Nice People

I wonder how many McCain supporters there are in this crowd:

HT: Wolking's World

RLC

Flew on Dawkins

In The God Delusion author Richard Dawkins has a few snide comments to make about Antony Flew's much heralded conversion from atheism to deism which was based largely on Flew's belief that there's too much evidence of the universe having been designed to discount it.

Now Flew replies to Dawkins. The riposte is reproduced at bethinking.org, but unfortunately there is no link there to the original paper.

For a much more extensive critique of Dawkins' book click on The God Delusion listed in the left margin of this page under the heading of Hall of Fame.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

Great Conservation News

It's easy to get depressed when thinking about the rapidity with which natural lands and habitat are being gobbled up by development throughout North and, especially, South America. For those who delight in the wonders of nature and the beauty it offers, the statistics on its rate of disappearance are glum. So this news out of Ontario, Canada is as welcome as it is surprising:

Ontario has made the largest conservation commitment in Canadian history, setting aside at least half the Northern Boreal region - 225,000 square kilometres - for permanent protection from development, Premier Dalton McGuinty announced yesterday.

It's an area almost the size of the United Kingdom.

"It is, in a word, immense. It's also unique and precious. It's home to the largest untouched forest in Canada and the third largest wetland in the world," McGuinty said.

The Northern Boreal region covers 43 per cent of Ontario but few people call it home. About 24,000 people, mostly in native communities accessible only by air, live there. It is home to approximately 200 sensitive species of animals, including woodland caribou, wolverine and lake sturgeon, which have been driven from large parts of the more southern forest by logging and other development.

The land that Ontario will permanently protect from timbering and mining is also home to 5 million juncos, 4 million magnolia warblers, 3 million palm warblers, 3 million Swainson's thrushes, and 2 million Tennessee warblers, just to name a few species.

See also this article by Scott Weidensaul at The Nature Conservancy.

A small portion of the preserved wilderness in Ontario.

RLC

Campaign Contribution

Having run an editorial by Barack Obama last week on his Iraq policy, the New York Times has chosen to reject a similar piece by John McCain. The ostensible reasons are given here by editor David Shipley. McCain's editorial can also be read at the same site.

Consider it a campaign contribution by the Times to the Obama campaign.

UPDATE: NEW YORK (AP) - New York Times Co. says its second-quarter earnings fell 82 percent from the year-ago quarter boosted by a one-time gain. Meanwhile, print advertising revenue continued to shrink.

Wonder why.

RLC

Radovan Karadzic

It took thirteen years, but former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic, accused architect of massacres and the politician considered most responsible for the deadly siege of Sarajevo, was arrested Monday evening in a Serbian-U.N. raid ending his reign as the world's most-wanted war crimes fugitive:

His alleged partner in the persecution and "cleansing" of tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Croats, former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic, remained at large.

A psychiatrist turned diehard Serbian nationalist politician, Karadzic is the suspected mastermind of mass killings that the U.N. war crimes tribunal described as "scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history." They include the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, Europe's worst slaughter since World War II.

Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador who negotiated an end to the Bosnian War, ....calculated that Karadzic is responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of 300,000 people, because without him there would have been no war or genocide.

The charges against him, last amended in May 2000, include genocide, extermination, murder, deportation, inhumane acts, and other crimes committed against Bosnian Muslim, Bosnian Croat and other non-Serb civilians in Bosnia during the 1992-1995 war.

"These offenses include a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing directed at non-Serbs, organized attacks on places of worship, the operation of concentration camps, and the mass murder of thousands of Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat civilians," the White House statement added.

It's hard to believe that Europe stood by and watched this genocide take place only fifty years after Hitler, but they pretty much did. It was only when the United States decided that we could no longer allow Muslims to be slaughtered by the tens of thousands and began bombing Bosnian targets that the killing stopped.

Quick quiz: Were we right to intervene militarily in Bosnia to stop the killing? If so, was there a significant difference between Bosnia under Karadzic and Milosevic and Iraq under Saddam? If not, were we justified in deposing Saddam? Explain your reasoning.

RLC

Ten Years?

A couple of months ago Senator Obama said he would campaign in all 57 states and now it appears that he expects to be president for the next "eight to ten years" (see video). I'm sure that the Senator knows that he's limited by the constitution to two four year terms, he was educated as a constitutional lawyer, after all, and I don't want to make too much of his lapses. Such things happen to the best of people.

Nevertheless, Dan Quayle was positively crucified for misspelling "potato" by the same media that lets these howlers from Obama just float on off into the ether, and no one needs to be reminded how George Bush has been made the object of contemptuous ridicule because of his various solecisms. Yet the media which found ample time to chortle at Quayle and Bush is too preoccupied striving to touch the hem of Obama's garment to apply the same standards of rhetorical punctilio to him.

Link: sevenload.com

Perhaps the MSM should be required to file with the elections commission as a 527 group.

RLC

Innumerable Piles of Corpses

Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler, writes a longish but important essay which traces the main lineaments of Western thought about human nature through the 19th and 20th century. The essay is titled The Dehumanizing Impact of Modern Thought: Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Their Followers, and it shows clearly how the ideas of these thinkers prepared the ground for the horrors of the 20th century.

Weikart begins by recalling the words of Viktor Frankl:

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who endured the horrors of Auschwitz, astutely commented on the way that modern European thought had helped prepare the way for Nazi atrocities (and his own misery). He stated, "If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. I became acquainted," Frankl continued, "with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment--or, as the Nazi liked to say, of 'Blood and Soil.' I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers."

Read the whole essay at the link. It will help you to understand why a lot of people are convinced that atheistic materialism leads ineluctably, in the enthusiastic words of 19th century Darwinian Ludwig Büchner, to "innumerable piles of corpses".

RLC

Other Possibilities

My friend Byron chides me for the post immediately below this one where I said that: "By choosing this site for his speech Obama tacitly endorses the symbolism of the Victory Column and makes himself appear just as blissfully ignorant of European history and culture as the feckless tourist who speaks no French."

Byron correctly points out that I should not have said that Obama was "tacitly endorsing" the symbol since there are other posible explanations for his choice of this venue. For one, it's possible that Obama knows the history behind the Victory Column and is going to use this backdrop to somehow criticize the mindset which lies behind it.

It's also possible that he actually doesn't know the history of the Column and would not have chosen it if he had.

Of course, if the Senator doesn't know the history then the last clause of the passage quoted above obtains, and if he doesn't use the occasion to make a speech which "deconstructs" (to use Byron's word) this expression of German military power then it seems we're back to my original formulation.

RLC

Innocent Abroad

Having been rebuffed in his attempt to hold a rally at the Brandenburg Gate in Germany Senator Obama has settled on the Siegessaeule or Victory Column in the heart of downtown Berlin. This is an odd choice for the candidate who scoffed at American visitors to Europe who can only say merci beaucoup. The Victory Column celebrates German military victories over our allies (France, Denmark, and Austria) and was placed there by Adolf Hitler who looked at it as a symbol of German military prowess. By choosing this site for his speech Obama tacitly endorses the symbolism of the Victory Column and makes himself appear just as blissfully ignorant of European history and culture as the feckless tourist who speaks no French.

And why does he need such symbolic backdrops anyway? The man is a candidate, not a President. Is he hoping to draw huge crowds of enthusiastic Germans in order to convince undecided Americans that the Europeans would love us if only we elected him as President?

Ed Morrissey writes:

Hitler didn't just move the monument to its more central location. He had a taller column built for it as well, to emphasize its message of German military domination over Europe. He saw it as a message to Germans of their destiny - as well as to other Europeans as their destiny as well. It was never meant as a symbol of peaceful, multicultural co-existence.

Team Obama has outdone themselves on symbolism with this choice. They've managed to make their hosts uncomfortable for a second time with their choice of rallying point, and perhaps more so this time. If one wanted to talk peace, what worse location could one choose than Adolf Hitler's favorite monument to militaristic domination? One has to wonder how France, Denmark, and Austria will feel about Obama rallying German masses under the Siegess�ule. Deja vu?

Obama could be excused for his gaffe, except for two reasons. His team certainly understood the historical weight that the Brandenburg Gate would have lent his event, so why didn't they bother to ask the Germans about the Siegess�ule? Quite obviously, the Germans understand the meaning and subtext of the monument, and most of them wonder why Obama does not. Maybe this is a better example of clueless Americans traveling abroad than those who can only say merci beaucoup.

The more basic question is why Obama feels the need to conduct a campaign event among Germans. Meeting with foreign leaders makes sense for a man with no foreign policy experience whatsoever, but that doesn't require massive rallies among people who aren't voting in this election. In his rush to look impressive for no one's purposes but his own, Obama has made himself look ignorant and arrogant all over again.

RLC

Giving Peace a Chance

The Bush administration has taken considerable heat from the right for meeting with the Iranians to discuss their nuclear weapons program. I don't think this criticism is really warranted. Surely the administration anticipated that they would have near zero success persuading the Iranians to draw down, but they did the right thing by meeting with them for two reasons:

First, there was a vanishingly small chance that the Iranians would have a Libyan moment and decide that they couldn't sustain the opprobrium of the world nor the fear of U.S. military action. Too much is at stake for President Bush not to at least allow for the possibility that a face-to-face meeting might provoke Iranian second-thoughts.

Second, and more importantly, the U.S., if it's going to take more serious measures down the road, simply has to make every effort to settle this matter peacefully. To take more aggressive action against Iran without at least having tried face-to-face talks would have been precipitous and unforgiveable. Doubtless, too, some of our allies are insisting that their support for a strike on Iran is contingent upon our exhausting every other avenue first.

Now that the talks have come to naught the next steps will likely be deep sanctions and a blockade, either of which are likely to provoke an aggressive response from Iran and a consequent all-out massive retaliatory strike against their nuclear facilities, military, and government. The most likely window for an escalation is after the November elections but before the next president takes office.

We may have little choice in the end but to do what's necessary to prevent the Iranians from getting these horrific weapons, but we're not there yet. President Bush, in my view, did the right thing by giving peace a chance.

RLC

Facts and Theories

Casey Luskin at Evolution News and Views is beginning a five part series of posts on these five questions:

1. Are Darwinists correct to define "theory" as "a well-substantiated scientific explanation of some aspect of the natural world" or "a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence"?
   
2. Under such a strong definition of "theory," does evolution qualify as a "theory"?
   
3. Is it correct to call evolution a "fact"?
   
4. Is it best for Darwin skeptics to call evolution "just a theory, not a fact"?
   
5. "All I wanted to say is that I'm a scientific skeptic of neo-Darwinism. How can I convey such skepticism without stepping on a semantic land mine and getting scolded by Darwinists?"
   

His response to #1 can be read here.

RLC

Irony

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has called President Bush a "total failure":

"You know, God bless him, bless his heart, president of the United States, a total failure, losing all credibility with the American people on the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject," Pelosi replied. She then tsk-tsked Bush for "challenging Congress when we are trying to sweep up after his mess over and over and over again."

Pelosi's outburst was a departure. Her usual practice in public has been to call Bush's policies a failure - not his presidency or him, personally. Pelosi's remarks are the latest evidence of the Democrats' throw-caution-to-the-wind approach to Bush in the waning days of a presidency weighed down by an unpopular war and soaring gasoline prices.

President Bush's approval ratings hover around 28%. The Congress which Ms Pelosi leads is at 8%. Congress has done nothing since Pelosi took the reins except try futilely to defund the troops in Iraq, harass Bush administration officials, and obstruct whatever the President has attempted to do. Even in these dubious pursuits she has had few successes, and yet she has the chutzpah to call Bush -- a man who has liberated 50 million people from oppression, rescued millions more Africans from the ravages of disease and starvation, kept the U.S. free for seven years from a terrorist attack, kept an economy which has experienced several critical shocks from going into recession -- a total failure.

Ms Pelosi has given us a good example of how little people sometimes try to make themselves look big and important by tearing down those who dwarf them.

RLC

Ego

Charles Krauthammer is not Senator Obama's biggest fan, but he has an idea who is. Read his clever and amusing essay to see who gets his vote.

RLC

Post-modern Crackup

A student of mine, Tim, reminds me of this 2003 article in Christianity Today by Chuck Colson who writes about what he sees as the post-modern crackup. I recall that Brian McLaren took exception in CT to Colson's analysis of the faults and future of post-modern thinking, but McLaren's writings on the subject suffer from the fact that he never seems able to bring himself to define exactly what he means by "post-modern". As a result, his critique seemed unfocussed.

Anyway, I couldn't find McLaren's piece so I can't link to it and won't say any more about it.

In Colson's essay he points out that people cannot live with the assumption that there's no ultimate truth, that the only truth is what's true for me and the group I identify with:

Is postmodernism-the philosophy that claims there is no transcendent truth-on life support? It may be premature to sign the death certificate, but there are signs postmodernism is losing strength:

I spoke at my alma mater, Brown University, in June, arguing that without acknowledging moral truth, it's impossible for colleges to teach ethics. I've been saying this since the late 1980s, all over America, and I've yet to be successfully contradicted. Whenever someone claims his alma mater teaches ethics, I ask him to send me the curriculum, which invariably turns out to be pure pragmatism, utilitarianism, or social issues like diversity and the environment-good things, but not ethics. At Brown-one of the most liberal campuses in the country-I was shocked when the professor who introduced me acknowledged that he could no longer teach ethics, adding: "Chuck Colson will explain why."

Read the rest of what Colson says at the link. He talks about how young people seem to be abandoning the assumptions of post-modernity for something more solid, but I'm not so sure this is really happening today. Barack Obama, for example, has waged a campaign that appeals to all of society's post-modern impulses - his campaign's emphasis on style and image over substance, their shifting truth claims, etc. - and young people are soaking it up.

Even so, Colson's piece is a good read.

UPDATE: Byron has sent along links to McLaren's response to Colson along with Colson's reply. Check it out here. RLC

Zigzagger

Byron and I have been having a back and forth over whether Obama has been prevaricating on his plans for Iraq or whether his position is simply so nuanced that it only seems like he's flip-flopping or talking out of both sides of his mouth when, in fact, he's merely been stressing different elements of his plan to different audiences.

Now comes a McCain campaign video that quotes Obama in a before and after format. I don't care much for their "translations", but the juxtaposition of what Obama has said on different aspects of his Iraq policy at different times makes it pretty hard to get a fix on what he actually believes and what he'll actually do.

The video is a little long, but at the very least it is cumulatively a pretty powerful indictment of Obama's ability to remain consistent:

HT:Hot Air

RLC

Which Makes More Sense?

We posted yesterday on what seems to be the Democrats' lack of seriousness about doing something to increase oil supplies. Today we read that Nancy Pelosi is insisting that oil companies drill on federal lands to which they have already been granted access. The oil companies say that the cost of exploring these lands for oil is prohibitively high and the risk is that there's too little oil on these lands to make drilling profitable.

The oil companies want to drill where they know there's oil, and the Democrats want them to drill where there might be none.

HT: Ramirez

RLC

Vile

Patterico wonders why the LA Times, which has to approve all comments made to its blog, would have allowed about one fourth of the comments concerning Tony Snow's death to be such vile, despicable trash.

I read that Michelle Malkin's site got some bad stuff in her comments section when she posted on the news of Ted Kennedy's cancer, and, if so, it's not just the left that reacts in such abominable ways, but some of this has to be seen in order to be believed. It's hard to imagine that there really are people this sick and deranged out there.

RLC

Loser Letter #8

In her next installment in her series of Loser Letters Mary Eberstedt writes the first of a two-part explanation for how she went from a Christian Dull to an atheist Bright. Citing the works of atheist heroes Peter Singer and Stephen Pinker, inter alia, she reveals how the loss of belief in "The Loser" is leading to a grand new moral paganism.

RLC

Unserious

Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats urge us to open up our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower the price of gas at the pump and also to cut back on our exports. If Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority leader, has his facts right, Pelosi's proposal simply reveals how unserious the Democrats are about reducing prices:

The fact is that, though they won't say it, the Democrats have long been pushing for higher gas prices as a conservation measure - Obama even admitted that his only problem with high costs is that we got there too soon - and now that we have them they don't want to see them lowered. This is an odd position for a party that claims to be concerned about the pain felt by the little guy who is paying more for everything because gas is more expensive. The rich aren't suffering from higher pump prices, its the poor and the middle class that are being squeezed, and their champions in Congress don't seem willing to do much about it.

RLC

More from Real Change

Here are a few snippets from Newt Gingrich's book Real Change:

• The U.S, Department of Agriculture has paid more than a billion dollars in subsidies to deceased farmers over the last seven years.
• The GAO reports that there are about 55,322 criminal illegal aliens in the country who have been arrested over 459,614 times. About 15,000 of these illegals have eleven of more arrests.
• It's not a crime in California for a public employee to lie while trying to get a disability pension.
• Unions are demanding, and the Democratic party supports, the right to get rid of secret ballot elections. This would eliminate seventy years of laws protecting workers from intimidation and coercion.
• FEMA spent $67 million on ice for Katrina victims that was never delivered. It was stored for two years and then FEMA spent another $3.4 million to melt it.
• FEMA spent $878.8 million on 25,000 manufactured homes for people displaced by Katrina. Eleven thousand of them were never used because FEMA prohibits placing homes in a flood plain.
• Only 25% of ninth graders in Detroit's public schools graduate on time. In most American cities the number is less than 50%.
• A white businessman in Detroit was called a racist for offering the city school district $200 million dollars to build fifteen charter schools to help poor black kids get an education. His offer was declined when the Detroit Federation of Teachers threatened to strike if it was accepted.
• In 1960 Ghana had the same per capita income as South Korea. South Korea adopted a free market approach to economic growth and Ghana adopted socialism. Today South Korea is the twelfth wealthiest nation in the world and Ghana languishes at number 100. Ireland was among the poorest countries in Europe two generations ago. Today, after a generation of cutting taxes, investing in infrastructure, and becoming investment-friendly, it's close to the wealthiest per capita nation on the continent.
• Meanwhile, our Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley act in 2002 which piles massive accounting burdens on American business creating a regulatory environment which, together with our laws regulating litigation, is driving business overseas. As a result, New York is at risk of losing its position as the center of world financial activity. If it does it could mean the loss of $15 to $30 billion dollars and as many as 60,000 jobs.
• Unless Social Security is fixed it will run out of funds to pay benefits by 2042, but in 2017 it will be paying out more than it takes in. In order to finance the pay-outs it will have to sell its trust fund bonds. Since there is no cash to buy them they will have to be paid for by raising taxes $6.5 trillion dollars.
• Under the Civil Rights Attorney's Fees Award Act of 1976 anybody who brings an even partially successful civil rights suit may have the defendant pay all the legal fees for both parties. Successful defendents, however, still have to pay their own fees. There is thus an enormous incentive to press civil rights cases on school districts and municipalities and defendents find it cheaper to settle than to fight. The result of this is that those with an anti-religious agenda have little to lose by continually harrassing schools with litigation and schools often give up without a fight.
• In 2005 a $286 billion transportation bill was loaded down with $20 billion in earmarks which are essentially handouts to constituents for things like sprucing up neighborhoods in which a Congressman lives, museums about prisons, and millions of dollars to organizations whose existence can't even be confirmed. The bill was signed into law by President Bush.

We need a government which is responsible to the people and which will not treat our money as wealth to which it's entitled. We need to get rid of those who protect and feed off bureaucracy and elect those who will make government work. First, though, we need more citizens who care enough to find out which of these the candidates asking for their votes are.

RLC