Orange Bowl Brawl

Video of Saturday's brawl between Miami U. football players and those from Florida International University can be seen here.

It's a disgraceful and pathetic scene, but despite professions of shock from everybody in the sportsworld whom I've seen or heard comment on it, I don't think anyone is really surprised. Big time college sports programs recruit semi-literate, semi-articulate non-students because they have the physical talent to win football and basketball games. No one should be surprised that out of every fifty such athletes a half dozen or so are genuine thugs.

There were at least that many players on the field at the Orange Bowl who should lose their "scholarships" and shouldn't play another game in the NCAA, and the announcer named Lamar, who seemed to warm so much to the action, should have just worked his last game in the braodcast booth as well.

The editor at the link has this comment:

The reaction of the Miami fans and organization might be even more shameful than the actual brawl. You have the announcer claiming he wants to go down the elevator and join the brawl. Quotes from Miami message boards include "I LOVED IT that may be the start of the U returning this will be a HUGE boost for recruiting", "we needed this in the worst way", "The reason we dominated the second half was due to the fight. Finally the players let out the emotion that has been controlled by a reserved Coker", and many more along the same lines. The fans in the Orange Bowl were cheering. The announcer wanted to leave the booth and join the brawl. Is this what Miami stands for? If so, the ACC should be redfaced that they were ever allowed to join the conference. Utterly ridiculous display by the Miami players, fans, staff and anyone associated with the program.

Viewpoint agrees.

The Flesh and The Spirit

Back in April I posted If I May as a response to Living Like Jesus and in that post I mentioned The Deeper Journey by M. Robert Mulholland. Here's a quote from the back cover of the book that sums up what the book is about:

Robert Mulholland exposes the false selves that we hide behind and helps us discover the true self that comes from being hidden with Christ in God. If the goal of the Christian journey is Christ-likeness, then we must reckon with the unhealthy ways that we root our sense of being in things other than God. Along the way, we will discover a growing sense of intimacy and abandonment to God. Not only will we encounter the joy of discovering our own self, we will also find a greater love for others and compassion for the world.

Mulholland also mentions that the apostle Paul spoke of the same concept by contrasting "life according to the Flesh" (the false self) with "life according to the Spirit" (the true self) in Romans 8.

I mention this simply to provide some background for the following from Great Cloud of Witnesses in Hebrews Eleven by E. W. Bullinger where he addresses the problem somewhat differently. Whether his is a more effective approach I'll leave to those of our readers who have also read The Deeper Journey to decide.

Interestingly, this gem is found in the end of the chapter entitled Sarah: Faith's Conclusion.

We have already remarked on the place which Sarah occupies in the Divine order manifest in this chapter. This is clearly seen from the structure on page 109 where Sarah is placed in direct correspondence with Rahab.

In these correspondences the same characteristic of faith is obviously emphasized by the Holy Ghost.

In Sarah and Rahab we have FAITH'S CONCLUSION. This is common to both women. Sarah "judged Him faithful Who had promised" (v. 11). Rahab said, "I know...for we have heard" (Josh. ii. 9, 10).

Moreover, both women stand in connection with the two examples of FAITH'S OBEDIENCE, forming two corresponding pairs, with Abraham and Israel respectively.

But we must now give the text in full (verses 11 and 12).

"By faith, Sarah herself also received power for [the] foundation of a posterity, and [that], after the ordinary time of life, since she esteemed Him faithful Who gave the promise. Wherefore, even from one, who was as good as dead as to such things, there sprang [a posterity] even as the stars of heaven for the multitude, and as sand which is by the sea-shore, which cannot be numbered."

...

The birth of Isaac was the introduction of a new element in Abraham's household.

It corresponds with the introduction of the New nature in the believer today. Ishmael corresponds with the Old nature, which, when the New nature comes, it finds in possession.

Its introduction at once brings to light, and arouses to greater life and strength, the activities of the Old nature.

There was no conflict in Abraham's house till Isaac was born "not of the will of man, or of the will of the flesh, but of God" (John i. 13).

"But, as then, he that was born according to the flesh persecuted him [who was born] according to spirit, even so it is now" (Gal. 1v. 29). "The flesh lusteth against the pneuma (or New nature) and the spirit against the flesh, and these are contrary the one to the other" (Gal. v. 17).

"The mind of the flesh is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be" (Rom. viii. 7).

In Abraham's house this enmity was at once manifest.

The birth of Isaac did not improve Ishmael, or change his character, or his activities.

There was only one remedy, and that was "cast out the bond-woman and her son; for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with MY SON, even with Isaac" (Gen. xxi. 10). The bond-woman was an Egyptian, and savoured of Egyptian bondage; and the only remedy was to "cast out" both her and her son.

But what was possible in the allegory or type is impossible in the antitype.

The old nature cannot be "cast out" from believers now, but we have to reckon it to be so, by faith.

This is to be for us FAITHS CONCLUSION, Faith's reckoning (Rom. vi. 11), Faith's judgment (Heb. xi. 11).

This is what Abraham considered in Rom. iv. 19. "He considered his own body as already having become dead, and the deadness of Sarah's womb; but staggered not at the promise of God, through unbelief, but was strengthened by [his] faith, giving glory to God" (Rom iv. 20). This is to find its exact counterpart in us who believe God, as Abraham did.

This is to be faith's consideration, faith's judgment, faith's conclusion for us.

All that we are called on to do now, is to believe God; to consider our Old nature to be dead, and unable to conceive, beget, or to bring forth, or produce anything for God.

It requires great faith to do this; because, all the time we are conscious of its presence and its power. Our faith, therefore, has to be "against hope," as Abraham's was.

All the while they where believing God's promise, he and Sarah were faced with the undeniable fact that all was "against hope."

It is even so with us. We are faced with the ever present fact of the workings of the Old nature; and, therefore, we must, "against hope," "reckon ourselves to be dead [persons] to sin, but alive to God, through (or in) Christ Jesus."

To attempt to improve our Old nature is to give a flat denial to Rom.vi. 11.

To attempt to change Ishmael is direct disobedience to God (Gal. iv. 30).

To "consider" our Old nature as being alive and able to produce anything for God is a refusal to reckon it as being dead.

To "mortify" its members, in the popular sense, is to consider them as not being "already dead", but to recognizes them as being very much alive. But to "mortify" in the Scriptural sense is to consider them as good as dead! This is the meaning of the word in this connection, as is clear from our context, Heb. xi. 23 and Rom. iv. 19.

Abraham could not have considered his own body as already actually dead, or that he could mortify it by any activities which he could put forth; but only by considering it "as good as dead."

That is what we are called on to do in exercising FAITH'S CONCLUSION.

We are not to seek to improve our members by mortifying them by any process of rules for daily living. This is only to treat them as though they were alive. But we are to treat them "as good as dead," and as being as incapable of doing good, as they are capable of doing evil.

But this can be done only by believing God; and, by faith-obedience, reckoning ourselves as already dead in ourselves. Until this is done, there can be no peace. For it is as being "justified by faith, we have peace with God.". This is the conclusion of the whole argument of Rom. iv. as continued in ch. v. 1.

Until this is done, there can be no joy, no happiness, no "laughter".

As long as Ishmael was in Abraham's house there was only grief (Gen. xxi. 11). But when God's faithfulness was realized, then Sara could say "God hath made me to laugh" (Gen. xx1 6).

Yes, it is the same God Who hath "made us meet for the inheritance of the saints in light," Who makes us thus to laugh.

But if we stagger through unbelief, and do not come to FAITH'S CONCLUSION and believe Him, "against hope," and in spite of all our feelings and experiences, then there is only one alternative for us: we shall go on our way in grief and unhappiness, mourning for what we have done or not done, instead of "giving thanks unto the Father: for what HE HATH DONE (Col. i. 12). We shall sink under the burden of the incessant confession of our trespasses, because we steadfastly refuse to believe what we hear from God, that "you being dead in your sins...hath He quickened together with Him (Christ) HAVING FORGIVEN YOU ALL TRESPASSES" (Col. ii. 13).

Oh, that we may have Sarah's faith, and "against hope" be strengthened by faith, and have our mouths filled with God-given laughter, and give glory to God, because we have judged Him faithful Who hath promised.

CT's Top Fifty

Everybody enjoys lists of the top 10 of this or that (Well, maybe not everybody). Christianity Today offers a catalog of the top fifty books which have shaped the lives and thinking of Evangelicals. As with any such list you'll feel that they left some books off that they should have listed, including classics like Pilgrim's Progress and In His Steps, and that they included some that they shouldn't have. If you're an evangelical Christian and a reader - and if you're the first then surely you're the second - give it a look and see what you think.

Just War in an Age of Jihad

A friend links us to this article by David Aikman who writes that the moral criteria Just War thinking are teetering on the brink of obsolescence in an age in which one side regards such criteria with disdain. He argues that we must not discard the principles of Just War but that we need to rethink what "Just War" means in an age of jihad:

Just war principles work successfully only among nations that acknowledge the same moral laws at work, as in Europe, for example, in general before World War I. Now, however, we are all in a wider and starker conflict, in which ruthless Islamic ideologists are prepared to immolate their own children for the sake of ultimate victory. We should not be pressured by the enormity of the challenge they pose to civilized life to abandon our own rules of "just war." But we need to think through-and make public-how to cope with guerrilla adversaries who operate according to barbaric and totalitarian rules. Civilization is at stake-not only ours, but the world's. Do we have the moral imagination to oppose such adversaries without compromising the very integrity we fight to protect?

For my part I'm not sure exactly which Just War criteria are threatened by the Islamist assault upon the West (See here for a helpful discussion of Just War theory). I do agree, however, that we need to rethink some aspects of Just War theory. For instance, we need to clarify the concept of proportionate response, the question of who is a non-combatant, and what constitutes torture, but I agree with Aikman that the tradition of Just War and the principles which comprise it should not be abandoned.

Walid Shoebat

There is a CNN interview with Walid Shoebat at Hot Air that everyone should watch. Shoebat was a Palestinian terrorist who renounced terrorism and now tours the U.S. trying to educate Americans on the nature of Islamic jihad. It's a powerful piece.

Shoebat spoke last Wednesday night at Columbia University which, still smarting from the criticism they got for their miserable response to the near riot that prevented Minuteman Jim Gilchrist from speaking, decided to rescind some 77 invitations and admit only Columbia students to the lecture.

This was a very unpopular move (some are calling it gutless) since they withdrew the invitations by e-mail just two hours or so before the lecture, but at least the students at Columbia were able to hear him speak.

The Daily Infidel has an excellent report of the event at which Shoebat appeared. Apparently several former terrorists who have converted to Christianity told their stories and gave their opinions of modern Islam. There were a number of remarkable things said that evening, but one of the most interesting was a reply by one of the panelists to a questioner who pointed out that most Muslims, even clergy, are moderate. The former terrorist, a man who said that he had killed 233 people by the time he was 16, replied, "If you think your imam is moderate, ask him what would happen if his son converted to Christianity."

There's much more at The Daily Infidel.

Straw Poll

A straw poll carried by a lot of conservative-leaning blogs is showing that the favored candidate for the 2008 presidential nomination is Rudy Giuliani with Newt Gingrich coming in second. You can cast your vote below:

UPDATE: Apparently the page at which the results are posted has been taken down. Maybe somebody didn't like the fact that Giuliani was doing so well.

Sci Phi

Jason at Sci Phi conducts audio interviews with prominent thinkers on various scientific and philosophical topics. For example, William Lane Craig explains how God can know the future without precluding human free will here, and Alvin Plantinga explains why it is irrational to believe that both naturalism and evolution are true here. The sound on this one is sometimes a little scratchy.

William Hasker explains a possible solution to the mind/body problem called emergent dualism. The sound is unsteady, but you can hear Hasker well enough.

There is also a discussion on Intelligent Design with skeptic Michael Shermer and IDer Salvador Cordova. To link to the Cordova audio, however, you have to go here and follow the links since navigating around Sci Phi is difficult. They really do need an index of links to their shows.

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the tip.

Dirty Harry

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who was one of the principal spokesmen in the campaign to establish in the public mind the image of Republicans as incorrigibly corrupt, grew suddenly silent when it was disclosed that he had ties to the Luciferian Jack Abramoff. Now it turns out that there's even more odor clinging to the Senator. He appears to have profited handsomely from some land deals, the details of which he is obligated to reveal to the Senate, but which he chose to keep secret.

Old Harry Reid is starting to look a little dirty, and more than a little hypocritical, again.

For the scandal junkies among our readers Ed Morrissey has the details. And just in time, too, since despite the strenuous efforts of Chris Matthews and Keith Olberman at MSNBC to keep the story on life-support, the Mark Foley unpleasantness is beginning to expire. People are coming to realize that the scandal was pretty much over once Foley resigned, much to the disappointment of libs who were hoping to club Republicans over the head with it all the way up to election day.

AWOL in the Greatest Battle of Our Time

News reports indicate that the population of the United States will pass 300 million this week, and it occured to me that there has been scarcely a peep about this from environmentalists who, throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties, were shouting from the rooftops that population growth was the most serious problem the world and this nation were facing. A burgeoning population puts enormous stress, we were told, on agricultural and natural lands, endangered species of wildlife and their habitats, resources like timber and water, and the over-all quality of life. People like Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book Population Bomb warned us that if we did nothing to stop or reverse our growth we were headed for doom. Others claimed, a bit hyperbolically, that we'd already passed the point of no return.

I happen to agree that population growth is a serious environmental and ecological problem, perhaps one of our two or three most serious middle-term problems, and am very concerned about the consequences, both ecological and aesthetic, of adding 100 million people to our nation just since the 1960s. I support most efforts to conserve and protect our natural heritage from the voracious demands of a burgeoning population.

So I wondered why the people who led the struggle over the past generation to warn us of the perils we risk by not controlling population growth are silent as we pass the 300 million mark. I was curious as to why Leftish organizations, like the Sierra Club for instance, which have been fighting to limit population growth for decades, who have been warning us that we are facing a biological calamity, and who are concerned about conserving natural lands were as quiet as the Nevada desert.

Then it was all made clear by a feature column written by Valerie Richardson in the Washington Times (subscription required).

The reason, Richardson explains, why these groups have suddenly gone mute on what is arguably the greatest threat to the ecological health of natural lands and population stability in the U.S. is that much of the growth (40%) we are experiencing is due to immigration, both legal and illegal, and much of the rest is due to high reproductive rates among native-born poor. None of the environmental groups, most of which are staffed by liberals and Leftists, wish to be seen as racist by opposing illegal immigration and pointing fingers at minority groups with high reproductive rates.

In other words, these people, who were grabbing us by the lapels twenty years ago and pleading with us to do limit the skyrocketing numbers of people who were placing unsustainable demands upon the earth, actually care more about being falsely accused of racism than they care about doing what must be done to preserve the health of the North American biosphere. They're more concerned about being politically correct than about easing the pressure growing populations impose on endangered species and precious ecological resources.

Because of their fear of transgressing liberal orthodoxies on race they are AWOL on perhaps the most important issue of our time, the issue that has been their whole raison d'etre for the last fifty years. It is quite astonishing. It's also very sad that they would sell out their principles for a mess of PC pottage, but principles are quite expendable and very malleable things in the hands of liberals.

Off to Nuremberg With Them!

The liberal instruction manual on how to win debates evidently offers the following guidance:

When the facts aren't on your side shout the other guy down so that he can't be heard. If that doesn't work then haul him before a tribunal and threaten him with imprisonment for having the impertinence to doubt your truth.

At least that's the conclusion one would have to draw from this article:

A U.S. based environmental magazine that both former Vice President Al Gore and PBS newsman Bill Moyers, for his October 11th global warming edition of "Moyers on America" titled "Is God Green?" have deemed respectable enough to grant one-on-one interviews to promote their projects, is now advocating Nuremberg-style war crimes trials for skeptics of human caused catastrophic global warming. Grist Magazine's staff writer David Roberts called for the Nuremberg-style trials for the "bastards" who were members of what he termed the global warming "denial industry."

Roberts wrote in the online publication on September 19, 2006, "When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards -- some sort of climate Nuremberg."

Gore and Moyers have not yet commented on Grist's advocacy of prosecuting skeptics of global warming with a Nuremberg-style war crimes trial. Gore has used the phrase "global warming deniers" to describe scientists and others who don't share his view of the Earth's climate. It remains to be seen what Gore and Moyers will have to say about proposals to make skepticism a crime comparable to Holocaust atrocities.

Sure. Once the erstwhile champions of "free-speech" on the Left can make it illegal to disagree with them they'll probably want to make any dissent from their orthodoxies punishable by firing squad. Joseph Stalin must be pleased.

Guns in School

Alan Gottleib and Dave Workman argue that greater efforts to restrict guns leads, counter, perhaps, to conventional opinion, perhaps, to more gun crime. They make a good case that the "gun-free zones" set up around schools are a farce. Such feel-good nostrums accomplish nothing more than to assure the psychopaths who roam the halls of every large public school in the nation that if they decide to go on a killing spree no one will be able to hinder them.

The allure of exerting total, unstoppable power over others is irresistable to certain twisted minds, and gun-free zone laws don't do anything to keep them from bringing weapons into schools to carry out their horrific fantasies. They only prevent school staff from being in a position to stop them once the carnage begins.

Anyone who smuggles a gun into a school can massacre students for a long time before police arrive, and despite all the precautions that schools take to prevent such tragedies there's really no practical way an unarmed staff can stop a student who wishes to murder his fellow students from actually doing it.

As a parent of a high school student I know I would feel better if I knew that at least some appropriate school personnel had been thoroughly trained in the use of firearms, particularly in a school environment, and were allowed to keep weapons, under lock but easily accessible, in the building. If they were the chances that someone would attempt, or succeed in an attempt, to perpetrate mass murder in the halls and lobbies of a school would be greatly diminished.

Some people will understandably blanche at the idea of having guns in school, but they're already there. Some schools have armed guards roaming their hallways and some have armed kids roaming the hallways. The question is not whether we will have guns in our schools - we already do. The question is who in the school do we want to have access to them.

Sartre's Intellectual Heirs

Waller Newell writes in The Weekly Standard that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was strongly influenced by an Iranian intellectual by the name of Ali Shariati and that Shariati, like the genocidal Cambodian Pol Pot, was strongly influenced by the French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre and the Marxist Frantz Fanon:

The key figure here is the acknowledged intellectual godfather of the Iranian revolution, Ali Shariati. To understand Ahmadinejad's campaign to return to the purity of the revolution and why it leads him to flirt with nuclear Armageddon, it is necessary to understand Ali Shariati.

Ali Shariati (1933-1977) was an Iranian intellectual who studied comparative literature in Paris in the early 1960s and was influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon. He translated Sartre's major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, into Farsi, and coauthored a translation of Fanon's famous revolutionary tract The Wretched of the Earth. Sartre and Fanon together were responsible for revitalizing Marxism by borrowing from Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existentialism, which stressed man's need to struggle against a purposeless bourgeois world in order to endow life with meaning through passionate commitment.

By lionizing revolutionary violence as a purifying catharsis that forces us to turn our backs on the bourgeois world, Sartre and Fanon hoped to rescue the downtrodden from the seduction of Western material prosperity. Fanon was even more important because he imported from Heidegger's philosophy a passionate commitment to the "destiny" of "the people," the longing for the lost purity of the premodern collective that had drawn Heidegger to National Socialism.

This potent brew of violent struggle and passionate commitment to a utopian vision of a collectivist past deeply influenced Ali Shariati, just as it had influenced another student in Paris a few years earlier, the Cambodian Pol Pot. Fanon in effect replaced the international proletariat of classical Marxism with the existentialist Volk of Heidegger's Nazi period, repudiating both liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninist politics as too materialistic. As applied in practice by the Khmer Rouge, this led to the bloodbath of 1975-1979 in which the cities of Cambodia were forcibly evacuated and the Cambodian people were purified of the taint of Western corruption by being reduced to a primitive collective of slave labor. Just as the the Jacobins had literally started the calendar over at the Year One, so Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, on assuming power, proclaimed the Year Zero.

Ali Shariati aimed to politicize the Shiite faith of his fellow Iranians with this same existentialist creed of revolutionary violence and purification. He sought to turn Shiism from pious hopes for a better world to come to the creation of a political utopia in the here and now.

What a legacy - Pol Pot and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. One wonders whether Sartre and Fanon would be proud of their intellectual descendents. When people possess a passionate commitment to changing the world, the use of any means, including genocide, is justified if it produces the desired outcome. The only check on such fanaticism is the belief that such means are immoral, but for the existentialist and the Marxist there is no morality other than pragmatism. Whatever works to advance one's cause is right. Indeed, It was Karl Marx himself who wrote in the Communist Manifesto that "Communism abolishes all eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality".

The only ideology or belief system that gives any grounds at all for believing that some means and ends are evil is the Judeo-Christian religion, but Sartre and Fanon, Pol Pot and Ahmadinejad all reject the moral teaching of the Judeo-Christian tradition root and branch. Thus we got the killing fields in Cambodia in the 1970s from Pol Pot and the threat of a nuclear holocaust in Israel today from Ahmadinejad. Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas in the minds of evil and powerful men often have catastrophic outcomes.

The 4% Panic Attack

A recent article in the New York Times by Laurie Goodstein calls attention to growing concern that evangelical Christianity is losing appeal among teens and frets that only 4% of today's teenagers will be conservative Christians as adults. Here are some excerpts from Goodstein's article:

At an unusual series of leadership meetings in 44 cities this fall, more than 6,000 pastors are hearing dire forecasts from some of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical movement.

Their alarm has been stoked by a highly suspect claim that if current trends continue, only 4 percent of teenagers will be "Bible-believing Christians" as adults. That would be a sharp decline compared with 35 percent of the current generation of baby boomers, and before that, 65 percent of the World War II generation.

While some critics say the statistics are greatly exaggerated (one evangelical magazine for youth ministers dubbed it "the 4 percent panic attack"), there is widespread consensus among evangelical leaders that they risk losing their teenagers.

Genuine alarm can be heard from Christian teenagers and youth pastors, who say they cannot compete against a pervasive culture of cynicism about religion, and the casual "hooking up" approach to sex so pervasive on MTV, on Web sites for teenagers and in hip-hop, rap and rock music. Divorced parents and dysfunctional families also lead some teenagers to avoid church entirely or to drift away.

Over and over in interviews, evangelical teenagers said they felt like a tiny, beleaguered minority in their schools and neighborhoods. They said they often felt alone in their struggles to live by their "Biblical values" by avoiding casual sex, risqu� music and videos, Internet pornography, alcohol and drugs.

That the Church is competing with enormously seductive rivals for the affections of its young people cannot be denied. That the pressures on teenagers to abandon their faith are high is obvious, but even so, to the extent that the statistics quoted in this article are accurate, and I'm not convinced they are, much of the responsibility for the decline in Christian commitment will lie at the door of the local church.

Too many local congregations, especially in "main-line" denominations, are unwilling to invest in their young people. They cannot see their way clear to make Christian education and Youth Ministry their top priorities. Any church today that allows finances to deter them from seeking out and hiring a full-time youth pastor savvy in contemporary culture, knowledgeable about the Bible, good at apologetics, talented on the guitar or keyboard, and who possesses a charismatic personality is essentially ceding their youth to the modern Zeitgeist.

It may be true that there aren't very many candidates such as I have described out there to be hired, but that's largely because churches haven't created the demand for such individuals. If the jobs were available, so, too, would be the talented young pastors to fill them. Moreover, the mainline congregations will find slim pickings if they search for candidates among their denominational seminary graduates. Mainline seminaries aren't churning out the kind of people, unfortunately, who are either adept at or inclined to nurture teens in their faith. Churches need to be willing to look outside their denominational plantations and seek candidates who grew up in independent or semi-independent churches and were themselves educated at schools which take the Bible and Christian faith seriously.

Nevertheless, despite the gloomy portents in the Times' article Christianity Today isn't too concerned. They think the statistics are overblown. I hope they're right.

Jaw-Dropping Ad

The producer and director of "Airplane" and "The Naked Gun", David Zucker, has made a political ad for the GOP that the GOP has declined to use. Matt Drudge tells us that:

In the ad, Zucker, producer of "Scary Movie 4", recreates former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's 2000 visit to North Korea. During the visit, Secretary Albright presented North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il with a basketball autographed by former NBA superstar Michael Jordan.

An actress playing Secretary Albright is shown presenting Kim Jong Il with the Michael Jordan basketball, painting the walls of Osama bin Laden's Afghanistan cave and turning a blind eye to suicide bombers. In one scene her skirt rips as she changes the tire of a Middle Eastern dictator's limousine.

One GOP strategist said "jaws dropped" when the ad was first viewed. "Nobody could believe Zucker thought any political organization could use this ad. It makes a point, but it's way over the top."

You can view the ad here.

Coercive Interrogation

Vasko Kohlmayer at Front Page Mag makes a case for the moral propriety of waterboarding which he believes to be the most benign of the coercive interrogation techniques we have at our disposal. Regular readers of Viewpoint will find little different in his argument from what we have presented here from time to time, but perhaps there is value in reading it in someone else's words.

Here's an excerpt:

.... careful consideration shows that waterboarding is in fact one of the least injurious among interrogation techniques. To see why this is so, it is enough to contrast it with the most common approach which involves a combination of sleep deprivation and cold exposure. Frequently requiring days and even weeks to break the captive's spirit, it carries a real possibility of long-term physical and psychological damage. Worse still, it often fails to achieve the desired effect with the result that the captive is subjected to prolonged hardships, but we still end up without the information we so urgently need.

Waterboarding, on the other hand, is fleeting in duration with the actual discomfort seldom lasting more than a couple of minutes. And since a man can be safely deprived of oxygen for at least twice as long, there is almost no risk of long-term harm. The possibility of injury is further reduced by the fact that the procedure calls for no direct physical contact between the subject and his interrogators. Not even as much as pushing or chest slapping is required at any time, making waterboarding one of the safest and least confrontational among interrogation methods. Involving the lowest risk of long-term harm and the least amount of cumulative discomfort, it is also the most humane. Most importantly, it is the most effective.

While other interrogation procedures employ raw force, intimidation or long-term duress, waterboarding brings the terrorist face to face with that which he himself seeks to inflict upon his victims - the horror of dying. Viewed in this light, waterboarding may well be the most just form of interrogation for this kind of criminal, because it gives him a taste of his own evil. The difference is that his anguish is stopped the moment he expresses a desire for it to be so. This, tragically, is something which his victims would never be granted. While the terrorist turns his prey into mangled corpses, waterboarding gives him a chance to see another day without being so much as scathed by his momentary ordeal. But even as he goes on living, we have in our possession crucial intelligence that will save innocent lives.

Some people reply to this sort of argument by saying that the end of saving lives does not justify the means of causing suffering and fear to another human being. This is nice ivory tower theorizing, but all one needs do to show the hollowness of the objection is to ask whether the person who makes it would think the same thing if he/she knew that among the lives saved by coercing information from a murdering thug would be those of his/her own children.

If the objector to waterboarding replies that even then she would not condone waterboarding then I would ask her to imagine looking into the eyes of her child a moment before a terrorist's bomb's blast incinerates the child and telling him or her that the impending death could have been prevented, but as a matter of principle the means to prevent it could not be used because they would have caused the murderer to suffer discomfort and fear.

Kohlmayer poses the same question in slightly different terms. He writes:

And as far as opponents of waterboarding are concerned, I have these questions to ask: Are a few moments of a terrorist's discomfort more important than the lives of the innocents he seeks to destroy? Are two minutes of Moussaoui's anguish worth more than the three thousand lives lost on 9/11? Does his momentary pain override a lifetime of hurt in the hearts of those left behind?

To answer "yes" to either of these questions, which is the implicit answer one gives if they oppose waterboarding as a means of coercing information, is to manifest colossal moral confusion.

Crazy Christians

Brent Bozell gives us a preview of the upcoming Studio 60 television series created by producer-writer Aaron Sorkin. Like much else coming out of Hollywood, Sorkin's show serves as a platform for anti-Christian animus. In one segment a fictional producer wants to run a show called "Crazy Christians" but is cautioned against it.

Bozell writes:

Sorkin uses his first script to throw sharp knives and rusty razors at the Americans who've lobbied for less filthy television. The show begins with an improbable "standards and practices" censor telling the producer of the fictional "SNL" that he can't run "Crazy Christians" because "what do you want me to say to the 50 million people who are gonna go out of their minds as soon as it airs?" The producer cracks wise: "Well, first of all, you can tell 'em we average 9 million households, so at least 41 million of them are full of crap. Second, you can tell 'em that living where there's free speech means sometimes you're gonna get offended."

Gutsy, eh? Cutting edge, to be sure. We look forward to the episode where the bold, audacious creator of this show exercises his free speech rights to do something really intrepid, like offending Muslims instead of Christians. We're looking forward to it, but we're not holding our breath. That much gutsiness is in short supply in Hollywood.

Bozell goes on to observe that:

What Hollywood likes is having the almighty power to offend - to "challenge" society, as they like to describe it - freely. But only some people are sought out for offending. For every supposedly crazy parent who worries about sex, violence and smutty talk on TV, perhaps there's another supposedly crazy parent who worries about different offenses, such as Twinkie commercials or scenes with cool, beautiful people smoking cigarettes. But those parents don't get mocked by scriptwriters. It is those with religious objections who get singled out.

There's more insight into Sorkin's adolescent attitude toward religion at the link. Bozell wonders in his concluding paragraph whether Aaron Sorkin will ever do a show on those "Crazy Atheists". We can see the puzzled look on Sorkin's face even now. Crazy atheists? What crazy atheists?

Musharraf's Untenable Position

For those who would like to know more about, and understand better, the goings on in Pakistan we recommend Rick Moran's primer at The American Thinker. Moran covers the recent history and highlights the very difficult position Prime Minister Pervez Musharraf finds himself in.

In his conclusion Moran says this:

Beset as he is on all sides, is there anything to be done with Musharraf? Outside of supporting him as much as we can, there really is nothing to be done. Replacing him is out of the question because the chances of someone coming to power who would be much less friendly to the United States and more accommodating to the Taliban are too great. And the likelihood of elections throwing up even more radical extremists is very high.

In this way, Musharraf is almost like an American tar baby. We're stuck with him for as long as he can survive.

How long that will be depends on Musharraf's knack for avoiding the assassin's blade and his complex political maneuverings. Because like it or not, Musharraf is still the best ally we have in the War on Terror. And he will remain so as long as he can continue to juggle the clashing interests and competing factions that threaten to bring him down at any time.

Read the whole column. It's enlightening.

Bush Derangement Syndrome Continues Unabated

More examples of the sickness that seems peculiar to the contemporary Left can be found at an art showing in Chelsea, New York. Whether the artist who labored over these canvasses deserves recognition for his talent, I can't say, but I will say that he should immediately check himself into a mental health clinic.

What is Consciousness?

One of the enduring problems in the philosophy of mind is the nature of consciousness. Exactly what it is and where it comes from has baffled philosophers and neuroscientists alike. Philosopher David Chalmers, one of the leading thinkers in this field, has a good paper on the matter in which he lays out the arguments against the materialist view that consciousness is reducible to material entities like atoms and chemical reactions. He begins the paper with this:

Consciousness fits uneasily into our conception of the natural world. On the most common conception of nature, the natural world is the physical world. But on the most common conception of consciousness, it is not easy to see how it could be part of the physical world. So it seems that to find a place for consciousness within the natural order, we must either revise our conception of consciousness, or revise our conception of nature.

The word 'consciousness' is used in many different ways. It is sometimes used for the ability to discriminate stimuli, or to report information, or to monitor internal states, or to control behavior. We can think of these phenomena as posing the "easy problems" of consciousness. These are important phenomena, and there is much that is not understood about them, but the problems of explaining them have the character of puzzles rather than mysteries. There seems to be no deep problem in principle with the idea that a physical system could be "conscious" in these senses, and there is no obvious obstacle to an eventual explanation of these phenomena in neurobiological or computational terms.

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. Humans beings have subjective experience: there is something it is like to be them. We can say that a being is conscious in this sense - or is phenomenally conscious, as it is sometimes put - when there is something it is like to be that being. A mental state is conscious when there is something it is like to be in that state. Conscious states include states of perceptual experience, bodily sensation, mental imagery, emotional experience, occurrent thought, and more. There is something it is like to see a vivid green, to feel a sharp pain, to visualize the Eiffel tower, to feel a deep regret, and to think that one is late. Each of these states has a phenomenal character, with phenomenal properties (or qualia) characterizing what it is like to be in the state.

There is no question that experience is closely associated with physical processes in systems such as brains. It seems that physical processes give rise to experience, at least in the sense that producing a physical system (such as a brain) with the right physical properties inevitably yields corresponding states of experience. But how and why do physical processes give rise to experience? Why do not these processes take place "in the dark," without any accompanying states of experience? This is the central mystery of consciousness.

What makes the easy problems easy? For these problems, the task is to explain certain behavioral or cognitive functions: that is, to explain how some causal role is played in the cognitive system, ultimately in the production of behavior. To explain the performance of such a function, one need only specify a mechanism that plays the relevant role. And there is good reason to believe that neural or computational mechanisms can play those roles.

What makes the hard problem hard? Here, the task is not to explain behavioral and cognitive functions: even once one has an explanation of all the relevant functions in the vicinity of consciousness - discrimination, integration, access, report, control - there may still remain a further question: why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? Because of this, the hard problem seems to be a different sort of problem, requiring a different sort of solution.

A solution to the hard problem would involve an account of the relation between physical processes and consciousness, explaining on the basis of natural principles how and why it is that physical processes are associated with states of experience. A reductive explanation of consciousness will explain this wholly on the basis of physical principles that do not themselves make any appeal to consciousness.[*] A materialist (or physicalist) solution will be a solution on which consciousness is itself seen as a physical process. A nonmaterialist (or nonphysicalist) solution will be a solution on which consciousness is seen as nonphysical (even if closely associated with physical processes). A nonreductive solution will be one on which consciousness (or principles involving consciousness) is admitted as a basic part of the explanation.

It is natural to hope that there will be a materialist solution to the hard problem and a reductive explanation of consciousness, just as there have been reductive explanations of many other phenomena in many other domains. But consciousness seems to resist materialist explanation in a way that other phenomena do not. This resistance can be encapsulated in three related arguments against materialism, summarized in what follows.

Go to the link to read the rest of this interesting paper.

One of the important things to note about it is that if consciousness is not reducible to physical entities then it becomes more plausible that it has a non-physical cause, but non-physical causes would be beyond the scope of science and indeed could be considered extra-natural or super-natural. Chalmers himself doesn't go this far but much of the argumentation in his paper lends support to this hypothesis.

The Nature of the Conflict

Paul Marshall has a fine, concise explanation of the Islamic grievance against the West. Quoting Osama bin Laden's words he makes clear the motivations and nature of the struggle we find ourselves in. Here are a couple of excerpts:

The network's central grievance, continually expressed, is the collapse of the Islamic world in the face of "Christendom" - a collapse explained by Muslims' apostasy from Islam, and which can be reversed only by returning to their version of Islam.

At the end of 2004, bin Laden lamented the "control exerted by the Zionists and the Cross worshippers" on Muslims, and he described the world conflict as "a struggle between two camps. One camp is headed by America, and it represents the global Kufr (infidelity), accompanied by all apostates. The other camp represents the Islamic Ummah (nation) headed by its Mujahideen Brigades." Similarly, his December 27, 2004 "Letter to the Iraqi People" referred to the war "between the army Of Mohammed, the army of belief, and the people of the cross." He warned Iraqis not to participate in the January 30, 2005 elections since the Iraqi constitution is "a Jahiliyya (pre-Islamic) constitution that is made by man," and Muslims may elect only a leader for whom "Islam is the only source of the rulings and laws."

At the end Marshall asks this question:

How should we respond to this radical, worldwide movement with millions of adherents whose programme it is to unite Muslims worldwide into one people, with one divinely sanctioned leader, governed by a reactionary version of Islamic law, and organized to wage a permanent war on the rest of the world - a war that from its perspective can only end in the annihilation, conquest or conversion of all non-Muslims?

Good question. Read his answer at the link.