naturalism, from another.

Great Question, Senator

Jonathan Turley, writing in the LA Times, recounts a meeting between Judge John Roberts and Senator Dick Durbin where Durbin posed a difficult question to the Supreme Court nominee:

Judge John G. Roberts Jr. has been called the stealth nominee for the Supreme Court - a nominee specifically selected because he has few public positions on controversial issues such as abortion. However, in a meeting last week, Roberts briefly lifted the carefully maintained curtain over his personal views. In so doing, he raised a question that could not only undermine the White House strategy for confirmation but could raise a question of his fitness to serve as the 109th Supreme Court justice.

The exchange occurred during one of Roberts' informal discussions with senators last week. According to two people who attended the meeting, Roberts was asked by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) what he would do if the law required a ruling that his church considers immoral. Roberts is a devout Catholic and is married to an ardent pro-life activist. The Catholic Church considers abortion to be a sin, and various church leaders have stated that government officials supporting abortion should be denied religious rites such as communion. (Pope Benedict XVI is often cited as holding this strict view of the merging of a person's faith and public duties).

Renowned for his unflappable style in oral argument, Roberts appeared nonplused and, according to sources in the meeting, answered after a long pause that he would probably have to recuse himself.

Too bad Roberts didn't think to respond by saying to Sen. Durbin, "That's a great question, senator. How did Justice Ginsburg answer it?"

Having chosen to answer it he might have said simply that the task of a Supreme Court justice is to interpret the constitution, not to pass judgment on its moral character. Should a question of capital punishment or abortion come before the court it is the justices' job to determine which side of the case conforms most closely to the original intent of the framers. Whether that intent conforms to the teaching of one's religion is irrelevant to the Court's task.

It is indeed telling that Durbin would ask this question. It reveals his tacit conviction that it is the role of the justice to create law rather than to interpret it. Were that really the case any conflict between the teaching of the church and the decisions of the court would be a much more acute problem. As it is the problem is more in Durbin's philosophy of jurisprudence than with judge Roberts' religious convictions.

UPDATE: The Washington Times reports that Sen. Durbin is denying that he ever asked the question, and Jonathan Turley is responding that Sen. Durbin was his original source:

Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, asked ... specifically what the judge, who is Catholic, would do if the law required him to do something that his church teaches as immoral, according to a column that appeared in yesterday's Los Angeles Times. But when the column drew criticism as a religious litmus test, Mr. Durbin's spokesman said the column was wrong, prompting writer Jonathan Turley to say that he learned of the exchange from Mr. Durbin.

We leave it to the reader to decide who, the politician or the journalist, is not telling the truth. Gosh, what a choice.

Straight Talk

Blunt words from the pen of one of the greatest men of the twentieth century:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities - but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

Sir Winston Churchill, after the horrific battle to wrest control of Sudan from the jihadis of the 19th century. From The River War, first edition, Vol. II, pages 248-50 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899).

Aside from his aside that Christianity struggled against the emergence of modern science, a claim which is historically dubious, is there anything in this passage which is not true?

Thanks to Little Green Footballs.

Modern Pedagogy

A retired teacher in England has a grand idea for promoting student success and protecting the fragile self-esteem of British children:

A retired primary school teacher has called for the word "failure" to be banned from the classroom and replaced with "deferred success". Liz Beattie, who taught for 37 years, said that children's aspirations to learn are crushed as soon as they are deemed failures and that they should be praised instead.

The motion to remove the word "fail" from the educational vocabulary will be put formally to members of the Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) at the union's annual conference in Buxton, Derbyshire, at the end of the month.

Critics said that it was just another example of "politically correct madness" creeping into the classroom, but Mrs Beattie, who lives in Ipswich and is the Suffolk Federation Secretary of the association, said that children responded better to encouragement than to being told they had passed or failed.

She said: "I think we all need to succeed at something. You need encouragement rather than being told you haven't done very well. Learning should be lifelong and it should be something that everybody knows they can do and knows they can have a bash at. I'd rather tell kids that they have done jolly well. You can then say, 'Tomorrow we should try that', rather than just saying, 'You have failed'."

The union of 35,000 teachers already recognises that pupils have "differing abilities and learn at differing rates and that all individual achievement should be recognised". Mrs Beattie, 68, insisted that the association should go further. She said: "I would be surprised if we didn't get the motion through because there are enough teachers at all levels who know that, with little ones, you've got to get them motivated and with the older ones you've got to give them confidence going into exams."

But the idea was denounced as "politically correct madness" by Suzanna Proud, 28, a mother of two. "When you apply for university they are hardly going to say, 'Well you have had some deferred success so we'll let you in'. They will say, 'Sorry, you failed your exams. You don't meet requirements'." If the motion to ban the word is accepted by the union, its ruling council will make it part of policy for its members in primary, secondary and nursery schools across the country.

Howard Martin, 54, who runs an online campaign against political correctness, said: "When children go through school they should learn how life works. Mollycoddling them will have completely the opposite effect."

Next thing some schools will be doing away with using red pens to grade papers since the color red causes stress in young psyches. Maybe grades should be done away with altogether since there are few feelings worse in a young student's life than knowing that if you don't do your homework your grade will suffer. Why do we want to inflict this trauma on our children?

Speaking of bad feelings and emotional trauma, here's a disturbing thought: John Kerry didn't fail to win the presidency in 2004, he merely experienced deferred success.

On a brighter note, none of the defeats we suffer in life should be seen as failures. No one ever really fails. In fact, some people's whole lives are just one deferred success after another.

Preaching Peace and Love

This Reuters article gives some insight into the tangled twisted thinking of at least one of London's Islamic clerics:

LONDON (Reuters) - Militant Islamists will continue to attack Britain until the government pulls its troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, one of the country's most outspoken Islamic clerics said on Friday. Speaking 15 days after bombers killed over 50 people in London and a day after a series of failed attacks on the city's transport network, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed said the British capital should expect more violence.

"What happened yesterday confirmed that as long as the cause and the root problem is still there ... we will see the same effect we saw on July 7," Bakri said. "If the cause is still there the effect will happen again and again," he said, adding he had no information about future attacks or contacts with people planning to carry out attacks.

The cause of the problem, of course, is people like Bakri preaching violence and hatred in the mosque every Friday.

Bakri, a Syrian-born cleric who has been vilified in Britain since 2001 when he praised the September 11 hijackers, said he did not believe the bombings and attempted attacks on London were carried out by British Muslims.

He condemned the killing of all innocent civilians but described attacks on British and U.S. troops in Muslim countries as "pro-life" and justified. In an interview with Reuters, Bakri described Osama bin Laden, leader of the radical Islamist network al Qaeda, as "a sincere man who fights against evil forces."

What does Bakri say about Muslims strapping bombs to mentally retarded Muslim boys and using them as suicide bombers? What does he say about Muslims kidnapping another Muslim's children and threatening to behead them unless the father serves as a suicide bomber? What does he say about Muslims who deliberately blow up Muslim children with nail bombs or shoot them in their schools? Nothing much, I'll bet.

Bakri said he would like Britain to become an Islamic state but feared he would be deported before his dream was realized. "I would like to see the Islamic flag fly, not only over number 10 Downing Street, but over the whole world," he said.

That, I submit, is a chilling vision of hell that not even Dante could have foreseen.

A hate figure for the British tabloid press, the bearded and bespectacled Bakri said Islam contained "a message of peace for those who want to live with the Muslims in peace."

That is, Muslims are willing to live in peace with those who submit to dhimmitude, a kind of second class status with no real rights.

"But Islam is a message of war for those who declare war against Muslims," he said.

In other words, Muslims will kill anyone who resists their wish to convert the world to Islam.

"I condemn any killing and any bombing against any innocent people in Britain or abroad, but I expect the British people to condemn the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan."

When Bakri gets around to condemning the mass murders of Muslims in Iraq by Islamic suicide bombers then his claim to reproach the deaths of innocent people in Britain will have a teensy bit of credibility. Even at that, he sneaks into his "condemnation" the qualification that it is the bombing of "innocent" people he denounces. In Islamist thinking, however, there are no innocent Western infidels. They are all guilty so Bakri's pious denunciation is meaningless.

However, asked about Islamist attacks on British and U.S. troops and on Israelis, he said: "If violence is pro-life I don't condemn it." Bakri, a 46-year-old father of six, was born in Syria and lived in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. When the Saudi government expelled him in 1985 he came to London. Nicknamed "The Tottenham Ayatollah" after the area of north London in which he lives, he has infuriated many Britons with his firebrand speeches and refusal to condemn suicide bombings.

He founded the British branch of Hizb ut-Tahrir, which describes itself as a non-violent political party dedicated to creating an Islamic caliphate centered on the Middle East. But he split from the group in 1996 and set up al Muhajiroun, which won notoriety in 2001 for celebrating the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon which killed nearly 3,000 people.

Doubtless he was condemning the deaths of innocents in the World Trade Towers while he was dancing in the streets.

Bakri has Syrian and Lebanese citizenship and says he thinks the British government might deport him to one of those two countries in the wake of this month's bombings.

They shouldn't deport him. They should ceaselessly ridicule both him and his moronic political and religious views until he realizes that to spare himself further humiliation and ignominy, to salvage whatever credibility he might have left after a campaign of public derision, he had best slink off on his own.

"But I think that would be political suicide for the British government if they started to deport and imprison all extremists and radicals," he said. "Because if, God forbid, something happened again, they would have nobody left to blame."

Quite so. If they started to deport all Muslims who are radical extremists, or at least sympathetic to the radicals, there'd be hardly any Muslims left in England to plant the flag at No. 10 Downing Street. God forbid.

PC Make-Believe

It is stunning that the NYPD has decided that they will inspect bags of commuters on the NY subway system. The stunning part is that the searches will be random. Random? As if no one knows who the perpetrators of a bombing would be. As if we are just oblivious to the fact that 99% of terrorist acts are performed by young, middle-eastern, males. No matter, the searches will be random. Ten year old redheads will have their backpacks searched. Just in case. Seventy year old guys wearing lime-green slacks, golf shirts, and white shoes will have their bowling bags checked. You can never tell what might be in them.

We've become so afraid to face and tell the truth in any matter involving race or ethnicity that we're reduced to truly bizarre play-acting. There's not a soul who rides the trains or checks the bags who thinks random searches are anything more than feel-good liberalism. The liberal thinks that the important thing is that whatever we do, no one be offended by it. Whether it's effective or not is only secondary. Like the citizens who turned out to admire the emperor's new clothes, oohing and ahhing at their splendor while watching a manifestly naked emperor riding through the street, everyone seems duty-bound to pretend that young, middle-eastern males shouldn't be any more suspect than anyone else. If liberals could control our thoughts as well as our actions they'd have us all experience astonishment every time a terrorist bombing turned out to be perpetrated by Arab Muslims.

So we all agree to make-believe that you just can't predict who would be a terrorist based on looks because that's the politically correct thing to do. We all nod knowingly when someone avers that, after all, Timothy McVeigh wasn't a Saudi Muslim, but if you're sitting in an airport waiting to board your flight and you see a couple of swarthy Pakistani males with a dead look in their eyes waiting to board the same plane, all your PC liberalism goes into the dumpster and the needle on your anxiety meter nudges the red. If you deny this then you're either not being honest with us or yourself. Or, like Rip van Winkle, you've just awakened from a thirty year snooze.

Unbelievable Rudeness

We hope there's more to this story than what meets the eye. If not, Catherine Baker Knoll, Pennsylvania's Lt. Governor, has shown extraordinarily poor judgment and an utter lack of sensitivity.

The family of a Marine who was killed in Iraq is furious with Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll for showing up uninvited at his funeral this week, handing out her business card and then saying "our government" is against the war.

Rhonda Goodrich of Indiana, Pa., said yesterday that a funeral was held Tuesday at a church in Carnegie for her brother-in-law, Staff Sgt. Joseph Goodrich, 32.

[Knoll came into the church and] sat down next to a Goodrich family member and, during the distribution of communion, said, "Who are you?" Then she handed the family member one of her business cards...

"Knoll felt this was an appropriate time to campaign and impose her will on us," Goodrich said. "I am amazed and disgusted Knoll finds a Marine funeral a prime place to campaign."

What really upset the family, Goodrich said, is that Knoll said, 'I want you to know our government is against this war.' "

This requires almost inconceivably bad manners. How does someone so devoid of good sense rise so high in state politics? Never mind. Dumb question.

Michelle Malkin has more here.

How the U.N. Wastes Your Money

Donald Trump blows the whistle on Kofi's latest billion dollar boondoggle. Radioblogger has the fascinating transcript of Trump's testimony before a senate committee investigating the proposed renovation of the U.N. building.

It's a little lengthy, but it's well worth the time. Don't miss it.

Somehow, we're sure, Kojo must be involved with this.

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for the tip.

Battered Left Syndrome

Ted Lapkin diagnoses the Left's political version of the battered wife syndrome:

With each new beating, the scarred and bruised victims of spousal abuse tend to excuse and rationalize the actions of their tormentors. A stubborn unwillingness to accept the proposition that their partners are violent louts plunges these woeful women into a morass of self-deception that spawns only further violence.

The far Left has similarly proved unable to liberate itself from the web of rose-tinted delusions that it has spun about the nature of Islamic extremism. After each al Qaeda outrage, leftist ideologues are quick to castigate their own countrymen for a catalogue of sins, both real and imagined. With a perverse combination of self-loathing and adoration of the enemy, the radical Leftist mantra preaches that if only we were nicer, the jihadists could not fail to love us. It's our own fault if Osama bin Laden doesn't realize what good people we are.

And all the while, these "progressive" academics, pundits, and politicians engage in ridiculous intellectual contortions designed to mitigate the guilt of the terrorist perpetrators. When push comes to shove, some intellectuals believe that Islamism is simply an understandable reaction to what they describe as "Western imperialism."

A case in point might be London mayor Ken Livingstone who said just a day or two ago that were it not for the sins of the West these atrocities would not be happening. Matthew D'Ancona of the U.K. Telegraph writes of the mayor:

So it was all the more depressing to hear him revert to type yesterday as he spouted the fatuous Left-wing mantras for which he earned his notoriety in the 1980s. While claiming that he felt no sympathy for the suicide bombers and (naturally) that "killing people is wrong", he resurrected the pernicious old doctrine of moral equivalence, beloved of the Left in the Cold War. "I don't just denounce the suicide bombers," he said. "I denounce those governments that use indiscriminate slaughter to advance their foreign policy" - by which he meant Israel, and, one presumed, America.

So, too, he deployed the whiskery argument that western imperialism is at the root of all evil. If we had only left the Arab nations alone after the First World War, the mayor said, "and just bought their oil, rather than feeling we had to control the flow of oil, I suspect this would not have arisen".... Does Mr Livingstone really think that the legacy of the Great War is what drove the Leeds terrorist cell to commit their atrocities?

Is he truly blaming the murder of 56 commuters on the Balfour Declaration, and the 1920 San Remo Conference? And would the mayor be willing to tell the bereaved relatives of Shahara Islam, the 20-year-old from Plaistow who was buried on Friday, or of James Adams, 32, from Peterborough, and Monika Suchocka, 23, a Pole who was living in north London (both of whom were named as among the dead on Tuesday), that their loved ones would still be alive if not for the Treaty of Versailles?

Read the rest of Lapkin's column here.

More on the Creationist Convention

Ronald Bailey at ReasonOnline continues his reporting on the Creationist Conference at Lynchburg, VA. The final session was a Young Earth Creationist (YEC) critique of Intelligent Design and a discussion of human evolution. Here's how Bailey reports the lecture on ID:

Science and scripture cannot contradict one another, and if they appear to do so, then there is something wrong with the science. God created the world in six 24-hour days, according to Georgia Purdom, an assistant professor of biology at Mount Vernon Nazarene University in Mount Vernon, OH. "It's what God said, and that's enough, and that's the way it has to be," said she. Purdom testified to the attendees of the 2005 Creation Mega-Conference that five years ago she "felt called to understand what I believe and why I believe it." Answering this call brought her to read Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (1996) by Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe. The book introduced her to the "intelligent design" movement.

Initially attracted to intelligent design theorizing, Purdom eventually found it unsatisfactory. Thus the question in her talk: "The Intelligent Design Movement: How Intelligent Is It?" Purdom rejects evolution because it is built on the notion that the process of natural selection relies on death, pain, suffering, and disease to produce our contemporary world. According to creationists, death did not enter the universe until Adam and Eve sinned (Genesis 3:19). "I couldn't believe it because it did not fit with the God I know; the God with whom I have a personal relationship," insisted Purdom. Intelligent designers share the same problem with evolutionists-both ignore Scripture.

Purdom explained that intelligent design was just "refurbished natural theology" of the sort made famous by Anglican divine William Paley in his Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802). Paley famously argued that if someone stumbled over a watch in a forest that he would immediately perceive that "the watch must have had a maker." Paley claimed that the complex mechanisms of organisms in the natural world point to the same conclusion. Purdom believes that both natural theology and intelligent design are fine as far as they go, but they don't go far enough. The problem is that nature is a general revelation while scripture is a special revelation and special revelation trumps general revelation.

Purdom sums up intelligent design as saying, "If it looks designed, it is designed." But still, how are intelligent design theorists going to determine if something is designed or not? "You can't just look at something and tell if it is designed," she says. This is where she still finds Behe valuable. In Darwin's Black Box, Behe explains the concept of "irreducible complexity" using the homely example of a mousetrap. A standard mousetrap is irreducibly complex because it will only catch mice if it has a board, a spring, a trigger and so forth. If any part is missing, it will catch no mice. The existence of irreducible complexity in organisms similarly points to an intelligent designer. Behe offers examples of several irreducibly complex biological systems such as the biochemistry of sight and the operation of the bacterial flagellum which must have the existence and coordinated action of many different proteins and other molecules or they will fail.

Purdom points especially to the complexity of the mammalian blood clotting cascade. We do know that genetic mutations disable blood clotting in people. For example, one version of hemophilia is caused by a lack of the blood-clotting Factor VIII, which is perhaps analogous to a mousetrap missing its spring. Purdom thinks that this is a knockdown argument against evolution, which is supposed to work by small gradual successive steps. If a new modification is not immediately functional, then it's gone. "Evolution doesn't believe in keeping leftovers," declares Purdom.

But is the mammalian blood clotting system irreducibly complex? While the work is far from complete, researchers are making progress in figuring out how that system came into existence over hundreds of millions of years. Strangely, Purdom rejects a well-known pathway for creating novel functions at the molecular level-gene duplication with subsequent modification of the redundant gene, which leads to new functions.

In any case, while accepting a good bit of the Intelligent Design movement's arguments, Purdom points out that Intelligent Design also allows for macroevolution-that is, new species can arise from earlier species. This a definite no-no since the Bible clearly states that God "created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, after their kind." If all creatures reproduce only their own "kind," then there is no way for evolution to produce new species.

However, according to Purdom, "the biggest problem is that Intelligent Design theory divorces Creator from Creation. They do not presume to pierce the veil of the Designer. They won't say 'who done it.'"

Purdom is also annoyed that ID advocates will not talk about the optimality of design. She pointed to a statement by ID godfather, Philip Johnson who recently said, "I suppose the Creator could have made it so that we would live forever and be bulletproof. Flawless design may not be his point."

In Purdom's creationist interpretation of Genesis, God made a perfect world in which Adam and Eve were the moral equivalent of immortal and bulletproof; however, it is now flawed due to Adam's sin. Even more horrifying to Purdom is the statement by Baylor University professor and Design Inference author William A. Dembski, "One looks at some biological structure and remarks, 'Gee, that sure looks evil.' Did it start out evil? Was that its function when a good and all-powerful God created it? Objects invented for good purposes are regularly co-opted and used for evil purposes."

Can Dembski be implying that God created evil in the world? Purdom replies that Christians know that "sin has broken this world, including all of nature." To illustrate evil in nature, Purdom offers the example of the nature documentary showing an idyllic scene of a "zebra grazing peacefully, and then a tiger leaps out and bites its head off." (Of course this documentary would have to be filmed in a zoo, since that's the only place in which African zebras are likely to encounter Asian tigers, but never mind.) The problem with ID theory, as Purdom sees it, is that it implies that God is the author of evil unless you have Biblical understanding of how evil came into the universe through Adam's fall. ID is flawed because it lacks "the Bible as a foundation and framework." Purdom ended her lecture with a Power Point slide illustrating the ultimate argument from authority: "God Said It, That Settles It."

Notice Purdom's criticism of ID: It's compatible with macroevolution and it's agnostic about who the intelligent designer is. It's ironic that many oppose ID being presented in public school science classes because they think it's just Creationism in scientific drag. The secular critics protest, wrongly, that ID'ers want to eliminate evolution and bring God into the schools, precisely what Creationists fault them for not wanting to do. Too bad Bailey chose not to point this out.

Also note Bailey's response to the claim that the blood clotting cascade is irreducibly complex: Scientists are making progress toward explaining how it could have evolved. Isn't it odd that this system is so intricate and exquisitely contrived that intelligent researchers can't figure out how it got put together, but they're nevertheless convinced that it was done by blind, undirected forces acting solely by chance?

World Class Chutzpah

We had to read this twice before we could believe what we were seeing:

Democratic Sen. John Kerry urged the White House on Friday to release "in their entirety" all documents and memos from Supreme Court nominee John Roberts' tenure in two Republican administrations.

"We cannot do our duty if either Judge Roberts or the Bush administration hides elements of his professional record," said the Massachusetts senator who was his party's presidential candidate last year.

This was Senator Kerry, of all people, demanding that all pertinent records be released so that the American people could assess what sort of man this John Roberts is who is asking to serve on the Supreme Court of the land. This is the self-same John Kerry who refused to release his military service records during the presidential campaign last summer so that voters could assess what sort of man it was who was asking to serve as their president. Now he suddenly thinks it appropriate to call on Roberts to do what he steadfastly refused to do.

Evidently, the senator is completely bereft of a sense of shame. Expecting others to do what one chooses not to do oneself is the very definition of hypocrite.

The article doesn't say whether the audience to whom the senator addressed this demand broke out in laughter, but we don't see how they could have held it in.

Deep Defense

Regarding the second attack on London's mass transit system Wretchard at Belmont Club makes this set of observations:

If the Economist is correct about the failure of the detonators to produce a high-order explosion two things can be inferred. First, the close-in defenses of London's public transportation system failed; after all the bombs were delivered to the trains and detonated, except that the detonations themselves were faulty. Second, the outer-ring of defenses, the anti-terrorist component that attacks the terrorist infrastructure, denies it havens, reduces its funding and makes it difficult to place competent bomb-makers in London has succeeded -- at least in this case. More details will clarify the situation as further news becomes available.

(Speculation alert) When faced with the suicide attack problem (Kamikazes) during the Second World War, US fleets adopted the concept of the layered defense around battlegroups, consisting of attacking enemy airfields, providing a radar picket on enemy lines of approach, creating a combat air patrol to intercept incoming Kamikazes and then presenting a succession of long, medium and short-range antiaircraft fire, before finally falling back on warship evasion, armor and damage control. Each component in the defense contributed its statistical share of the defense. The debate surrounding the prosecution of the war on terror can be conceptually split, though not very neatly, between those who advocate a layered defense with a forward-deployed component (coordination with 'friendly' Muslim countries, involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, etc), plus everything in between, and those who would rely primarily on terminal or close-in defenses (national IDs, CCTV cameras, border control, etc) in the homeland.

A small percentage of policy advocates believe that a complete reliance on nearly passive close-in defenses ("support the troops, bring the boys home", build bridges to Muslim communities, etc) would be adequate to protect the public against terrorism. Over the coming years, the value of every aspect of the defense will be highlighted by different incidents. Some attacks will be stopped by an alert security guard, others will be pre-empted in a land so distant the public will never even know that the attacks were mounted. But they are all needed. If any lives were saved in London today, it probably means that a deep defense makes a difference.

Defense in depth is such an obvious principle that it should be insisted upon by everyone, yet some on the current political landscape simply fail to comprehend its necessity. We are at war against kamikazis far deadlier than the Japanese pilots and our defense needs to be both long-range and close-in. To urge one without the other is astonishingly myopic. To depend upon one without the other would be folly.

The Patriot Act

The sound we're not hearing is the tonsil-shredding shriek of outrage from civil libertarians and leftists following the House of Representatives' resounding reauthorization Thursday of the Patriot Act. Why the calm?

Is it because proponents of the Ashcroft is Satan school of political discourse realize that in the wake of 7/7 the American people are likely to look upon their protests as the outbursts of a mentally impaired child? Is it because it has become obvious even to its detractors that none of the horrors so stridently predicted to attend the Act have come to pass? Is it that the left cannot concentrate on more than one thing at a time, and their minds are already at maximum capacity with the Karl Rove contretemps and the John Roberts nomination?

Whatever the reason, the silence following this 257 - 171 vote is remarkable given the passionate outpouring of contempt for the measure when the Ashcroft justice department first implemented it in the wake of 9/11. Maybe it's beginning to dawn on some critics of the Act that the Islamists really are serious about wanting to destroy us, that the threat is imminent, and that the law has helped to stave them off.

Quick Lesson in Recent History

Australian Prime Minister John Howard gives a news reporter, who should be embarrassed but probably wasn't, a much needed history lesson. The question from the reporter was whether British policy in Iraq has made them a target for terrorists. Howard replied:

The first point of reference is that once a country allows its foreign policy to be determined by terrorism, it has given the game away, to use the venacular, and no Australian government that I lead will ever have policies determined by terrorism or terrorist threats, and no self respecting government of any political stripe in Australia would allow that to happen.

Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq? And can I remind you that the 11th of September occured before the operation in Iraq? Can I also remind you that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia's involvement in liberating the people of East Timor? Are people by implication suggesting that we shouldn't have done that? When a group claimed responsibility on the website for the attacks on the 7th of July, they talked about British policy not just in Iraq but in Afghanistan. Are people suggesting we shouldn't be in Afghanistan?

When Sergio DeMillo was murdered in Iraq, a brave man, a distinguished international diplomat, immensely respected for his work in the United Nations, when al Qaeda gloated about that, they referred specifically to the role that DeMillo had carried out in East Timor because he was the United Nations adminsitrator in East Timor. Now I don't know the minds of the terrorist. By definition you can't put yourself in the mind of a successful suicide bomber. I can only look at objective facts. And the objective facts are as I have cited.

The objective fact is that Australia was a terrorist target long before the operation in Iraq and indeed all the evidence, as distinct from the suppositions, suggest to me that this is about hatred of a way of life. This is about the perverted use of the principles of a great world religion that at its root preaches peace and cooperation, and I think we lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances rather than the abuse through a perverted ideology of people and their murder.

Lord, please send us more John Howards.

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for the transcript.

Julian Robertson Speaks Out

From the link:

Specifically, he is very worried about a world that is sustained by American consumer spending which is in turn 1/4 sustained by a property bubble. He predicts that 20 million people could lose their homes once the property bubble bursts.

...

They have now consolidated power and money on the planet to the maximum extent possible. The planet's net liquidity, that is its net free cash flow is now a negative number. The planet is not simply sinking into a sea of red ink; it is already sunk. The people just don't realize it yet," he said.

Got Gold?

Stand and Deliver

Why does Sean Hannity think it's a good thing that Judge Roberts' views on Roe v. Wade are too ambiguous to provide his opponents with grist for their mill? Whenever he talks about it on the air Hannity seems to be saying that Roberts' foes will not be able to nail him for thinking Roe was poorly decided because there's no judicial ruling or writing in his past which makes it certain that he feels that way. The implication is that Roberts is free to fudge or even duck the question, and this elicits gloating from Mr. Principled Conservative who lectures us regularly on the need to be intellectually honest.

The worst thing Roberts could do in the hearings would be to sound weasely on the issues that the Dems will try to nail him on. Why not say, if he really believes it, that the Roe decision was an example of judicial overreach? Why not use the hearings to instruct his august inquisitors and the general public on exactly why he believes there is no constitutional warrant for a right to abortion? The people who are going to vote against him and those who are going to vote for him are going to do so regardless of what he says. Why does Hannity seem so gleeful that Roberts can, if he wants, temporize on the question?

Conservatives, or anyone for that matter, should stand up for what they believe and state honestly what their views are on past cases. If they can make strong arguments for their views then we'll all benefit from hearing them. If they can't mount good arguments then we should know that, too.

Sen. Schumer, as much as we hate to say it, is right on this one. The problem with Schumer is that he's such a hypocrite. He would never expect a Democrat nominee to explain his or her judicial philosophy. He'd be piously denouncing "litmus tests" and the impropriety of asking potential justices to prejudge cases which might come before them. Nor is he genuinely interested in hearing Judge Roberts' arguments. Schumer is more interested in twisting and distorting whatever he says to discredit and smear him.

Even so, Roberts should not waffle and Hannity shouldn't delight in the prospect that he could.

Creationists in Convention

Ronald Bailey at ReasonOnline has a slightly satirical report on the 2005 Creation Mega-Conference at Lynchburg, VA this week. Bailey is not a sympathizer, but there is much of interest in his report, including this succinct summary by John Whitcomb, co-author of the classic creationist work, Genesis Flood, of the difference between Special or Young-Earth Creationism, Intelligent Design and Progressive Creationism:

Whitcomb doesn't just take godless evolutionists to task; he is also critical of Christians who accept progressive creationism or intelligent design. Progressive creationism as represented by Dr. Hugh Ross fails because Ross accepts (1) the Big Bang; (2) that animals were supernaturally and periodically created over many millions of years; (3) that Adam's rebellion did not introduce death into the animal kingdom for the first time; and (4) that the Flood was local to Mesopotamia.

Whitcomb reproaches the leaders of the intelligent design movement for believing that evolutionism can be defeated without any reference to the Bible or the Creator of the World. He agrees with them that tax supported schools need to be purged of the errors of evolutionism, but he then rhetorically asks a very pointed question: "Are people believing in Christ their Lord and Savior as a result of hearing the message of intelligent design scholars?"

Creationists also differ from the other groups in denying the Big Bang, primarily because it conflicts with a literal reading of Genesis:

Why? Because Genesis explains that God created the waters and the Earth on the third day of Creation (Genesis 1:9) and THEN the sun, moon and stars on the fourth day of Creation (Genesis 1:16).

Nor could there have been vast stretches of prehistorical time, in the Creationist view, because this also conflicts with a literal rendering of Scripture:

Like Whitcomb, Ken Ham brooks no compromises and dismisses the soft-headed idea that "you can believe in millions of years so long as God was involved." Why not? Again because that implies that death and disease occurred before there was "sin." In Genesis, Adam and Eve and all the animals were vegetarians (Genesis 1:29-30) and there was no death or disease. God pronounced his Creation "very good." It was perfect. Then Adam and Eve sinned by eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 3:6) thus introducing death and disease into the universe for the first time.

Bailey also reports on yesterday's discussions of cosmology, aspects of which pose serious problems for the young-earth view. Bailey relates the attempts of the speakers to come to grips with the problem of distant galaxies, for example. Bailey writes:

Dr. Jason Lisle took up the challenge distant starlight poses to young-earth creationism. Lisle has an astrophysics Ph.D from the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he apparently researched solar physics and black holes. "We are told that galaxies are so far away that it should have taken billions of years for their light to reach earth," notes Lisle. "We see these galaxies, so it is argued that the universe must be billions of years old."

Lisle declared that distant starlight "is the best argument against a young universe, but it is not a good argument against a young universe." Lisle noted that according to Genesis the stars were created on Day 4, after the land, seas and plants were created on Day 3. He affirmed his belief that God created the world in six 24-hour days. Nevertheless, Lisle admitted, "We do see galaxies that are many billions of light years away."

He hastened to warn his fellow creationists against adopting some overly facile and seductive "solutions" to the distant starlight problem. For example, Lisle warned against arguing that perhaps those stupendous cosmological distances aren't real. "Science does confirm that galaxies are that far away," he insists. But what about the idea that when God created the stars He created the beams of light emanating from them as though they had already traveled billions of light years across the universe so that they would reach the earth by Day 4 of Creation? In other words, the universe was created "mature" as though it had experienced history. This brings to mind the old conundrum: How do you know that you, your memories, and the whole universe with its "history" weren't called into existence just 5 minutes ago?

Lisle agrees that God could have created a mature universe, but he harbors reservations about that "solution." Why? Supernova 1987A. Lisle points out that the star that exploded into Supernova 1987A is 170,000 light years away. Since the universe is only 6000 years old that means that the light which appears to be a supernova is actually from an object that never existed depicting an event that never happened. Lisle declares, "God would not create little movies of things that never happened." However, I am wondering how Lisle knows for sure that the heavens are not just a divine planetarium projection on a gigantic crystal sphere enclosing the solar system? Never mind.

So what are possible creationist solutions to the distant starlight problem? First, Lisle suggests that perhaps the speed of light was not constant over time and that when God created the universe it was so much faster that it could travel across nearly 14 billion light years to arrive at the earth by Day 4 of Creation. He does acknowledge that if the speed of light had been significantly greater in the past, there would have been dramatic changes in the energy and mass of everything in the universe. Remember Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 (Energy = mass multiplied by speed of light squared).

Lisle also offers "gravitational time dilation" as a possible solution to the distant starlight problem. He claims that the Milky Way might really be the center of the universe and thus at the bottom of a deep universal gravity well. In which case time would pass much more slowly in our galaxy-perhaps only thousands of years elapsed on earth while billions of years of physical processes occur in the universe. Something like the above scenarios must have happened because according to Lisle, "We know from the Bible that the light got here in thousands of years."

The Young-Earth Creationists may be correct. It may be that everything sprung into being complete and with an apparent age of billions of years only a few thousand years ago. Or they may be wrong and the universe appears to be billions of years old because it really is. If the simplest explanation that fits the facts is the best then the YEC have some work to do if they're going to convince people, including other Christians, that their explanation for the vast size of the cosmos is more parsimonious and conforms better to the facts than does its competitors.