Obama's Defense Strategy

Senator Obama tells us why we shouldn't vote for him to be President in November:

He will end the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. To understand why this would be exceedingly reckless go here.

He'll set a goal of eliminating nuclear weapons from the world. This is empty rhetoric. How, exactly, does he propose to disarm the rest of the world including Israel, India, Pakistan, China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia?

He'll work for a global ban on fissile material. This would mean that nuclear power plants, the only feasible alternative to coal burning power plants, would be taken off the table not jut in the U.S. but around the world.

He'll end our missile defense program. This is the prgram that currently gives us hope that we'll one day be able to shoot down an incoming nuclear-tipped ICBM. Why would he want to deprive us of a technology that could one day save millions of American lives?

He'll take our ICBMs off hair trigger alert, but I didn't think, though I could be wrong about this, that they were on one.

In any event, the Senator simply doesn't sound to me like he's really thought through what he's saying. His strategy for a strong defense seems to be not to have one. It's disturbing to think that someone of his views may be our next Commander-in-chief.

RLC

Badgering Rape Victims

Newsday.com carries a deeply troubling story about a twelve year old girl who was raped, but when the case went to trial the defense attorney badgered the young girl, damaging the credibility of her testimony to the point where the rapist, an adult against whom there was considerable evidence, got off on a reduced charge.

This is outrageous enough but the story takes on a surreal aspect when we learn that the lawyer, despite her aggressiveness toward the young victim and her lack of sympathy for the ordeal the girl was going through, is a prominent champion of women's rights.

The story becomes almost incredible when we learn that the lawyer was Hillary Clinton:

Hillary Rodham Clinton often invokes her "35 years of experience making change" on the campaign trail, recounting her work in the 1970s on behalf of battered and neglected children and impoverished legal-aid clients.

But there is a little-known episode Clinton doesn't mention in her standard campaign speech in which those two principles collided. In 1975, a 27-year-old Hillary Rodham, acting as a court-appointed attorney, attacked the credibility of a 12-year-old girl in mounting an aggressive defense for an indigent client accused of rape in Arkansas - using her child development background to help the defendant.

In May 1975, Washington County prosecutor Mahlon Gibson called Rodham, who had taken over the law clinic months earlier, to tell her she'd been appointed to represent a hard-drinking factory worker named Thomas Alfred Taylor, who had requested a female attorney.

In her 2003 autobiography "Living History," Clinton writes that she initially balked at the assignment, but eventually secured a lenient plea deal for Taylor after a New York-based forensics expert she hired "cast doubt on the evidentiary value of semen and blood samples collected by the sheriff's office."

However, that account leaves out a significant aspect of her defense strategy - attempting to impugn the credibility of the victim, according to a Newsday examination of court and investigative files and interviews with witnesses, law enforcement officials and the victim.

Rodham, records show, questioned the sixth grader's honesty and claimed she had made false accusations in the past. She implied that the girl often fantasized and sought out "older men" like Taylor, according to a July 1975 affidavit signed "Hillary D. Rodham" in compact cursive.

Rodham, legal and child welfare experts say, did nothing unethical by attacking the child's credibility - although they consider her defense of Taylor to be aggressive.

"She was vigorously advocating for her client. What she did was appropriate," said Andrew Schepard, director of Hofstra Law School's Center for Children, Families and the Law. "He was lucky to have her as a lawyer ... In terms of what's good for the little girl? It would have been hell on the victim. But that wasn't Hillary's problem."

And that's the point. Hillary was able to suppress her feminist principles in order to win the case, even if it meant browbeating and confusing a sixth grade rape victim so that the child's testimony was discredited.

The victim, now 46, told Newsday that she was raped by Taylor, denied that she wanted any relationship with him and blamed him for contributing to three decades of severe depression and other personal problems.

"It's not true, I never sought out older men - I was raped," the woman said in an interview in the fall. Newsday is withholding her name as the victim of a sex crime.

Questions: What difference does it make if the girl did seek out older men? Does that justify the rape? Don't feminists like Ms Clinton remind us that sexual provocations on the part of women never justify sexual assault? Is anyone in the MSM ever going to ask her about her tactics in this case?

Answers: None, no, perpetually, be serious.

RLC

Interview With Timothy Keller

Timothy Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhatten and author of the very popular (currently #18 on the New York Times best-seller list) The Reason for God, is interviewed by Anthony Sacramone at First Things.

In answer to a question about how thinking has changed between the 1940s when C.S. Lewis was writing books on Christian apologetics and the current era Keller replies:

Lewis definitely lived at a time in which people were more certain across the board that empirical, straight-line rationality was the way you decided what truth was, and there's just not as much of a certainty now. Also, when Lewis was writing, people were able to follow sustained arguments that had a number of points that built on one another. I guess I should say we actually have a kind of rationality-attention-deficit disorder now. You can make a reasonable argument, you can use logic, but it really has to be relatively transparent. You have to get to your point pretty quickly.

In New York City, these are pretty smart people, very educated people, but even by the mid-nineties I had found that the average young person found Mere Christianity-it just didn't keep their attention, because they really couldn't follow the arguments. They took too long. This long chain of syllogistic reasoning wasn't something that they were trained in doing. I don't think they're irrational, they are as rational, but they want something of a mixture of logic and personal appeal.

Another question tries to pin down how Keller would describe the church of which he is the pastor. Sacramone says: I've heard you refer to Redeemer as a seeker church. Do you see Redeemer as part of the emerging church phenomenon, and what does that mean?

No, no, no, no. The words "seeker church" now I think mean Willow Creek to most people, which is a service that is strictly-Willow Creek branded that term, so I probably can't use it anymore.

Seriously?

Yeah, well the seeker church is a church in which you have sort of low participation, there's a talk, there's good music-but it's not really a worship service. You're not trying to get people engaged. You are targeting nonbelieving, skeptical people as the audience. That's considered a seeker church. And I would have always said that Redeemer is the kind of church in which we're trying to speak-it's a worship service, but we're trying to speak in the vernacular. We're trying to speak in a way that doesn't confuse or turn off nonbelievers. We want nonbelievers to be there. I think that a lot of ministers would never say, "We expect nonbelievers to be constantly there, lots of them there, incubating in the services." And we do. We do expect that. In that sense we'd be a seeker church. But now I'm afraid I don't think it's a good word to use, because when people hear "seeker church" they're thinking something else.

I found that if you define megachurch as anything over two thousand people, then yes, then we are. But here's four ways in which we're not a megachurch, or we don't do things people associate with megachurches. One is, we do no advertising or publicity of any sort, except I'm trying to get the book out there so people read it and have their lives changed by it, but Redeemer's never advertised or publicized. And the reason is, if a person walks in off the street just because they've heard about Redeemer through advertising, and they have questions or they want to get involved, there's almost no way to do it unless you have all kinds of complicated programs, places where they can go. But if they come with a friend who already goes there, their questions are answered naturally, the next steps happen organically, the connections they want to make happen naturally . . . We do not want a crowd of spectators. We want a community.

Secondly, we do almost no technology. We don't have laser-light shows, we don't have Jumbotrons, we don't have overheard projectors, we don't have screens. We don't have anything like that. Thirdly, we have a lot of classical music, chamber music-we are not hip at all. We don't go out of our way to be hip.

There's much more on the interview at the link.

RLC

Three Cheers for Cultural Chauvinism

Lawrence Harrison of Tufts University and author of The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change a Culture and Save It From Itself looks at the assumptions of our nation's multicultural moment and finds much not to like. In an essay in Christian Science Monitor Harrison observes that:

Since the 1960s, multiculturalism has become a dominant feature of the political and intellectual landscape of the West. But multiculturalism rests on a frail foundation: cultural relativism, the notion that no culture is better or worse than any other - it is merely different.

When it comes to democratic continuity, social justice, and prosperity, some cultures do far better than others. Research at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, summarized in my book, makes this clear.

Extensive data suggest that the champions of progress are the Nordic countries - Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden - where, for example, universal literacy was a substantial reality in the 19th century. By contrast, no Arab country today is democratic, and female illiteracy in some Arab countries exceeds 50 percent.

Culture isn't about genes or race; it's about values, beliefs, and attitudes. Culture matters because it influences a society's receptivity to democracy, justice, entrepreneurship, and free-market institutions.

A key component of a successful democratic transition is trust, a particularly important cultural factor for social justice and prosperity. Trust in others reduces the cost of economic transactions, and democratic stability depends on it.

Trust is periodically measured in 80-odd countries by the World Values Survey. The Nordic countries enjoy very high levels of trust: 58 to67 percent of respondents in four of these countries believe that most people can be trusted, compared with 11 percent of Algerians and 3 percent of Brazilians.

The high levels of identification and trust in Nordic societies reflect their homogeneity; common Lutheran antecedents, including a rigorous ethical code and heavy emphasis on education; and a consequent sense of the nation as one big family imbued with the golden rule.

Again, culture matters - race doesn't. The ethnic roots of both Haiti and Barbados lie in the Dahomey region of West Africa. The history of Haiti, independent in 1804 in the wake of a slave uprising against the French colonists, is one of corrupt, incompetent leadership; illiteracy; and poverty. Barbados, which gained its independence from the British in 1966, is today a prosperous democracy of "Afro-Saxons."

In other words, all cultures are not equally good, and some are clearly superior to others. Harrison draws important and doleful conclusions from this fact concerning our efforts in Iraq and our failure to get a handle on immigration. Read the rest of his piece at the link.

RLC

The Next Holocaust

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbollah, a terrorist organization supported by Iran and Syria and operating in Lebanon, declares that they will destroy Israel to avenge the death of Imad Mughniyeh, a murderous terrorist assassinated recently under mysterious circumstances:

The Hizballah leader, in his most vituperative speech against Israel ever, said Friday, Feb. 22: "Arab opposition, including Syria, and popular opposition will eliminate Israel; its armed forces will be defeated and Israel will be left with no army. We will fight as we have never fought before, confronting the Israeli army with a type of combat it has never before experienced." Nasrallah pledged "Mughniyeh's blood would not go unpunished, declaring," He was killed in a pre-emptive Israeli strike, an open war."

Israeli chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gaby Ashkenazi indicated Hizballah planned to seize on an Israeli ground offensive against Gazan missiles to launch a revenge attack in the north and force Israel to fight on two fronts. He told graduating IDF officers: "It is up to us to achieve a quick victory in every confrontation."

What is the rest of the world, particularly the United Nations, doing to see that Nasrallah's prediction doesn't come to pass? The same thing it did during the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s? The same thing it has been doing to stop the systematic slaughter of non-Arabs in Darfur? If the past is any indication of U.N. resolve and dependability they are likely to be doing very little to prevent another war against Israel.

Three relatively recent films give the viewer a clear picture of the utter uselessness and fecklessness of the United Nation's attempts at peace-keeping: No Man's Land, Beyond the Gates, and Hotel Rwanda. Watch any of these and you'll wonder why the U.S. even belongs to this organization and why we help fund it. When Hezbollah launches its war of extermination against Israel we have no reason to think that the U.N. will be of any more help in saving Israeli and Lebanese lives than it was in saving the Tutsis from the Hutus in Rwanda or in preventing the genocide in Sudan.

RLC

Dualism vs. Materialism

Materialist neuroscientist Dr. Steven Novella, in a post that reflects the sour, dyspeptic rhetorical style typical of materialists who are unaccustomed to having their worldview challenged, makes several claims about what we should expect in the relationship of mind and brain if materialism is true. He states:

If the mind is completely a product of the material function of the brain then:

• There will be no mental phenomena without brain function.
• As brain function is altered, the mind will be altered.
• If the brain is damaged, then mental function will be damaged.
• Brain development will correlate with mental development.
• We will be able to correlate brain activity with mental activity - no matter how we choose to look at it.

He is arguing, for example, that damage to the brain will produce impaired mental function and that this is strong warrant for the belief that the mental world is completely reducible to material processes. Dr. Novella is simply wrong about this.

If the mind and brain work in tandem to produce mental phenomena something like a television signal works with a tv set to produce an image on the screen, then nothing really follows from Dr. Novella's claims. In other words, substitute "screen image" for "mental phenomena" in the above claims and substitute "television set" for "brain".

It's true, then, that there will be no screen image without a properly functioning television set, but that doesn't mean that the set is all there is to the production of the image. The signal is a necessary part of the production of the image even though its presence is not apparent to the person viewing the set.

It's true, too, that as the television's settings are altered, the image will be altered, but it doesn't follow that the set is all that's controlling the image.

Moreover, if the set is damaged the image will be disrupted, but it doesn't follow from this that the set is all that's involved in generating the image. In other words, it is one thing to say that the brain, like the tv, is necessary for mental experience, but it is quite another to say, as Dr. Novella does, that it is also sufficient to account for that experience. Neither he nor anyone else has ever come anyhere close to demonstrating that.

Dr. Michael Egnor replies to Novella's argument in a different and interesting way. He cites a 2006 study done on a woman in a persistent vegetative state who had seriously impaired brain function, but whose mental function, as assessed by MRI tests, was indistinguishable from that of subjects who had no impairment.

Egnor's discussion of this study is fascinating and his reply to Novella is very strong. I urge readers interested in the mind/brain controversies in general and the relationship of consciousness to matter in particular to check it out.

RLC

Another Candidate at Risk

Yesterday we talked of fears in some quarters for Barack Obama's safety. Here's another presidential candidate whose safety may be in jeopardy:

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, blamed by many Democrats for their loss of the White House in the 2000 election, said on Sunday he is launching another independent campaign for the White House.

Nader called Washington "corporate occupied territory" that turns the government against the interests of the people. "In that context, I have decided to run for president," he said.

If Nader pulls enough votes away from the Democratic candidate in one or two very closely contested states resulting in another Republican victory like 2000, the left will explode. This would be ironic since Nader would be their hero were he not a political cipher. As it is, he can only earn their hatred by costing them another election. If he does well enough in November to make a difference in the outcome he would be wise to add kevlar to his wardrobe.

RLC

William F. Buckley (1925-2008)

In November of 2005, on the occasion of William F. Buckley's 80th birthday, I wrote the post below as a way of honoring a man who was as influential in my life, especially during the decades of the 70s and 80s, as anyone I can think of. Bill Buckley passed away last night, and I think it appropriate to reprise what I wrote on his birthday:

Anyone who looks back on his life and seeks to identify the influences which led him to the place he presently finds himself will probably be able to point to a half dozen or so people, in addition to his parents, who exerted a strong push on his life in at least one of its aspects.

There are those who help shape one's character, one's ambitions, one's religious, philosophical, and political views, and so on. In my own life there have been several such men, some I knew personally and others whom I never formally met but whose influence I nevertheless soaked up through their written work like leaves soak up sunshine.

One example of the latter is William F. Buckley. When I was fresh out of college in 1969 I stumbled across Mr. Buckley's Firing Line television show. I was just beginning to develop an interest in political affairs, having somehow managed to scoot through college in the ideologically charged 60's with hardly a political thought in my head to show for it.

I was impressed with all the things about Buckley that impress everyone who watches him - his wit, his breadth of knowledge, his mastery of the language, his ability to articulate conservative ideas with an eloquence and charm that disarmed his opponents - but most of all I was impressed with his demeanor. He was never rude or overbearing. He never got nasty or raised his voice. His colloquies with his guests were always marked with courtesy, good humor, and unfailing graciousness (except in his famous debate with Gore Vidal). In those early years of my adulthood he was an exemplar of how political disagreements should be navigated and how discourse should be conducted.

Although I possessed none of his gifts, I subliminally decided that I wanted to be like him anyway, to the extent that I could. I read his books and National Review, the magazine he founded in the 1950s, and found myself wishing to learn all the things I should have learned in college but was too busy being a jock to trouble myself with. I regretted, having fallen under his sway, that I had squandered so many years and opportunities that could have been devoted to the cultivation of a fuller intellectual life.

Eventually, my interests evolved in various directions and followed channels not closely related to politics, but those other pursuits were always in some sense a product of the appetite he had stimulated in me for learning. He had given my appreciation for what Hannah Arendt calls "the life of the mind" a spark, a sturdy kick start, and I have always been grateful for the richness that that has added to my life.

I heard Bill Buckley give a lecture a few years back, and I wanted to tell him after his talk how much he has meant to me, but he was surrounded by adoring fans and besides, I thought, he probably hears stories similar to mine all the time anyway. I've regretted not taking the opportunity then, and I thought I'd write him and tell him what I wanted to tell him that night, but I somehow never got to it. I suppose I assumed that WFB has always been around and always will be. There'll be other opportunities.

Now I see that his 80th birthday is the 24th of this month, and I realize that if I don't do it soon it might never happen. That would be an omission I would deeply regret, so as Mr. Buckley approaches this milestone in his life I've resolved to contact him and tell him what he has meant in mine.

Happy birthday, Bill.

I did send him this post after I had written it, but I don't know if he ever saw it. I hope he did. The AP has an overview of the man and his accomplishments here.

We are deeply saddened at the loss of this great man, but heaven is rejoicing at their great gain.

UPDATE: See National Review Online for their farewell to Bill Buckley.

RLC

Government-Run Health Care

My friend Jason D. links us to this short video which should be required viewing for anyone who thinks that the health care proposals of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are a good idea:

This is an illustration of what happens when people turn enterprises like health care over to the government. We certainly need insurance reform and tort reform, but we don't need socialized medical care, not if we want to be able to get the care we need when we need it.

RLC

Dancer, Farmer, Bottle

Bilbo at Telic Thoughts has an interesting post on the nature of God's action in creation. Bilbo dislikes the idea that God intervenes at intervals throughout history to tinker with things. This seems to him to be inelegant and so he offers a couple of alternative analogies:

The idea of a God continuing to intervene in the universe in a nonsensical hodgepodge repels our sense of the way things should be. That is why in the past I offered an analogy that might help make aesthetic sense of God as designer: a duet. I proposed that we see it as a dance between God and Nature, where God is Fred Astaire, and Nature is Ginger Rogers. Most of the time, Ginger dances on her own two feet, and God merely leads her, invisible to the probing eyes of science. But just as occasionally Fred might pick up Ginger and twirl her around, so might God do the same with Nature, when designing organisms. It's an analogy that might help us make more aesthetic sense of what might be God's relationship with the universe.

But there may be another analogy that might make even more sense of God's action: the image of a farmer planting seeds. In this case, maybe only two or three seeds. The first seed would have been the universe itself, which we are told started out as a very small thing, much smaller than a mustard seed. Yet it has grown into a giant tree, that all the stars and planets can find shelter in. The second seed would be the first microorganisms planted on our planet, billions of years ago. If Mike Gene's hypothesis of front-loaded evolution turns out to be correct, this is all the direct design intervention that may have been necessary. And from this tiny seed grew the huge tree of life that we see around us today.

On the other hand, there may be ways to think of God's relationship with creation which illustrate a more continuous involvement of God in the world. Perhaps we can think of God as a vessel, a bottle, and the world as a liquid that gradually fills the bottle. As the liquid pours into the vessel it takes the shape the container imposes upon it. God, by virtue of His intimate contact with the creation, impresses upon the world the pattern of its development, or unfolding, continuously as the creation moves through time. The biological and physical "shape" or structure of the world, in other words, is a perpetual moment by moment expression of God's intention and immanence, not an episodic phenomenon or a once-and-done event. God, in this view, is the template upon which the world evolves.

RLC

Obama's Safety

The Associated Press, whether intentionally or not, perpetuates the notion that America is irredeemably racist by running an article publicizing the fear of some African Americans that Senator Obama's success has placed him in mortal jeopardy. Their concern is that a black man calling for "change" is going to be the target of an assassin's bullet just like Medgar Evans or Martin Luther King.

Perhaps the fear is legitimate, although we should note that we have to reach back forty years to find precedents. Even so, I don't recall similar articles expressing concern about George Bush's safety when he took on Islamic terrorism, nor was there a lot of concern about his father's safety despite his humiliation of Saddam Hussein in 1991 and the thwarted attempt on his life after he had left the presidency. Nor do we read of concerns for John McCain's safety even though he will undoubtedly continue, if elected, to prosecute the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and target Muslim terrorists around the globe.

In our world, every president and presidential candidate has a bullseye on his chest, and for the AP to suggest that Obama's bullseye is bigger than others just because he's black is to accuse white America of a racism that is presumably, given their lack of concern about the safety of the Bushes and McCain, much more virulent, violent and dangerous than is Islamic terrorism.

Nevertheless, despite the shortcomings of the AP's article there may indeed be good reason to fear for Obama's safety. Consider the startling number of people associated with the Clintons who have came a cropper either by murder, "suicide", or mysterious accident. Of course, it may all be coincidence that the Clintons must spend half their waking hours attending viewings for acquaintances who have passed on prematurely, or maybe there's some kind of voodoo curse on the couple, but even so, if people are concerned about the Senator's safety they may try urging him to not ask Hillary to be his Veep. No sense tempting voodoo.

RLC

Prairie falcon

A western species of falcon, almost never found in the east, has turned up within an hour's drive of my home and thus made a trip to see it yesterday irresistable. The bird is a Prairie falcon, and it's been hanging around some fields and a quarry just north of Shippensburg, PA. The Prairie falcon is about the size of a crow and a much faster flier. There are more strikingly plumaged raptors than this one, but watching him in flight was quite a treat.

RLC

Vantage Point

Debbie Schlussel loves the new movie thriller Vantage Point:

Hollywood is finally giving us true terrorists who are unsympathetic. Hollywood is finally giving us good guys who are good and bad guys who are Islamic terrorists without an excuse or any redeeming value.

In "Vantage Point," out [last] Friday, the terrorists are Islamic, and they are evil, cold-blooded killers. Finally, Hollywood is giving us "truth-in-terrorism." And it's an exciting thriller.

Boy was I ever wrong about "Vantage Point." And boy am I glad I was. As readers will recall, I wrote on this site that the trailer for this movie made it look like this was, yet again, another movie in which Muslims were not actually the terrorists, but good and victimized people mistaken for terrorists--yet another movie in which the Westerners are the bad guys.

But it was the exact opposite. The President (William Hurt) and the U.S. Secret Service Agent (Dennis Quaid) who is the hero in this movie are, without reservation, the good guys. The terrorists are Muslim and they are the bad guys. There is nothing presented in this movie to justify the mass carnage they produce.

There's much more about the movie and its plot at the link. Schlussel criticizes it for taking too long to get going, but, like a roller coaster, once it climbs to the top the rest of the ride is an adrenalin rush. Here's the trailer:

Actually, this isn't the first good movie to treat terrorism in a realistic fashion. If you can't wait for Vantage Point try The Kingdom with Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, and Jason Bateman. It, too, is very good and very believable though it is R-rated so you might not want to sit down to it with the children.

But Schlussel's point is well-taken. So many movies and shows like 24 sacrifice credibility by adopting the politically correct but totally implausible story line that terrorists are disaffected Europeans, CIA renegades, or corporate megalomaniacs motivated by little more than revenge or greed. That may have worked in the 1970s when European terrorism was a serious problem, or in a movie about Ireland's "troubles", but the intelligent viewer simply loses interest in any movie today about global terrorism that features non-Muslims in the role of the terrorist.

It's as if we're being asked to ignore what everyone knows to be true and believe that the naked emperor is actually arrayed in fine raiment simply for the sake of not offending the very people who are trying to kill us. The Kingdom doesn't do this and neither, apparently, does Vantage Point.

RLC

Evolving Sex

The International Herald Tribune has an interesting article on parthenogenesis in Komodo dragons and other species. Parthenogenesis occurs when an ovum produces offspring without benefit of male fertilization, making the offspring a genetic clone of the mother. In other words, it's a form of virgin birth.

Here's one passage of several from the article which caught my attention:

The big question these virgin births raise is this: If some females can get along without males, why does any species have males? The reason is simple. With virgin birth, hatchlings are simply genetic duplicates of the mother. In a world of clones, there would not be enough variation for populations to adapt. Virgin birth, then, is a great stopgap measure to ensure the survival of a species, but works against it in the long haul.

Ah, so easy. Sexual reproduction is necessary to produce genetic diversity, diversity helps a species survive, therefore sexual reproduction evolved through the blind, purposeless processes of natural selection and genetic mutation. This is what some scientists and philosophers refer to as a wave of the wand explanation. It tells us why sexual reproduction evolved while glossing over the much more intractable question of how such a process evolved.

Think of all the changes that have to occur, most of them simultaneously, in order to produce two different sexes of the same species. The evolution of meiosis and the production of gametes in both males and females (before males and females ever evolved), the means of getting the gametes from the male to the female, the entire complex of reactions which occurs when a male gamete encounters the female ovum allowing the male's DNA to penetrate to the nucleus of the ovum, the synchronization of the two sets of chromosomes, the coordination of embryonic development and the entire panoply of anatomical structures and behaviors which need to evolve in order to facilitate the process, along with the physiological and biochemical adaptations which must also be in place. It's no wonder that evolutionary treatments of sex almost always focus on the advantage that sexual reproduction affords, they almost never address the problem of how sex evolved. The problems are staggeringly difficult.

Consider, too, how rare it is that mutations occur that are beneficial to an organism, much less simultaneous beneficial mutations occurring in the same populations of the proto-sexes. Each of these mutations had to confer a survival advantage even before sexual reproduction was possible. Moreover, since both plants and animals reproduce sexually we can assume that this ability evolved pretty early on in the evolutionary process, so it must have unfolded with comparative rapidity.

Well, maybe it all did happen, but the more one learns about the extremely complex series of events and the sheer number of adaptations that must have occured in order to produce fertilization in all sexual species the more skeptical one becomes that chance and nature could, with no conscious intention, produce such a breathtaking process.

The Darwinian, perhaps, can trace out a long, elaborate hypothetical scheme which results in the emergence of sexual reproduction among protists and conclude that, since it is logically possible that it could have happened that way, that therefore it's plausible that it did happen, and since it's plausible then it's probable that it indeed happened because, after all, here we are, and we're sexual creatures.

But logical possibility is hardly a sufficient condition for plausibility, much less probability. Whether evolution produced sexual reproduction, I don't know, but I am quite certain that if it did, it was not the blind, unguided evolution of the Darwinian materialists. Their story of the evolution of sex is a fairy tale of magic wands and pixie dust.

RLC

Global Swelling

The consensus among scientists today is that the earth's continents have drifted apart over the ages due to the spreading of the sea floor caused by the introduction into the crust of new rock from deep in the earth's mantle. This new rock, the theory goes, is exuded through crevices in the mid-ocean ridges and pushes the continents away from each other. The continents then slide under each other along contact faults in a process called subduction. This returns rock back to the mantle where it's melted.

There is a minority view, however, which holds that continental drift is not a result of sea-floor spreading and subduction but rather is caused by an expanding globe. According to this theory (see video) the earth is inflating like a balloon, and it's this expansion which pushes the tectonic plates(continents)apart. The earth's crust was originally a solid shell, the story goes, and over vast time the planet grew in size forcing the crust to fracture and spread. There are http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanding_earth_theory various hypotheses as to the causes of the expansion, but that it happened the narrator of the video, Neal Adams, is quite convinced:

Wait until the global warming people here about this. They'll be hurling themselves off of bridges.

HT: Jonah @ NRO

RLC

The Russian Bear Is Stirring

Recent statements and provocations by the Russian leadership and military suggest to some that Vladimir Putin wishes to initiate a new cold war with the United States by rebuilding Russia's military to a state of parity with American forces. Strategy Page thinks a rebuild of the Russian military is highly unlikely, however:

The government is making a lot of noise about rebuilding the armed forces, and another Cold War with the U.S., but this is all talk, to make the government appear like it's doing something. The military would need massive amounts of money (over $100 billion a year, for a decade or more) to restore any meaningful amount of military power. Nothing near that amount is forthcoming. The government is trying to get the population stirred up so there is less resistance to the purchase of many expensive warplanes and ships.

A lot of this is necessary because China is buying less and starting to offer their own stuff, often containing stolen Russian military technology, on the world market. China is threatening to offer its copy of the Su-27 (the J-11). Currently, half of Russian weapons export sales are Su-27s. The Chinese ignore Russian complaints about the stolen technology. To keep Russian weapons manufacturers in business, the Russian military has to buy more, to make up for the lost Chinese sales. Western firms are also going after the lucrative Indian arms market, which Russia has dominated for decades. Last year, Russia sold $7 billion worth of weapons overseas, and may have a hard time topping that this year.

In other words, the talk of a new military aggressiveness on the part of the Russians is all bluster. They haven't the resource base or the economic power to sustain the kind of program that would be necessary to catch up. The real problem they pose is that out of resentment toward western superiority they may provide assistance to those, like the Chinese and the Islamists who intend to,and can, hurt us.

RLC

Reforming Education

Sol Stern has an article in City Journal that should be read by everyone pursuing or contemplating a career in education or who cares about the issue of educating our children. Stern breaks education reformers into two camps, the incentivists who want to increase competition and rewards for success and the instructionists who believe that the best way to improve our schools is to impose rigorous curricula K-12.

Stern himself used to be an incentivist and acknowledges that they still dominate the reform movement, but he cites three reasons why he's moving away from it. First, alternatives to failing urban public schools are diminishing. Catholic schools, for example, are closing their doors. In Detroit only one Catholic school is still operating in the city. There's no place else for public school students to go even if they had vouchers and tax incentives to leave the schools they're in.

The second problem is that incentives like vouchers simply haven't won the allegiance of most voters and their proponents cannot compete in referenda into which the NEA can pump money and volunteers that choice advocates simply can't match.

The third reason he's reconsidering his position is Massachusetts:

...where something close to an education miracle has occurred. In the past several years, Massachusetts has improved more than almost every other state on the NAEP tests. In 2007, it scored first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading. The state's average scale scores on all four tests have also improved at far higher rates than most other states have seen over the past 15 years.

The improvement had nothing to do with market incentives. Massachusetts has no vouchers, no tuition tax credits, very few charter schools, and no market incentives for principals and teachers. The state owes its amazing improvement in student performance to a few key former education leaders, including state education board chairman John Silber, assistant commissioner Sandra Stotsky, and board member (and Manhattan Institute fellow) Abigail Thernstrom.

Starting a decade ago, these instructionists pushed the state's board of education to mandate a rigorous curriculum for all grades, created demanding tests linked to the curriculum standards, and insisted that all high school graduates pass a comprehensive exit exam. In its English Language Arts curriculum framework, the board even dared to say that reading instruction in the early grades should include systematic and explicit phonics. Now a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, Stotsky sums up: "The lesson from Massachusetts is that a strong content-based curriculum, together with upgraded certification regulations and teacher licensure tests that require teacher preparation programs to address that content, can be the best recipe for improving students' academic achievement."

In other words, those who have been advocating that schools teach what and how they did two generations ago are being vindicated in, of all places, Massachusetts. It remains now for courts and legislatures to wake up and facilitate the removal from middle and high schools those students whose behavior acts as a drag on the rest of the student population. Combine the academic rigor which our schools used to demand of our students along with the behavioral expectations that once prevailed in our schools and our educational crisis will be largely solved. And it won't cost a dime of taxpayer money.

Stern goes on to say that:

The Massachusetts miracle doesn't prove that a standard curriculum and a focus on effective instruction will always produce academic progress. Nor does the flawed New York City experiment in competition mean that we should cast aside all market incentives in education. But what has transpired in these two places provides an important lesson: education reformers ought to resist unreflective support for elegant-sounding theories, derived from the study of economic activity, that don't produce verifiable results in the classroom. After all, children's lives are at stake.

Read the whole essay at the link. There's a lot of discussion on it at Tuesday's Corner blog at NRO.

RLC

Battling Cancer

Tony Snow, former press secretary to President Bush, talks about his battle with cancer. It's pretty inspirational:

He's an amazing guy.

RLC

Why Do People Believe?

According to a Fox News story Oxford University is going to spend $3.7 million to try to determine why it is that people believe in God. Is belief, the academics wonder, an evolutionary adaptation that conferred upon early man a survival advantage or is it something that we absorb from our environment:

Academics have been given a grant to try to find out whether belief in a deity is a matter of nature or nurture. They will not attempt to solve the question of whether God exists but they will examine evidence to try to prove whether belief in God conferred an evolutionary advantage to mankind.

They will also consider the possibility that faith developed as a by-product of other human characteristics, such as sociability.

I know it will sound presumptuous to suggest, but could it be that people believe in God because essentially there are only two options, belief or nihilism, and most people don't care much for nihilism. Now, it's true, I suppose, that the majority of people don't think this way, but it's really pretty hard to escape the conclusion that if God doesn't exist then life is a pointless exercise in futility and most people want to believe in something that makes their lives matter. Belief that there is a God, in other words, makes much more sense of our existential experience of the world than does belief that there is no God and most people intuitively recognize this even if they aren't able to articulate it.

I seek to defend this claim, by the way, in a paper that I've posted here. Maybe if the Oxford dons checked it out they could save themselves a considerable sum of money and use it instead to buy pints all around at the local pub.

RLC

That's a Problem

Even his supporters can't say what Senator Obama has actually done to qualify him for the presidency. Here's Texas state senator Kirk Watson being interviewed by Chris Matthews:

It matters not that Sen. Obama is all hat and no cattle, as they say in Texas. The ladies swoon at his campaign events, he inspires in the multitude "hope" of "change", and he promises, essentially, to convert a few loaves and fishes into food for everyone. What other qualifications does a president need?

Thanks to Jeff C. for the link.

RLC