Good News, Bad News

The good news is that it turns out that all those frantic reports of sexual assaults and dead children in the Convention Center were, ah, somewhat overblown:

Conditions at the Convention Center may not have been as bad as initially thought, said New Orleans Police Chief Eddie Compass. He said no bodies of children have been found and there has also been no evidence of sexual assaults.

The bad news is that our media is so desperate for stories that they'll apparently report anything that sounds shocking based on nothing more than rumor. Among those who have lessons to learn from this hurricane are the reporters who reported that these things occured without any confirmation that they had.

He's Down With Sounding Stupid

Are all rappers this dumb or is it just Kanye West? He's beginning to sound almost Michael Mooreish.

When are people going to start holding these nitwits accountable for their asinine and overtly incendiary remarks?

The Widow's Mite

This is a wonderful gesture on the part of the Iraqi military:

Iraqi soldiers serving at Taji military base collected 1,000,000 Iraqi dinars for victims of Hurricane Katrina. Iraqi Col. Abbas Fadhil, Iraqi base commander, presented the money to U.S. Col. Paul D. Linkenhoker, Taji Coalition base commander, at a Sept. 5 staff meeting.

"We are all brothers," said Abbas. "When one suffers tragedy, we all suffer their pain."

The amount of money is small in American dollars - roughly $680 - but it represents a huge act of compassion from Iraqi soldiers to their American counterparts, said U.S. Army Maj. Michael Goyne. "I was overwhelmed by the amount of their generosity," Goyne said. "I was proud and happy to know Col. Abbas, his officers, NCOs and fellow soldiers. That amount represents a month's salary for most of those soldiers."

Abbas read a letter he wrote after giving the envelope to Linkenhoker:

"I am Colonel Abbas Fadhil; Tadji Military Base Commander," Abbas wrote. "On behalf of myself and all the People of Tadji Military Base; I would like to console the American People and Government for getting this horrible disaster. So we would like to donate 1.000.000 Iraqi Dinars to help the government and the People also I would like to console all the ASTs who helped us rebuilding our country and our Army. We appreciate the Americans' help and support. Thank you."

It's a bit of a clichè to say that it's the thought that counts but gifts like this remind us of how true the clichè is.

Crackpots and Relativists

Rosa Brooks at the LA Times apparently thinks that the call for teaching both sides of a controversy over where a metaphysical truth lies is equivalent to denying that there is any truth in the first place. She draws the peculiar conclusion that advocates of Intelligent Design, because they wish to see ID taught alongside Darwinian explanations of complex structures and processes, are epistemological relativists who believe that truth is simply a cultural construct. Ms Brooks is seriously confused. Either that, or she's deliberately misrepresenting the ID side of this debate. Here are some excerpts from her column along with commentary:

Sometimes it seems like secular intellectuals just can't win. In the 1980s and '90s, they were attacked by the right for their "relativism" - an alleged refusal to accept the existence of absolute truth. Today, they're under attack once more, only this time the right is mad because secular intellectuals aren't relativist enough. At any rate, that appears to be the charge put forward by conservatives who advocate the teaching of so-called intelligent design.

This is a distortion of what ID theorists are advocating. They're not saying that there is no truth or that truth is relative. What they're saying is that the Darwinian materialist's account of biological complexity is insufficient and inadequate and that a more complete picture of the truth would include intelligent, purposive agency.

These are not your daddy's creationists. When scientists and other members of the reality-based community declare that evolution is the only valid and provable account of our planet's natural history, intelligent design boosters don't cite the Bible. Instead, they earnestly insist that no one ought to claim a monopoly on truth, and that in the interests of intellectual and moral pluralism, "alternatives" to evolution should get a fair hearing in schools.

"Reality-based community" is an odd moniker to affix to those who dogmatically insist that it is a fact beyond doubt that the astonishing fitness of the universe for sustaining life is just a coincidence. It's a strange name to assign to those who believe that the fact that matter has precisely the chemical and physical properties necessary to produce complex organisms is just a brute given, that the geo-physical properties of the earth are simply fortuitous, and that the amazing complexity of life from proteins to organisms to ecosystems is explicable merely in terms of blind forces and random chance.

These "reality-based" folk, among whom Ms Brooks numbers herself, can no doubt believe a dozen impossible things each day before breakfast. Indeed, belief that Darwinian processes alone produced life is statistically similar to believing that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might leave in its wake a fully functional 747 jet airplane, to borrow Fred Hoyle's memorable metaphor. That's an interesting reality Ms Brooks is so proud to be a part of.

Nor is she correct when she equates the demand for teaching alternatives to materialism with the claim that no one has a monopoly on truth. Perhaps someone somewhere among the burgeoning population of ID supporters has made such a statement, but I've never heard it. Even so, the claim that no one has a monopoly on truth is not, pace Ms Brooks, a relativistic claim. One can agree that truth is not the exclusive possession of a single group without affirming that truth is "all relative" or without denying that there is an objective truth.

This week, Arizona Sen. John McCain became the latest Republican politician to urge that "all points of view" be presented to students studying the origins of life. He joined President Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who argued recently that intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution because people in "a pluralistic society should have access to a broad range of fact, of science, including faith."

It's the new relativism: when scientific truth can't be squared with your religion or ideology, wax eloquent about the value of pluralism and intellectual diversity.

Perhaps Ms Brooks will answer a question: What is scientific or true about this proposition: No non-material, non-natural processes or forces were involved in the creation of the universe, of life, or the development of life. That statement is the crux of the controversy. Darwinians affirm it. ID'ers deny it. Neither the affirmation or the denial are scientific claims, although those who make them may be scientists and they may use the findings of science to buttress their positions. Moreover, if Ms Brooks wants to say that the statement expresses a truth I invite her to explain how she, or anyone, knows it to be true.

So it's a tad ironic that conservatives and the religious right are now arguing that intelligent design should be taught on the grounds of intellectual pluralism. Needless to say, from the perspective of virtually all reputable scientists, evolution isn't just one theory among many, it's the only scientifically proven account of the origin and development of life on Earth. Denying evolution isn't merely "another perspective." It's like insisting that the sun revolves around the Earth, or that the moon is inhabited by little green guys. Whatever happened to truth?

This assertion is a tad preposterous. Not only did evolution have nothing to do with the origin of life, scarcely anything about the origin of life has been proven. Scientists have no idea how life originated. For Ms Brooks to blithely inform her readers that it has been proven that life originated through an evolutionary process of some sort is very naughty on her part.

[I]f intelligent design must be taught just because a few crackpot scientists are on board with it, we'll also have to teach about the UFO landings at Roswell and the numerous Elvis sightings that occur each year.

This statement is so dumb as to make one want to throw up his hands in despair at the state of contemporary journalism. First, for the writer to call scientists who embrace intelligent design "crackpots" is a tendentious slander. Ms Brooks is hardly qualified to make assessments of the professional qualifications of the people who are at the front of the ID "movement."

Second, she claims that teaching students that the cosmos and life bear the impress of design and that some scientists and philosophers believe this design points to an underlying teleology necessitates teaching about UFOs and Elvis sightings. How she arrives at such a weird conclusion totally escapes me. What do UFOs and Elvis have to do with the question of whether design in the cosmos is real or just an illusion?

Ms Brooks doesn't seem to understand that there are only two alternatives in this controversy. Either the universe and life are ontologically contingent upon intelligence, or they are not. That's the issue upon which the whole dispute rests. It's really that simple. So simple, in fact, that even a "crackpot" journalist should be able to comprehend it.

Armageddon on Capitol Hill

John Hinderaker explains the challenge Bush faces in replacing Justice Rehnquist. The pressure on the Democrats from their left-wing base to fight a conservative will be enormous. Another conservative with as meager a paper trail and as easy to confirm as Judge Roberts will be hard to find. Almost anyone Bush picks, Hinderaker predicts, will launch the political equivalent of WW III.

Maybe so, but Bush may surprise the Dems with a nomination that would please the conservative rank and file while short-circuiting the Democratic attack machine. He could do this by nominating someone out of the Senate, like, say, Sam Brownback. Brownback is widely respected, unflinchingly conservative, and, being a senator, will be harder for Senate Dems to attack as savagely as they would someone from the outside.

Even so, there is so much at stake that almost any conservative is going to find him- or herself at the center of a firestorm. The left can live with Roberts as a replacement for Rehnquist, but they will not submit to a Scalia-type conservative as a replacement for O'Connor. Such an appointment could tip the court to the right for decades, undoing much of the mischief the left has accomplished since the sixties, and blocking most of what they have planned for the next twenty years. Hence, this next nomination, Hinderaker argues, will trigger an Armageddon on Capitol Hill.

We expect that Bush won't allow that to deter him from doing what he believes is right, but it may deter wobbly Republicans from supporting his nominee. It looks like it'll be gut-check time in the Senate once Roberts is confirmed.

See here for more possibilities from the Senate as well as several women and Hispanics whose nomination would delight conservatives.

The War Along the Rat Lines

The Fourth Rail's Bill Roggio continues to keep us updated on the war along the Syrian border towns which foreign fighters use as rat lines to infiltrate Iraq. The battle for Tal Afar is set to commence once the evacuation of the citizens is complete. It will not be a search and destroy mission but rather a "clear and hold" operation where the enemy is cleared out and Iraqi forces are left in place to keep them from returning. Insurgent leadership continues to suffer losses from targeted airstrikes which suggests that there is a lot of good intelligence coming from citizens on the ground.

Read Roggio's report for more information, and don't miss the analysis on Strategy Page of the effect that coalition pressure in this region is having on the insurgents' ability to find safe havens from which to mount operations.

Where Was the Red Cross?

Representatives of the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security, a state agency, turned away truckloads of food and other supplies that the Red Cross was trying to deliver to the Superdome and convention center after the storm passed but before the levees broke. Fox News' Major Garrett was interviewed about the story by Hugh Hewitt. Here's part of the transcript:

MG: Well, the Red Cross, Hugh, had pre-positioned a literal vanguard of trucks with water, food, blankets and hygiene items. They're not really big into medical response items, but those are the three biggies that we saw people at the New Orleans Superdome, and the convention center, needing most accutely. And all of us in America, I think, reasonably asked ourselves, geez. You know, I watch hurricanes all the time. And I see correspondents standing among rubble and refugees and evacuaees. But I always either see that Red Cross or Salvation Army truck nearby. Why don't I see that?

HH: And the answer is?

MG: The answer is the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security, that is the state agency responsible for that state's homeland security, told the Red Cross explicitly, you cannot come.

HH: Now Major Garrett, on what day did they block the delivery? Do you know specifically?

MG: I am told by the Red Cross, immediately after the storm passed.

HH: Okay, so that would be on Monday afternoon.

MG: That would have been Monday or Tuesday. The exact time, the hour, I don't have. But clearly, they had an evacuee situation at the Superdome, and of course, people gravitated to the convention center on an ad hoc basis. They sort of invented that as another place to go, because they couldn't stand the conditions at the Superdome.

HH: Any doubt in the Red Cross' mind that they were ready to go, but they were blocked?

MG: No. Absolutely none. They are absolutely unequivocal on that point....I want your listeners to follow me here. At the very moment that Ray Nagin, the Mayor of New Orleans was screaming where's the food, where's the water, it was over the overpass, and state officials were saying you can't come in.

Garrett states that the reason the Red Cross was given for being turned away was that the authorities didn't want people staying at the Superdome or convention center, and if there was food and water there it would be harder to get them to move on.

Contrary to what the paranoid fantasists at the NYT doubtless suspect, the relief wasn't turned away because a phone call from Bush forbade the state authorities from allowing it in.

There's much more at the link.

By the way, there has been nothing about this report on MSNBC. They're still too busy blaming Bush and focussing on the body count.

Trying to Pin it All on Bush

Despite the best efforts of the Democrats and their associates in the MSM only 13% of the people surveyed in a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll blame President Bush for the New Orleans debacle. The 13% probably encompasses the splenetic Bush-haters who, like the poor, we will always have with us, and maybe a few others.

That all the energy, newsprint and air-time invested in pinning the post-hurricane disaster on Bush didn't yield greater rewards to those who see it as their mission in life to do everything possible to tear down this president must be extremely discouraging to the Left.

Shed a momentary tear, for example, for the disappointment that poor Bob Herbert of the New York Times must feel at this poll result. Mr. Herbert is so consumed with loathing for the president that in a column on Monday he wrote the following:

The Big Easy had turned into the Big Hurt, and the colossal failure of George W. Bush to intervene powerfully and immediately to rescue tens of thousands of American citizens who were suffering horribly and dying in agony was there for all the world to see.

Colossal failure? Exactly what was Mr. Bush's failure? What could he have done that he didn't do that would have made a difference? Mr. Herbert chooses not to tell us, quite likely because Mr. Herbert has no idea.

Mr. Herbert seeks to drives the point home. Reciting a litany of suffering and degradation suffered by the victims of Katrina, Herbert concludes by claiming that "the president didn't seem to notice." He offers no support for his libel, but then it's a bit awkward to insist upon factual support from someone whose intent is only to assassinate someone's character and not to uncover truth.

When he senses that the stage has been set and the moment is right, Mr. Herbert dramatically trots out the venerable old warhorse named Racism:

He would have noticed if the majority of these stricken folks had been white and prosperous. But they weren't. Most were black and poor, and thus, to the George W. Bush administration, still invisible.

Yes. While the black folk were suffering, Bush was no doubt traipsing gleefully around his Crawford ranch in white sheets and hood. It would not surprise us to see such an absurd claim from the pen of Mr. Herbert since in his world no evidence is necessary to justify any calumny against the president. Just saying that Bush is a racist is enough to make it so for the cerebrally-challenged, among whom Mr. Herbert must feel at home.

He ends his indictment of the president with this summation:

Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever by a president during a dire national emergency. What we witnessed, as clearly as the overwhelming agony of the city of New Orleans, was the dangerous incompetence and the staggering indifference to human suffering of the president and his administration.

And it is this incompetence and indifference to suffering (yes, the carnage continues to mount in Iraq) that makes it so hard to be optimistic about the prospects for the United States over the next few years. At a time when effective, innovative leadership is desperately needed to cope with matters of war and peace, terrorism and domestic security, the economic imperatives of globalization and the rising competition for oil, the United States is being led by a man who seems oblivious to the reality of his awesome responsibilities.

Well. Has it occured to Mr. Herbert to examine Mr. Bush's total tenure in order to form a judgment of the prospects for our future? Evidently not. He prefers to pick a single event, one in which the facts are as yet unclear about Mr. Bush's responsibility, and extrapolate from that to the most dire warnings about the next three years under such an incompetent bumbler.

No thought enters the hate-soaked labyrinths of Mr. Herbert's mind about Bush's response after 9/11, or his liberation of 50 million people and the toppling of one of the most evil men in modern history. Nor does Mr. Herbert deign to remind us of Mr. Bush's widely acclaimed response to the devastating hurricanes which hammered Florida last year. Nor does Mr. Herbert mention how Bush took an economy that was heading into recession when he came to office and which subsequently suffered the heavy blows of 9/11, war in the Middle-east, and sky-rocketing gas prices, and nevertheless nursed it back to a state of health that is absolutely astonishing given the obstacles that had to be overcome.

These facts are all irrelevant to Mr. Herbert. For a day too long after Katrina, Mr. Bush allegedly hesitated when he should have been doing some unspecified thing, and therefore he's the worst person imaginable to be leading us into the days ahead.

Mr. Herbert's entire case reduces to this. People suffered. Help was slow. Bush was president. Therefore Bush is an incompetent racist. Mr. Herbert displays no awareness that there may be reasons why help was slow for which Mr. Bush cannot rationally be held responsible. He displays no inclination to place any blame for the failure to get people out of the city on the mayor and governor, who, with every passing day it becomes more clear, it squarely belongs. He evinces no sign that he is aware of the governor's inexplicable 24 hour hesitation to invite the feds into the state. Indeed, he shows an abject unwillingness to actually engage in any kind of sophisticated thought or analysis at all.

In fairness, perhaps Mr. Herbert, from his exalted perch atop the Mt. Olympus that is the New York Times, is privy to information that is being withheld from us mere mortals, and which he is not at liberty to share - information that would explain exactly what Mr. Bush's fault was and why it is so damning.

Or, more likely, perhaps Mr. Herbert is simply a buffoon who believes that an argument is won by whomever can cram the largest number of unsubstantiated and outrageous allegations into the smallest number of column inches.

Dowd's Dishonesty

Maureen Dowd tries to kick George Bush in the shins with her most recent column but just winds up looking foolish, petty, and dishonest instead. Her column can be read here. Like much of her work, it's short on facts and long on baseless invective. Let's consider her more serious allegations in the order she makes them.

She alleges that money that could have gone to shoring up the levees around New Orleans has been squandered in Iraq:

Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.

The implication, of course, is that there were not enough National Guard troops at home to do the job of securing the city. This is, however, completely false. James Robbins sets forth the truth of the matter at National Review Online.

She goes on to imply that the Bush administration is culpable for the deaths of New Orleanians because they cut the Corps of Engineers budget request last year:

Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million.

Aside from the delightful irony of seeing lefties like Ms Dowd harrumphing that the Corps of Engineers, a governmental entity absolutely loathed by the Left, did not get the funding it requested, there is another problem here. Let's suppose the Corps had received everything it asked for. Would the money have been spent on levees or on marshland reclamation? If it would have been spent on the levees would they have been upgraded by the time Katrina hit? Would the money have made any real difference by this date? If not, why mention it? Until we know the answers to these questions Dowd's complaint is meaningless.

She goes on to express amazement that Bush doesn't start metaphorically executing people willy-nilly in the wake of the calamity:

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

So far from being a flaw in Bush's character his reluctance to cashier his people reveals a strength. It certainly shows a vast difference between Bush and Dowd. Bush believes in sticking by his subordinates and supporting them until all the facts are in. It's one reason he inspires such fierce loyalty among his staff and cabinet. Dowd, like some Middle-East despot, believes in cutting off peoples' heads as soon as they give the appearance of having screwed up, regardless of what the ultimate facts might turn out to be. It's one reason that so many people find her repellant.

A lot of conservatives think Brown should be fired, too, but the difference between them and Dowd is that they see Bush's willingness to take heat for his people as a virtue and Dowd sees it as a vice. Actually, she sees everything Bush does as a vice.

She then shamelessly insinuates that Bush's people don't care about Katrina's victims because they're just blacks, don't you know.

[I]t is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

A lack of empathy? How does she know what Bush and his staff were feeling and doing behind the scenes. As time goes on it's becoming clearer that much of the fault for the predicament of the people trapped in New Orleans, to the extent it wasn't their own, was the fault of their mayor and their governor. Why does she not condemn their lack of empathy? Might it be that they're Democrats (and minorities) while Bush is a white Republican male, a legitimate object of obloquy in the eyes of northeastern liberals like Dowd?

When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.

This is the most egregiously dishonest thing she says in the piece. It demonstrates her utter disregard for the truth when a lie will better serve the purpose of slipping the stiletto into Bush's ribs. First, she implies that the administration is racist, but worse, she strongly suggests that the 700 guests of the Hyatt were sent to the front of the line by the feds because the people they were butting ahead of were only poor blacks. What actually happened was this: The people from the Hyatt were tourists who were sent to the head of the line under orders by the black mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin.

It might be worthwhile to ask Ms Dowd why she chooses not to tell her readers who was responsible for greasing the tourists' exit from town. Evidently, when you need to tarnish a man like the president it's okay at the NY Times to deceive your readers any way you can.

That's Howard

How long will rank and file Democrats allow themselves to be led by people who have so few scruples that they'll do something like this:

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean has told one of the nation's largest black church groups that racism was a factor in the rising death toll from Hurricane Katrina.

Dean told the annual meeting of the National Baptist Convention of America in Miami that the nation must "come to terms with the ugly truth that skin color, age and economics played a deadly role in who survived and who did not."

He also said the funds that now support the Iraq war could be used to rebuild New Orleans or to aid the poor and elderly.

The ugly truth is that Howard Dean is a mendacious demagogue who is a disgrace to American politics. If he's going to make the claim that skin color was a factor in determining people's fate in Katrina's aftermath he should at least have the decency to offer some supporting evidence aside from the simple-minded observation that there was a large number of blacks in the Superdome.

Does Mr. Dean have information that people were denied the ability to evacuate because they were black? Were they refused helicopter rescue because they were black? Were they denied access to shelters, food, water, or medical care because they were black? Exactly how did skin color play the role that Mr. Dean alleges? Tell us, Mr. Dean, precisely how were African-Americans singled out for discriminatory treatment?

Of course, he won't answer these questions because demagogues never get down to specifics - it would enable people to see through their scam. Sadly for this country, Dean and others like him in the Democratic party will continue to set one American against another for political advantage as long as they can get away with it.

It's disgusting. It's criminal. It's Howard Dean.

The Calm Before the Storm

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail informs us here and here of preparations for a big battle at Tal Afar, an Iraqi city that has become a haven for insurgents. The coalition is evacuating the citizens in preparation for a massive combat operation along the lines of the assault on Fallujah. Already two hundred insurgents have been killed. The city is cordoned and escape is doubtful. The battle is imminent.

Requesting Your Help

As you know from our announcement at the head of our posts, we've been having trouble with our server not always responding to readers' requests to access it. The problem persists for a few minutes and then seems to miraculously heal itself. Being somewhat skeptical of the doctrine of the infinite extent of God's mercy and doubting that it reaches to healing machines several times a day, we've been trying to pinpoint a more mundane cause.

We'd like to enlist the aid of our readers in the effort. If you have gotten a "web site not responding" message when trying to access Viewpoint anytime within the last four weeks you can help us by going to the Feedback button and telling us whether this has happened once or twice during this period, or if it has happened more frequently.

If the Feedback button doesn't work with your browser feel free to e-mail me at 74@aol.com. Bill and I appreciate your help with this.

Thanks,

RLC

Saving the Beer From the Coelacanths

Years ago scientists dredged up a primitive fish off the coast of Madagascar called a coelacanth that had been believed to have been extinct for millions of years. Such finds are called "living fossils." I thought of the coelacanth when reading an article about Muslims who killed a woman for having a romantic relationship with a Christian and then went on a rampage destroying the homes of Palestinian Christians.

In the standard view, you see, man has evolved through stages of barbarism and savagery culminating in the civilized form he takes today as "thinking man", Homo sapiens. According to this version of human evolution man had to overcome along the way cognitive abilities on the level of an imbecile and religious beliefs that require that the gods be appeased through human sacrifice - the bloodier, more terrifying, the better. Think of the thugees in Raiders of the Lost Ark sacrificing their victim by ripping his still pulsing heart out of his breast.

We've advanced beyond this primitive savagery thanks largely to the influence of Christianity on the Western world, but there are still pockets of "living fossils" found throughout the world which still function cognitively at the level of an imbecile and hold to religious beliefs that cause them to revel in bloody human sacrifice. These people belong to the genus Homo, but they can hardly be considered sapiens. One such very large pocket stretches across the vast Arab world and produces stories like this on an almost daily basis:

Efforts were under way on Sunday to calm the situation in this Christian village east of Ramallah after an attack by hundreds of Muslim men from nearby villages left many houses and vehicles torched.

The incident began on Saturday night and lasted until early Sunday, when Palestinian Authority security forces interfered to disperse the attackers. Residents said several houses were looted and many families were forced to flee to Ramallah and other Christian villages, although no one was injured.

The attack on the village of 1,500 was triggered by the murder of a Muslim woman from the nearby village of Deir Jarir earlier this week. The 30-year-old woman, according to Palestinian Authority security sources, was apparently murdered by members of her family for having had a romance with a Christian man from Taiba.

"When her family discovered that she had been involved in a forbidden relationship with a Christian, they apparently forced her to drink poison," said one source. "Then they buried her without reporting her death to the relevant authorities."

When the PA security forces decided to launch an investigation into the woman's death, her family protested for fear that the relationship would be exposed. The family was further infuriated by the decision to exhume the body for autopsy.

The attack is one of the worst against Christians in the West Bank in many years. Residents said it took the PA security forces several hours to reach Taiba. Others complained that the IDF, which is in charge of overall security in the area, did not answer their desperate calls for immediate help.

"More than 500 Muslim men, chanting Allahu akbar [God is great], attacked us at night," said a Taiba resident. "They poured kerosene on many buildings and set them on fire. Many of the attackers broke into houses and stole furniture, jewelry and electrical appliances."

With the exception of large numbers of PA policemen, the streets of Taiba were completely deserted on Sunday as the residents remained indoors. Many torched cars littered the streets. At least 16 houses had been gutted by fire and the assailants also destroyed a statue of the Virgin Mary.

"It was like a war, they arrived in groups, and many of them were holding clubs," said another resident.

"Some people saw them carrying weapons. They first attacked houses belonging to the Khoury family [looking for the man who had the affair with the women, not realizing he had already fled the village.] Then they went to their relatives. They entered the houses and destroyed everything there. Then they tried to enter the local beer factory, but were repelled by PA security agents. The fire engine arrived five hours later."

Col. Tayseer Mansour, commander of the PA police in the Ramallah area, said his men arrived late because of the need to coordinate their movements with the IDF. "The delay resulted in the torching of a number of houses and cars in the village," he said.

Taiba, the only West Bank village that is completely inhabited by Christians, is famous for its Taiba Beer factory, which was established by the Khoury family in 1994.

The residents are Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox or Greek Catholic. The village was originally called Ephraim, and is thought to be the city to which Jesus came with his disciples before his crucifixion: "Jesus therefore walked no more openly among the Jews; but went thence unto a country near the wilderness, into a city called Ephraim" (John 11:54).

According to some accounts, Salah a-Din, who led the war against the Crusaders, was responsible for the name change. He is said to have found the villagers there to be nice and kind - in Arabic, taybeen - and the name stuck, to become Taiba.

Well, at least the PA police prevented the destruction of the brewery by the human coelacanths. There's no word yet, however, as to how Allah views this intervention to preserve the iniquitous manufacture of the vile fluid from the expression of his righteous anger. Maybe the police can atone for thwarting Allah's will by permitting the murder of a few more women and/or Christians. That will likely satisfy his wrath.

A closing question for the moral equivalence crowd: When was the last time you read about Israelis doing anything like this?

The World Begins to Step Forward

This is good to read although given the wealth of some of these countries one hopes that this it just a first step:

CAIRO, Egypt - Donations to Hurricane Katrina relief poured in from around the world Sunday, with Kuwait offering $500 million and other Mideast countries offering aid and condolences despite widespread opposition to U.S. policies in the area.

The European Union and NATO also stepped up to provide aid following rare requests for help from Washington, while the 22-member Arab League urged countries across the Middle East to "extend aid to the United States to face the exceptional humane circumstances."

Spain, Belgium, Britain, Germany and Italy announced they had started or were about to send aid and experts to the U.S. to help with the logistical operation of getting help to hurricane survivors. Britain's Ministry of Defense said Sunday the government would send 500,000 ration packs. Germany and Italy sent flights of supplies, including food rations, bed supplies, inflatable dinghies and water purifiers.

The $500 million offer by Kuwait - which owes its 1991 liberation from seven months of occupation by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army to a U.S.-led coalition - is the largest to date, surpassing the $100 million pledged by Qatar, another U.S. ally in the Mideast. "It's our duty as Kuwaitis to stand by our friends to lighten the humanitarian misery and as a pay back for the many situations during which Washington helped us through," Kuwait's energy minister, Sheik Ahmed Fahd Al Ahmed Al Sabah, said in a statement.

Kuwait's offer includes $400 million in oil products and $100 million in humanitarian relief, Al Sabah's spokesman told The Associated Press. Another close U.S. ally, the United Arab Emirates, is sending tents, clothing, food and other aid. The United States enjoys close relations with most Gulf states, particularly Kuwait, which was a launch pad for the 2003 invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam, and Qatar, a base for the U.S. military in the war's initial stages.

Bitter U.S. foes Iran and North Korea - which Washington pressured over their respective nuclear programs - offered to help rescue efforts, and Syria - another longtime opponent - was among numerous Middle Eastern states offering condolences. And Arab League chief Amr Moussa said the Arab world should support the United States, which "always expresses solidarity with nations that face natural catastrophes and extends most of the aid they receive."

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a longtime opponent of the Bush administration, said Sunday he had offered 1 million barrels of gasoline and $5 million, but criticized the U.S. government for failing to evacuate the victims before disaster struck. "The rich were able to leave, by their own means. It was the poor that remained there," the leftist leader said on his weekly television and radio show. The United Nations said Sunday the U.S. had accepted its offer of U.N. assistance and expertise.

"A small U.N. coordination team is in Washington now consulting with government officials on how best the U.N. can complement the United States' own emergency efforts," said a statement from the U.N. spokesman. The Paris-based International Energy Agency has also said its 26-member nations would release the equivalent of 2 million barrels of oil per day from strategic reserves.

These offers of aid should not be turned away, even if we don't need them. To spurn the offer of a gift is to encourage resentments. To accept the gift is to make the giver feel good, not only about himself but about the one upon whom the gift is bestowed. Acts of kindness generate kind feelings in the doer. Feelings follow actions. When people or nations act in kind ways they find themselves experiencing much more positive feelings toward the object of their beneficence than perhaps they did before. We should encourage all the acts of kindness toward the U.S. that others wish to bestow.

Dwarf-Tossing

PowerLine does a complete smackdown of the NY Times' Paul Krugman who looks more intellectually diminutive every time he writes a column. In his latest he takes a potshot at the administration for its alleged tardiness in the wake of Katrina by citing the example of the U.S.S. Bataan:

The Chicago Tribune reports that the U.S.S. Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since last Monday - without patients.

What caused that paralysis? President Bush certainly failed his test. After 9/11, all the country really needed from him was a speech. This time it needed action - and he didn't deliver.

But the federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good.

Bad choice of stories to employ against Mr. Bush, this one. As it turns out, a simple check of the facts would have shown Mr. Krugman that he was embarking down the road to personal embarrassment by building his case upon this story, but checking facts is for right-wingers. Lefties are unconstrained by such bourgeois and infra dig considerations. Read PowerLine to find out what has really happened with the U.S.S. Bataan.

PowerLine is going to have to start picking fights with people its own size. Picking one with Krugman is analogous to dwarf-tossing.

The Thuggery Was Predictable

Here's a question I've had ever since the frenetic stories of media reporters stationed at the Superdome and the Convention Center started coming in about the desperate state of people who were being victimized by thugs and rapists: Was the crime rate at these places significantly different than it is in New Orleans under normal conditions? Probably not, I thought.

Now City Journal writer Nicole Gelinas comes to a similar conclusion. She rejects Al Sharpton's feeble apologias on behalf of the looters in N.O. and proceeds to dissect the problem and apportions blame where it belongs. Her article, written before the military moved in to establish order, makes a lot of sense.

New Orleans' vicious looters aren't the real face of the city's poor-their victims are.

New Orleans hasn't even been disarmed yet, but the story of those who looted, trashed, and terrorized the city this week is already being re-written. Al Sharpton went on MSNBC Thursday night to say that "looters are people who pay their taxes whose infrastructure caved in on them." The final PC version of the story is likely to go like this: The desperate people left behind in New Orleans, nearly all black, had justification in brutally attacking their city because the help they frantically sought didn't come.

In truth, the looters, rapists, and murderers who have terrorized New Orleans since Monday began their post-Katrina reign of terror a full day before the situation grew truly desperate-and it was their increasingly lawless behavior that kept willing but unarmed professional and volunteer rescue workers away from the city and from the poor people who needed saving.

Let's go back to last Sunday morning-such a long time ago, it now seems. Most New Orleanians with means-the most resourceful poor, the middle class, and the affluent-left the city of nearly half-a-million residents that day, 24 hours before Katrina hit. They took planes, they drove, they hitchhiked, and some walked. Save for the home and business owners who valued their property more than their lives, most of the 100,000 or so who stayed behind were those not only poor in financial resources but in human capital as well.

Some who stayed behind are the New Orleanians who depend on the government on a good day-impoverished women, children, and elderly folks who went to the Superdome and to the Convention Center Sunday, expecting their government to take care of them. And those were the smart ones-those who moved rationally and proactively, despite a lack of transportation out of the city and a lack of government co-ordination, to secure their own physical safety. Thousands of others who stayed in their low-lying homes in the 9th Ward (which predictably flooded, as it flooded 40 years ago during Hurricane Betsy) drowned or now find themselves trapped-starved and dying of dehydration.

And the others who stayed behind, unfortunately, are those who terrorize New Orleans on a low-grade level on a good day-and have now taken over the stricken city. What's happened is the predictable civil deterioration of a city whose fragile civil infrastructure can't control or contain its core criminal class in peacetime.

Katrina didn't turn innocent citizens into desperate criminals. This week's looters (not those who took small supplies of food and water for sustenance, but those who have trashed, burned, and shot their way through the city since Monday) are the same depraved individuals who have pushed New Orleans' murder rate to several multiples above the national average in normal times. (New Orleans, without Katrina, would have likely ended 2005 with 330 or so murders-compared to about 65 in Boston, a city roughly the same in size.) Today may not be the best day to get into New Orleans' intractable crime problem, but it's necessary, since it explains how this week's communications and policing vacuum so quickly created a perfect storm for the vicious lawlessness that has broken out.

During the mid-1990s, New Orleans made some progress in cutting down its murder rate from its one-time peak as the Murder Capital of America. With the help of the feds, the city weeded out the worst of its police force (including two murderers) and implemented some new policing techniques borrowed from successful cities like New York, including COMSTAT. But New Orleans-and the state judicial system-has never cemented a sustainable institutional infrastructure to build on early progress, and the murder rate had risen perceptibly again.

New Orleans, first off, doesn't have the middle-class or affluent tax base to afford the professional police or prosecution force it needs-crime has created a vicious cycle, pushing out taxpayers who fund the police. Nor have the city and state cemented the command-and-control direction of financial and human resources that police, detectives, and prosecutors need to do their jobs.

In New York, the mayor, police, and prosecutors know that taking one killer off the streets means preventing more killings, because a murderer frequently murders again. In New Orleans, killers and other violent criminals remain free, because in many cases, they aren't arrested or tried; conviction rates remain abysmal. The lawlessness these criminals create in pockets of the city breeds more killers and more lawlessness. Witnesses and crime victims in the inner city fear to come forward: they know that even if a criminal winds up arrested, his associates will be free to intimidate them.

On a normal day, those who make up New Orleans' dangerous criminal class-yes, likely the same African-Americans we see looting now-terrorize their own communities. Once in a while, a spectacular crime makes headlines-the shooting death of a tourist just outside the French Quarter, or the rape and murder of a Tulane student. But day in and day out, New Orleans' black criminal class victimizes other blacks. Churches put up billboards in the worst neighborhoods that plead: "Thou shalt not kill." The inner-city buses shuttle what look like hundreds of war veterans around the city-young black men, many of them innocent victims, paralyzed in wheelchairs.

This week, this entrenched criminal class has freely roamed the streets-and terrorized everyone. On Monday, New Orleans still had food and water stocked in stores across the city, but young looters began sacking stores, trashing the needed food and stealing TVs, DVDs, and other equipment. If the uncoordinated, understaffed New Orleans police had even a prayer of keeping order, it was Monday. By Tuesday, the looters had armed themselves with ample weapons supplies available in stores all across the city; by Wednesday, the armed gangs, out of food and water like everyone else, were not only viciously dangerous but desperate, hungry, and thirsty.

But while the looters have reportedly killed police offers and have shot at rescue workers, they're mainly victimizing, as usual, other poor blacks. The vicious looters aren't the face of New Orleans' poor blacks. Their victims are: the thousands of New Orleanians who made their way to shelter before the storm, and who rescued others and brought them to shelter during and after the storm-but who now cannot get the help they desperately need.

This week's looting was predictable. When Hurricane Georges, another potentially catastrophic storm (it spared New Orleans at the last minute) was about to hit in 1998, I foolishly refused to evacuate my Uptown apartment. More than one person said I should evacuate not due to the storm, but because looters would terrorize the city afterward.

Was this week's looting preventable? Failure to put violent criminals behind bars in peacetime has led to chaos in disaster. New Orleans' officials had only the remotest prayer on Monday of coordinating police officers with no electronic equipment to rescue survivors while at the same time stopping looting before it descended into wholesale terror. Now, those uncoordinated police officers are themselves victims-according to multiple accounts, dead officers, their bodies marked with gunshot wounds, litter the city.

Armed marauders have now taken over every dry area of a deluged city. They've hampered rescue efforts: without wanton looting, there was at least a chance that individual police officers could have distributed food in stores to those who needed it most. And they've likely hampered rebuilding efforts down the road: they've smashed much of intact Uptown and the French Quarter, which will surely be a pyschological barrier for those who knew that the storm didn't destroy their homes and their livelihoods-fellow citizens did.

Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco lost whatever fragile authority they ever had over New Orleans early Monday, as the waters still rose. The federal government was unacceptably slow at assessing a rapidly deteriorating situation. Now, no civil authorities can re-assert order in New Orleans. The city must be forcefully demilitarized, even as innocent victims literally starve. What has happened over the past week is an embarrassment to New Orleans-and to America.

Even in the best of times Mayor Nagin ran a dysfunctional city. For him and others to blame the feds for not responding more quickly to the crisis largely created by their own lack of preparedness, seems like an act of deflecting fault that they know is their own.

Anyway, the good news is that once the cops got some reinforcements from the national guard they found a bunch of these hoodlums and terminated their activities, as well as the hoodlums themselves, in rather definitive fashion. There are reports that at least eight of these morons are permanently out of the terrorizing business.

We're waiting for the caterwauling howls of protest from the ACLU against police brutality to begin.

Why Are They Poor?

Most of us watch the nightly news reports from the Gulf Coast and see people, human beings, in desperate straits, but not so some of our friends on the left. They look at the footage and they see proof of white racism and oppression. They are unable to view the world except through the neo-Marxist lens of race and class.

Jack Shafer at Slate writes a somewhat confused essay about the fact that news journalists seem very reluctant to mention the race and class of the victims of the Hurricane and also of those who have exploited this calamity to rob and pillage.

Like a social bloodhound Shafer thinks himself to have caught the scent of racism in these scenes of human suffering and devastation, and he bays and sniffs avidly along the trail in avid pursuit of his quarry.

Unfortunately, he just seems to get himself tangled up in his argument, as if the source of the scent had run around in circles and then off in several different directions at once. You can read it for yourself. The blind alleys and cul-de-sacs Shafer starts us down only to turn us around and set us off in another direction when it becomes apparent that there's no prey to be found where we were almost wear us out. It's hard to tell exactly what his point is until we get to the closing paragraph which might serve as a synedoche for the whole:

By failing to acknowledge upfront that black New Orleanians-and perhaps black Mississippians-suffered more from Katrina than whites, the TV talkers may escape potential accusations that they're racist. But by ignoring race and class, they boot the journalistic opportunity to bring attention to the disenfranchisement of a whole definable segment of the population.

It could be interpreted as racist, he admits, to make an issue of the color of the people who didn't evacuate and who looted stores, but it's evidently also racist to ignore these pertinent facts because we'd be papering over the salient point that these are black people who've been disenfranchised and victimized by a racist society that allows, even compels, these wretches to live in poverty. One almost expects Shafer to point to Katrina's furious white clouds as proof that the whole tragic disaster was a racist plot by evil white meteorologists at the National Weather Service, Bush appointees, no doubt, to make poor black folk suffer.

His final line is: "What I wouldn't pay to hear a Fox anchor ask, 'Say, Bob, why are these African-Americans so poor to begin with?' "

Well, he's not asking us, but if he were, here's the answer we'd give him, though I'm fairly sure he wouldn't like it:

The reasons blacks in New Orleans, like blacks elsewhere in America, are often poor is because large swatches of the African-American population have, for various reasons, abandoned, or never embraced, the set of values that enable people to become upwardly mobile in our society. What are these values? Here are two which are conspicuously and tragically absent in many African-American neighborhoods:

Getting married before you have kids and staying married afterward. Nothing is more likely to guarantee that children grow up poor than to have them raised by a young mother with no husband. Such children are not only very likely to be impoverished, they are also more likely to be socially dysfunctional, i.e. involved with drugs, crime and early sex, than those who grow up with their biological father. The revolution in attitudes which resulted in single motherhood becoming an accepted and acceptable condition has been hard on the white population, but it has been devastating to African-Americans. Twenty eight percent of white children are born to unmarried mothers, but almost sixty nine percent of black children are born out of wedlock. This is an anchor around the necks of black kids which prevents them from climbing out of their penury and reaching higher socio-economic heights.

Valuing education. African-Americans too often fail to place the premium on education that other groups do. Black parents, for whatever reasons, tend to be less involved in their children's schools, they tend to read to them less, and to offer their children fewer enrichment activities outside of school. Critics sometimes say that inner city schools are in such a deplorable state that kids can't learn in them, but one reason they're in such bad repair is that too few parents of black kids simply care enough about their schools to demand that they be maintained, supplied, and hold to high standards of discipline.

Black kids too often suffer verbal and even physical abuse if they outperform their peers and are seen as "acting white." Young blacks are often encouraged by a depauperate culture to project images of black stupidity. Schools are charged with racism by the race hustlers if they try to teach black kids to be articulate or force them to dress in a manner that doesn't make them look like morons, with their pants at half-mast and their hats turned sideways. The peer culture in which they swim too often encourages them to emulate some "gangsta rapper" rather than a Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas or Condaleeza Rice, people who are often held in contempt by black "leaders" as Uncle Toms and sell-outs.

Children who go through school and never learn to speak articulately, to read effectively, and to do basic math are doomed. As bad as our urban schools may be, a child with a concerned family to go home to could still develop these basic skills in them. Too many African-American children don't, because they don't return to a home where learning is valued.

If Jack Shafer wants to know why there is an African-American underclass, that's the answer. Those who are chronically poor and who pass on their poverty from generation to generation place a low value on both marriage and education. So far from this being the result of a racist plot, it is much more likely to be the consequence of the disintegration of both sexual mores and academic standards that liberals applauded in the 1970s and which still plagues us today.

Just like Katrina, the liberalization of social attitudes has hit and hurt everyone, but they have hit African-Americans the hardest. If we sincerely care about ameliorating poverty in this country then we need to realize that nothing we do will have any lasting effect, and may even make the problem worse, as some forms of welfare did in the 1970s, unless we change people's attitudes about the crucial importance of marriage and education.

One Reason to Rebuild

To the Salafi Jihadis throughout the world the deaths of over a thousand Shia during a stampede in Baghdad and the almost simultaneous destruction in America caused by Katrina is an omen that Allah is on the march against apostates and infidels. According to Walid Phares these twin tragedies are boosting jihadi confidence and spirits.

I had my doubts about the wisdom of rebuilding New Orleans, but having read the Islamo-fascist reaction to this calamity I've come to think that, even were there no other good reason to restore the city, it should be done anyway just to show the Wahhabists that Allah is not in the business of killing Muslim women and children and poor old folks in America just to facilitate their warped, perverted hopes for a world groaning under the stifling demands of Islamic law.

Rebuilding the city will show these nut cakes that their Allah smiles upon mercy, compassion and kindness, and holds out no blessing for those who promote hatred, ignorance, and murder. The lesson will be lost on most of them, probably, but maybe a few will be able to discern the message.

The Grand Unifying Theory

One frequently hears it said that evolution undergirds and unifies all of modern biology which would be devastated were evolution to be somehow disproved. Evolutionary theory, the thinking goes, is the sine qua non of biology.

Such claims, however, have recently come under fire. They're being criticized as at best overblown and at worst completely false. Consider, for instance, this article in The Scientist by Philip Skell, Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Skell writes:

...the modern form of Darwin's theory has been raised to its present high status because it's said to be the cornerstone of modern experimental biology. But is that correct? "While the great majority of biologists would probably agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky's dictum that 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,' most can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas," A.S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, wrote in 2000.1 "Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one."

I would tend to agree. Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming's discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.

I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others. I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss.

Darwinian explanations for such things are often too supple: Natural selection makes humans self- centered and aggressive - except when it makes them altruistic and peaceable. Or natural selection produces virile men who eagerly spread their seed - except when it prefers men who are faithful protectors and providers. When an explanation is so supple that it can explain any behavior, it is difficult to test it experimentally, much less use it as a catalyst for scientific discovery.

Darwinian evolution - whatever its other virtues - does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology. This becomes especially clear when we compare it with a heuristic framework such as the atomic model, which opens up structural chemistry and leads to advances in the synthesis of a multitude of new molecules of practical benefit. None of this demonstrates that Darwinism is false. It does, however, mean that the claim that it is the cornerstone of modern experimental biology will be met with quiet skepticism from a growing number of scientists in fields where theories actually do serve as cornerstones for tangible breakthroughs.

Some writers have been so carried away in their enthusiasm for the neo-Darwinian synthesis that they've asserted it to be not only central to biology but to all of science. That always seemed to me to be a whopper of an exaggeration. In light of Skell's essay it seems not only hyperbolic but risible.

Does God Punish the Innocent?

I don't often agree with Juan Cole but its hard to argue with him on this one. There were, apparently, some who had made the claim that Katrina was God's punishment on New Orleans for its decadence. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, huge swaths of populated land across the Gulf coast were devastated yet the most decadent section of the city of New Orleans was largely unscathed. So what conclusion is to be drawn from that? Cole says it leaves us with three alternatives:

1. God does not exist. Or:

2. God does not use natural or man-made catastrophes to punish people for moral failings. Or:

3. God does not actually object to people having a good time occasionally.

With appropriate qualifications we'll take options two and three, thanks.

Cole also posts a transcript of the conversation between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson after 9/11 in which they interpret the huge loss of life as God's judgment on America for its secularism. The biggest flaw in their argument, of course, is that none of the groups which they accuse of having precipitated God's wrath were harmed on 9/11. The people who died were salt of the earth types, many of whom were Christians.

And who suffered from the tsunami last December? It wasn't the people who Falwell and Robertson would think deserve it: wealthy, hedonistic tourists and others. It was innocent, poor children, mostly.

Make no mistake, I agree with Falwell and Robertson in their claim that the ACLU, NARAL, PAW, etc. have done great harm to the social fabric of this nation. But to state that God sends babes in arms and their poor mothers into the raging torrent because of the sins of such organizations as these entails a concept of God more compatible with Islam than Christianity. The God of Christianity doesn't kill the innocent in order to punish the guilty.