A Minor Point

I don't want to nitpick the President's speech at Notre Dame, but in it he made a statement that perpetuates a misunderstanding. He said this:

Those who speak out against stem cell research may be rooted in an admirable conviction about the sacredness of life, but so are the parents of a child with juvenile diabetes who are convinced that their son's or daughter's hardships can be relieved.

The President in these lines refers to a class of people which doesn't exist. No one that I know of speaks out against stem cell research. Not even President Bush spoke out against stem cell research. What many people oppose is embryonic stem cell research because it kills a living embryo. There are other ways of creating stem cells and everyone is hopeful that these will bear fruit.

Personally, I wonder about the consistency of those who oppose embryonic stem cell work. I agree that we should not be creating embryos simply to harvest their cells, but I'm not sure how people can object to using surplus embryos produced in a fertility clinic for research purposes but not object to the production of the surplus embryos in the first place.

In other words, fertility clinics produce more embryos for a couple than what they eventually implant in the mother's womb. The surplus is ultimately destroyed. Yet at most there is muted criticism of this practice from the pro-life community. If there are not objections to the way fertility clinics help mothers have children then why make an issue of using the doomed embryos to help others have a better life?

The embryos will ultimately die. To harvest their cells is almost like harvesting organs from an organ donor. If this is morally problematic then surely producing extraneous embryos is also problematic, but if producing extraneous embryos is acceptable then so, too, should harvesting their cells be acceptable.

Having said this, I thought President Bush's ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research was wise. He didn't oppose stem cell research nor did he end embryonic stem cell research. He merely decided that, given the moral concerns of many Americans, it's best to leave such research to the private sector and not use taxpayers' dollars to fund the destruction of those embryos.

RLC

Campus Fascists

Edward Olshaker at American Thinker asks us to....

Imagine it's 1940, and picture Adolf Hitler speaking at a US university, receiving a polite reception, while Winston Churchill is barred from speaking because his safety cannot be guaranteed.

It's unthinkable, yet the very same pro-fascist dynamic is a reality in 21st Century America.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes to America knowing he is a second-class citizen who is denied the free-speech rights enjoyed even by prominent jihadists, having been violently prevented from speaking on campuses in the US and Canada in recent years.

Protestors at Berkeley, the campus once synonymous with the term "free speech," forced the cancellation of Netanyahu's speech there, as well as two subsequent speeches, in November 2000.

And yet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a vicious anti-semite and homophobe, gets a polite reception at Columbia a year and a half ago. So what lesson does this travesty invite us to draw?

Perhaps one lesson is that if you're an ally of the U.S. and the leader of a democracy where people are free to select their government the Left will fight tooth and nail to keep you from being heard, but if you're tyrant and dictator and an enemy of the U.S. then you're more than welcome to present your case on American campuses.

Olshaker is right. Today's Left are the new fascisti. Read the rest of his column at the link.

RLC

Atheists Intrigued by Design

It's difficult for many people, including people in the media, to grasp the idea that intelligent design is not a theory held solely by theists. To be sure, most of its adherents are theists of one sort or another, but there are also a number of atheists who find themselves charmed by the idea that intelligence is somehow responsible for the universe. One example is the philosopher Bradley Monton author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design. Mike Gene talks about an exchange Monton had with another atheist philosopher in which Monton says this:

...atheist-minded philosophers are unhappy with how some intelligent design opponents seem more focused on emotion and rhetoric than argument - they expect better of people (especially philosophers) who are engaging in this debate. For example, I recently got an email from a philosopher of science at a top philosophy program, which read in part:

"I'm also an atheist who thinks that the arguments for ID are far more interesting than philosophers tend to appreciate. I think it's lamentable that the climate now is such that you can't seriously discuss such things without attracting ill will from well-meaning opponents of the religious right.... Writing a book like yours is a brave thing to do and it might make the world a better place."

Gene goes on to discuss the constraints scientists are placing upon themselves in their writing and research in order to avoid giving credence to intelligent design. It's a fascinating post.

Part of the reason why, perhaps, so many think that ID is a religious hypothesis is that they don't understand what a religious claim is. To be religious a claim about reality must go beyond existential assertions about what exists ultimately and assert certain obligations toward that ultimate reality (i.e. worship, devotion, fealty, etc). In other words, the claim that God exists is a metaphysical claim as is the Darwinian claim that whether He exists or not, God is irrelevant to the diversification of life. Both of these claims have religious implications but neither of them is itself a religious assertion.

Philosopher Roy Clouser in his book The Myth of Religious Neutrality puts it differently. He says that what all religions share in common, the core that makes them "religious," is that they all hold that there is something ultimate which depends upon nothing else for its existence and upon which all else depends. According to this definition every thinking person has a religion. For most atheists the religion is materialism, the belief that matter is the self-existent primal source of all that is. For many others it's theism, the belief that the ultimately real is an intelligent, personal mind.

So, here's the point: either ID is not religious because it imposes no duties toward the Designer upon anyone, or, if Clouser's definition be accepted, it's no more religious than is its rival, materialistic Darwinism. Either way, the claim that ID doesn't belong in public school classrooms because it's religious (there may be other legitimate reasons for excluding it, though I can't think of any) is a canard that few who think about the issue in an unbiased fashion will find tenable.

Thanks to Bradford at Telic Thoughts for the links.

RLC

Macho Men

The American Thinker's George Joyce recounts for us an incident on a recent edition of the NPR show "Wait, Wait ...Don't Tell Me":

On Thursday evening's NPR quiz show "Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me" senior Obama advisor David Axelrod made reference to Miss California Carrie Prejean as a dog. Politico is reporting that when Axelrod was asked on the show if he had helped the Obama's choose their recently acquired dog Axelrod replied:

"I was only called in for the final three, and one was Miss California."

When a senior advisor to the President of the United States refers to a courageous, twenty-one year old Christian woman as a dog it's a sign that conservatives have finally found a crack in the Obama administration's armor. Axelrod's remark is also an indication of the off-the-charts sense of superiority that characterizes many of those on Obama's staff.

How much longer will this country be able to endure the utter contempt these progressives have for traditional American values? When will conservatives begin to stand up for this young woman and the values she is defending?

I second Joyce's questions and raise him a couple: How is Axelrod's calling a 22 year-old college student a "dog" any more acceptable than Don Imus calling the Rutgers girls basketball team "nappy-headed 'hos"? For that matter, why doesn't Axelrod call his boss a dog? Prejean's views on gay marriage, the ostensible trigger for the abuse she has received from the left, are precisely those of Barack Obama, at least they are if Obama was telling the truth when he announced his views on the subject.

Why do people on the left (e.g. Bill Maher) feel compelled to insult a young woman who merely gave an honest answer to a question from a judge in a beauty pageant? Is it because she stumbled a bit in her delivery? Is it because her answer is what the majority of people in this country believe about marriage? Is it because she's a Christian and nevertheless posed for some less than Christian photos? Or is it just that she's a Christian, period?

Maybe it's because Axelrod, Maher, Keith Olbermann, Perez Hilton, Michael Musto, et al are arrogant, adolescent bullies who, like prebuscent middle school boys huddling in the lavatory, think it's cool to insult and laugh at people who're better than they are. It's amusing to consider that these heroic, stalwart specimens of left-wing masculinity would never do to, say, a Muslim man what they're eager to do to a gentle Christian college girl.

But perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps these macho tough guys have indeed scoffed at the beliefs of Muslims who hold to much more extreme views on gay marriage than does Carrie Prejean. Perhaps they've courageously laughed with public derision at Islamic law and the Muslim belief in the Prophet. Perhaps they've roundly ridiculed the Muslim's belief that Allah regards homosexual behavior as an abomination worthy of public execution.

Or maybe not. Maybe their courage only extends to mocking harmless young women. It is, after all, much easier to beat up on a co-ed beauty pageant contestant than to take on grown men who are likely to exact a steep price for their insolence.

Anyway, here's the last question: When is the National Organization for Women going to step in and defend this woman from the rhetorical assault these "men" are waging against her?

Okay, you're right. That's a silly question.

RLC

Thought for a Sunday

Among other things, I see this as interesting support for Predestination as opposed to Free Will. But even beyond that, it should cause one to take pause.

And so pride, the loss of humility, is the root of every sin and evil. It was when the now-fallen angels began to look upon themselves with self-complacency that they were led to disobedience and were cast down from the light of heaven into outer darkness. Likewise, it was when the serpent breathed the poison of his pride - the desire to be as God, into the hearts of our first parents, that they too fell from their high estate into the wretchedness to which all humankind has sunk. In heaven and on earth, pride or self-exaltation is the very gateway to hell.

...

The life God bestows is imparted not once for all but each moment by the unceasing operation of His mighty power. Humility, the place of entire dependence upon God, is from the very nature of things the first duty and the highest virtue of His creatures.

...

Humility is a virtue that only comes in power when the fullness of the Spirit makes us partakers of the indwelling Christ and He lives within us.

Andrew Murray, Humility - The Journey Toward Holiness

Contingency Plan

The big fear in the Middle East right now is that the Taliban will topple the current regime in Pakistan and gain control of their nuclear weapons. It's hard to imagine a more frightening circumstance than Islamic terrorists armed with nukes.

To prevent this the military has been training a special ops unit to insert itself into Pakistan, if the Taliban seems on the verge of overrunning it, and to secure the weapons and transfer them to a safe location. Here are excerpts from the Fox News report on this program:

The United States has a detailed plan for infiltrating Pakistan and securing its mobile arsenal of nuclear warheads if it appears the country is about to fall under the control of the Taliban, Al Qaeda or other Islamic extremists.

American intelligence sources say the operation would be conducted by Joint Special Operations Command, the super-secret commando unit headquartered at Fort Bragg, N.C.

JSOC is the military's chief terrorists hunting squad and has units now operating in Afghanistan on Pakistan's western border. But a secondary mission is to secure foreign nuclear arsenals -- a role for which JSOC operatives have trained in Nevada.

The mission has taken on added importance in recent months, as Islamic extremists have taken territory close to the capital of Islamabad and could destabilize Pakistan's shaky democracy.

"We have plans to secure them ourselves if things get out of hand," said a U.S. intelligence source who has deployed to Afghanistan. "That is a big secondary mission for JSOC in Afghanistan."

The source said JSOC has been updating its mission plan for the day President Obama gives the order to infiltrate Pakistan.

"Small units could seize them, disable them and then centralize them in a secure location," the source said.

A secret Defense Intelligence Agency document first disclosed in 2004 said Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal of 35 weapons. The document said it plans to more than double the arsenal by 2020.

What makes the Pakistan mission especially difficult is that the military has its missiles on Soviet-style mobile launchers and rail lines. U.S. intelligence agencies, using satellite photos and communication intercepts, is constantly monitoring their whereabouts. Other warheads are kept in storage. U.S. technical experts have visited Pakistan to advise the government on how to maintain and protect its arsenal.

Also, there are rogue elements inside Pakistan's military and intelligence service who could quickly side with the extremists and make JSOC's mission all the more difficult.

"It's relatively easy to track rail-mounted ones with satellites," said the intelligence source. "Truck-mounted are more difficult. However, they are all relatively close to the capital in areas that the government firmly controls so we don't have to look too far."

JSOC is made up of three main elements: Army Delta Force, Navy SEALs and a high-tech special intelligence unit known as Task Force Orange. JSOC was instrumental in Iraq in finding and killing Abu Musab Zarqawi, the deadly and most prominent Al Qaeda leader in the Middle East.

This seems like our best option in Pakistan should Islamist seizure of the weapons appear imminent. So, what is the plan for Iran?

RLC

Trickle Down

The Washington Post reports that GM will be cutting 2400 of its 6000 dealerships by the end of next year and Chrysler is closing 789 of its 3181 dealerships. Think for a moment the effect these layoffs will have. The corporation gets itself into financial trouble and the problems ramify all the way down to the mechanics working in the service bay and the stockboys working in the parts department. Many of these workers will lose their jobs so they'll have no money to spend in the communities in which they live. There'll be less money spent in restaurants, movie theaters, on home maintenance, etc. which means that those businesses will suffer also. Moreover, when the dealership goes out of business the local community takes a huge hit in its tax revenue. Thus the devastation trickles all the way down to minimum wage workers in every business in the local municipality.

This all seems pretty obvious so why mention it? Because there has been in our country over the last couple of decades a lot of derision leveled at the idea of "trickle down" economics, the idea that what helps businesses at the top helps everyone all the way down the economic ladder. The left misses no opportunity to mock this notion which is a key element in the justification for tax cuts in the midst of difficult economic times. When the corporation has more money to spend everyone all the way down to the waitress in the local restaurant benefits even though they're unaware of it. A rising tide does indeed lift all boats as Ronald Reagan used to say, much to the scorn of his critics.

It's amazing that people have no difficulty seeing that economic malaise is a trickle down phenomenon, but they refuse to acknowledge that economic vigor also cascades through the society and lifts everyone up. When taxes are cut on corporations they have more money to invest in the business and that provides jobs not only for their own employees but, as in the case of the car industry, also for the dealerships and thus for communities all across the nation. Tax cuts also enable the business to keep their prices lower so their customers have more money to spend on other businesses in their town and a prosperous business is a source of tax revenue for the local municipality.

It all seems so obvious that it astonishes me that the left has been so successful in persuading people that the best way to achieve prosperity is to raise taxes on business, increase their costs, and diminish the amount of wealth available to the hundreds and thousands of people who are effected by that business's economic health.

"Trickle down" is almost a law of economics, whether it's trickle down malaise or trickle down prosperity, and what's happening right now at Chrysler and GM should convince even the most otiose of its inexorability.

RLC

Milestone

Tomorrow is a special day here at Viewpoint. It was five years ago, May 16th, 2004 that my brother Bill and I launched this humble venture. It was born out of the conviction that there had to be a better way to share ideas with friends and family than by bombarding them with articles and e-mails. Not only was it annoying to the recipients but it was getting a little cumbersome because among my acquaintances there were different audiences for different topics, and I didn't think that most people had the time to read a lot of the stuff anyway.

I wondered if it might not be more effective to just have a site where people could come if they were interested and find commentary on current events, religion, science, and philosophy - the topics that most interest me. I had no idea how to go about creating such a site, but Bill said that it was fairly easy and set about doing it. Viewpoint is what emerged from his efforts.

Since then we've churned out over 5160 posts on a variety of topics and had over 347,450 hits, averaging around 7500 hits a month over the last three years.

Surely it's a conceit to think that one has something to say that others might wish to read or hear, but I suppose that it's a conceit shared by everyone who writes, teaches or preaches so I don't let myself feel too guilty about it.

I do wonder sometimes, though, how long I'm going to keep it up. It does take time to put a day's posts together, and I often wonder if there aren't other ways I should be spending that time. Then I get an e-mail like the following from a reader named Dave, and I'm energized to keep going for another couple of months.

Dave wrote:

I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for your website. I am relatively new to it, but I look forward to checking it every day. I love the range of topics you post on; it all is very interesting and thought-provoking to me. I am a recent college grad (I grew up in York) now living in Philadelphia, so as you can imagine with the liberal way-of-life out here, it is very refreshing to hear common sense ideas and rational, well-informed thinking.

Your archives and search capabilities are great tools for learning more about specific topics. In fact, since earlier today I overheard people talking about gay marriage, I searched for that on the website and just finished reading nearly all of your posts about it. I now feel as though I have a much more tenable, and convincing, stance should I ever find myself debating someone.

Finally, I feel I must comment on your communication skills. Your command of vocabulary is top-notch. Sometimes I find myself going back and forth between the dictionary and your posts, only to find you've chosen the exact word needed for your idea. In this day of cryptic internet abbreviations and phrases, it is a welcomed change to read your polished writing. It has certainly helped me add to my own vocabulary.

In sum, I really appreciate and admire your site. Keep up the fantastic work.

On behalf of Bill and myself I want to thank Dave and all of you for your readership. It's knowing that you think it's worth your time to come here that makes our time and effort all worthwhile.

Thanks again,

Dick Cleary

Letter of Amends

Robin is a self-described "recovering liberal from Berkeley" who writes her family and friends a letter of apology for all the unpleasantness she put them through before the scales fell from her eyes. It's good, especially the second half where she explains what brought about her epiphany.

Here's the nut of it:

In February of 2008, I saw a new client, a bright and sensitive young woman who came in looking like she just escaped a war zone. In some ways she had; she had innocently shared with others at her job that she voted for Hillary rather than Obama. Immediately she was being targeted for abuse that put her in fear for not only her job, but her life.

We both suddenly became aware that something had grown really dark in the Democratic Party. I started hearing about many other incidents where loyal Democrats were being physically and emotionally threatened for supporting Hillary. A woman in Berkeley had her front window broken because it displayed a poster of Hillary. Randi Rhodes, an Air America talk show leftist, called Hillary a f______ witch. (Rhodes was recently promoted to a national talk radio show, illustrating another disturbing trend: the deafening silence about what Rush Limbaugh has dubbed the new "thug-ocracy.)

An acquaintance had her car broken into, and the only item stolen was a NoObama bumper sticker. A South Park episode featured an episode where a nuclear weapon was being aimed at Hillary's genitals. My local greeting card store sold very flattering cards about Obama, insulting ones about Hillary, and a Hillary "nutcracker." When I complained, the young male manager literally laughed in my face.

Things went from bad to worse when Sarah Palin entered the scene. When Geraldine Ferraro ran for Vice President, there was no debasement of her character, no sexual threats. But with Palin, a full scale "wilding" ensued that chillingly reminded me of the random sexual attacks on women by gangs of men in New York. She was called every vile name in the book by both male and female liberals.

Actress Sarah Bernhardt hoped a gang of black males would rape her. When Palin's church was torched with children inside, the press was missing in action (somehow I imagine the press would have been all over this if Obama's church were torched). Not only was the misogyny disgusting, but the classism was abhorrent. The Democrats, by ridiculing Palin's voice and her education, were acting like arrogant snobs. The party had changed, I had changed, and the differences looked irreconcilable.

The final straw for me was when a close friend flew into a rage at me when she learned I wasn't supporting Obama. The political became personal when she began impugning my character. Worse yet, she tried to intimidate me into changing my mind by threatening to dump me.

Suddenly a light went on. The peace and love and flower power of the old left was dead and gone (if it even existed to begin with except in my imagination). The Democrats had morphed into a power hungry Thought Police, and I was done with them. My new motto in life: don't PC on me.

Robin concludes with these questions:

But now the problem is: how in the world does one be a conservative these days? How to stay brave and committed when conservatives are being targeted, punished, and shunned on a daily basis? How to sleep at night knowing that the country I have finally come to love may be destroyed from within by a massive Big Brother government?

Maybe one reason the Democratic party has shifted so far toward the hard left is that a lot of intelligent people like Robin, people who sincerely believed that liberalism held the answers to our problems, have been so repulsed by the tactics of the ACORNs and the antics of the Keith Olbermanns that in order to preserve their own sense of self-dignity and integrity they just have to dissociate themselves from it all and leave the party to the leftists. Maybe.

RLC

Agile or Indolent?

Changing one's mind is indicative of one of two things: intellectual nimbleness (i.e. the ability to change course in light of new evidence) or intellectual laziness (a failure to think matters through in the first place). When the change of mind occurs only occasionally we may assume the cause is an agile mind. When it happens frequently it's more likely due to the latter cause. In the president's case I'm not sure yet which it is, but his switches seem to be occurring with uncomfortable frequency, at least in matters bearing on national defense.

We noted earlier Mona Charen's recitation of some of them, and now Jake Tapper of ABC informs us that Obama has had yet another change of heart.

President Obama defended his decision to fight the release of photos showing detainee abuse Wednesday afternoon, saying it would only put American troops in harm's way and create a backlash against Americans.

"The most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger," the president said before departing on his trip to Arizona. "Moreover, I fear the publication of these photos may only have a chilling effect on future investigations of detainee abuse."

The move is a complete 180. In a letter from the Justice Department to a federal judge on April 23, the Obama administration announced that the Pentagon would turn over 44 photographs showing detainee abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq during the Bush administration.

In other words, the Obama administration is going to fight against releasing the photos even if it means going to court and even if it means opposing the ACLU.

This is a good decision. Indeed, in almost every instance where the president has flipped I think he's come down on the side of doing the right thing, but it's worrisome that he could not see it was the right thing until after he had made so much political hay promising the left he would do the wrong thing. Did he really think through those promises before he made them or was he just iterating the knee-jerk positions of his leftist constituency? Do his tergiversations suggest that the president is intellectually gifted or intellectually lazy?

If it is the first we have cause to be hopeful. If it's the second we have cause to be alarmed.

RLC

SCOTUS Pick

There's been much speculation as to who President Obama will pick to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court. There seems to be agreement that the nominee will probably be a woman, an African-American, someone relatively young with legal experience and leftist views of the importance of the Constitution.

Given all this there's one obvious candidate who meets all the criteria and who would have the nomination simply by asking, yet her name has never been mentioned: Mrs. Obama. You heard it here first.

RLC

Saving What's Left

New Scientist comments upon the parlous state in which many species of birds find themselves due primarily to the loss of their habitat:

Darwin would not be amused. A bird native to the Galapagos islands, the medium tree-finch, this year joined 191 other bird species newly added to the critically endangered list, the roster of the world's most threatened species.

But while the medium-tree finch is in jeopardy because of parasitic flies introduced to the islands, most of the species on this year's red list of threatened species are imperiled by inexorable loss of their habitat.

There was some good news, however, with six critically endangered species downgraded to "endangered". Some owed their reclassification to successful conservation programmes. The threat to the Mauritius Fody, for example, was lifted by moving the remaining birds to an island off Mauritius free of predators.

Another success story is Brazil's Lear's macaw, named after the English nonsense poet Edward Lear. The spectacular parrot has increased fourfold in number through a joint programme involving the Brazilian government, local landowners and conservation organisations.

Aside from habitat loss and predation, the other ominous factor is the impact of climate change, says Fowlie. Mountain-living birds, for example, would die out if the climate they rely on shifts north or south to non-mountainous zones.

Lear's Macaw

I confess to being very conflicted every time I drive around my county and see the huge swaths of land being gobbled up for housing, highways and shopping malls. I find myself having to fight the temptation to be inwardly pleased that the economy is slowing down and housing starts are depressed. I keep asking myself if it isn't wrong to view the reduced pace of the loss of natural lands as a silver lining to the economic crisis.

I know the economic slump is costing people jobs, and that's the source of my inner conflict. I don't want anyone to be out of work, but neither do I want to see our beautiful countryside and crucial habitat buried under vast deposits of asphalt and cinder block.

If I had my way I think I'd preserve it all and require that all new building be done in areas that are already developed, like our cities and the empty malls that long ago closed their doors.

Don't bother to write to tell me how impractical that is. I know it is. That's why I'll never have my way.

RLC

Chuck Defarge

Here was Democrat senator Chuck Schumer in 2004 when the sobriety imposed upon our political class by 9/11 still had some residual influence:

"Do what you have to do." Gosh. That sounds like Senator Schumer is saying that if the government has reason to believe that a catastrophe can be averted by squeezing information out of a terrorist then most of his colleagues and he himself would advocate extreme methods of interrogation, methods much more gruesome, one assumes, than waterboarding or sleep deprivation.

But that was then. Now the Madame Defarges of the Democratic party, as Michael Barone aptly refers to them, are cackling with glee at the prospect of Bush officials being carted off to the guillotines. So here is the same Chuck Schumer a month ago:

Let's be charitable and decline to call this hypocrisy. Let's just think of it as moral and logical incoherence. Chuck Schumer like Nancy Pelosi and a host of others in their party were in favor of "enhanced" interrogation before they were against it.

So what's different now from then? The chance to avenge themselves on the Bush administration has presented itself to the Democrats who have gained congressional majorities and control of the White House, so they're seizing the opportunity. They've got their knitting needles working furiously, weaving into the sweater as many names of the people they hate as they can.

Thanks to Hot Air for the videos.

RLC

Thirteen Mysteries

If you're into science you might find this article by Michael Brooks at New Scientist interesting. Brooks lists thirteen mysteries that have (mostly) cosmologists and physicists baffled. To give you a sample here's #9:

It's one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds. It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues."

One suggestion is that some property of empty space is responsible - cosmologists call it dark energy. But all attempts to pin it down have fallen woefully short. It's also possible that Einstein's theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked when applied to the very largest scales of the universe. "The field is still wide open," Freese says.

I have to say that I think cosmologists are much more confident that dark energy is the culprit than what this article suggests. I wrote about this phenomenon last December. After discussing what dark energy is believed to be doing to the universe I mentioned that the most fascinating thing about it is this:

Scientists have determined that the amount of dark energy present in the universe cannot vary from the actual value by more than one part in 10(120). That's a one with 120 zeroes after it. If it did deviate from its actual value by more than this amount life would not be able to exist in the universe that would result. That is an unimaginably precise setting. It's the equivalent of the mass of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of the mass of a single electron.

What an amazing thing that this dark energy is calibrated to just the right value to allow life to survive. What an extraordinary amount of blind faith it takes to think that it's just a lucky accident.

The biggest mystery about dark energy, it seems to me, is not what it is but rather how it came to be so exquisitely calibrated. Or maybe that's only a mystery for materialists.

RLC

Wouldn't You Know

Okay. I knew it would happen. As soon as I made the comment that I hadn't heard of any conservative making a joke about killing those in the political opposition, or words to that effect, along comes the first instance of it in my memory and puts egg on my face.

A sportscaster told an unfunny and pathetic "joke" and conservative radio talk show host Mark Davis allegedly repeated it with alleged approval. I use the qualifier "alleged" because I didn't hear it myself, but am relying on Camille Paglia's description:

Two days after watching "Seven Days in May," I was utterly horrified to hear Dallas-based talk show host Mark Davis, subbing for Rush Limbaugh, laughingly and approvingly read a passage from a Dallas magazine article by CBS sportscaster David Feherty claiming that "any U.S. soldier," given a gun with two bullets and stuck in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, would use both bullets on Pelosi and strangle the other two. How have we come to this pass in America where the assassination of top government officials is fodder for snide jokes on national radio?

Paglia is right to be upset by this. So am I. This sort of talk should have no place in our public discourse. Wishing or even joking about the suffering and/or death of one's opponents is reprehensible and disgusting whether it's Wanda Sykes telling the sick joke or David Feherty (whoever he is). Moreover, those who laugh at these gibes, whether it's Barack Obama and the Washington press corps, or a conservative talk show host, evince a serious and unpleasant character flaw that should invite our disdain for the flaw and our prayers for the offender.

RLC

Hope He Dies

In 1994 a journalist named Julianne Malveaux distinguished herself by admitting that she hoped Clarence Thomas would develop heart disease and die. More recently Bill Maher lamented that an assassination plot against Dick Cheney during a visit to Afghanistan had been foiled. During the Bush years a a novel was written that fantasized his assassination. Now an alleged comedienne named Wanda Sykes not only calls Rush Limbaugh a traitor and a terrorist, which trivializes both, but adds that she wishes he'd suffer kidney failure.

The remark was despicable enough, but did our president and the audience have to laugh at it? What kind of people are these that they find talk of the death of their political opponents so hilarious?

I know I ask this question a lot, but this video clip just demands that I ask it again. Can you imagine the press reaction had a conservative said something this vicious, this stupid, this cruel about a Democrat? Have you ever seen a Republican president laugh when someone says in his presence that he hopes some Democrat suffers a fatal illness? Come to think of it have you ever heard a conservative say anything like this? Me neither. It's not that conservatives have so much class, it's that liberals, are at least too many of them, have so little.

For more on this see Kathryn Lopez at NRO.

RLC

Power of the Happy Man

Jason sent us a link to an essay by Peggy Noonan on the late Jack Kemp. Like much of what Noonan writes it is graceful and touching. Kemp was a political role model, one who is emulated too infrequently but whose example, if followed, could have a powerful impact on an electorate that seems to be wearying of the politics of humorless viciousness.

Kemp was driven by two things: the power of ideas and a genuine concern for the poor. He believed that the way to help the poor was not just by giving them stuff, which never works, but by giving others the incentive to offer opportunities for the poor to work their way out of their poverty.

Here are a couple of paragraphs:

Kemp was the kind of person politics wants more of, the kind who remind us that it is a great profession, that at its best it is a calling, an actual vocation. We all know politicians who are cynical, and whose interaction with the public leaves them convinced of their superiority. Kemp was the opposite. As his son Jimmy said this week, "My father didn't think people were the problem but the solution." He believed people had talent, dynamism, brilliance and hunger, and a good government was one that did not thwart but helped them, through sound policy, to become what God built them to be.

Jack knew how to lead. He spoke of ideas with affability and authenticity. He wasn't angry and dark and simmering, didn't glower. He had the power of the happy man. "Sometimes now the cost of admission into politics is bitterness, bile and guile," said the pollster Kellyanne Conway. He was old-style, and humane. Ms. Conway got her first job in politics as an intern in Kemp's office. "Who are you?" he once said. "I'm just an intern here," she said. "No one is just an intern here," he replied. He saw politics as a team sport, assigned, delegated and promoted from within. In all the years Ms. Conway knew him, she never heard him ask what the polls were saying. When he ran as Bob Dole's vice presidential nominee in 1996, he flopped as a hatchet man. It wasn't in his DNA.

I hope you'll read the rest of Noonan's column. It paints an image of a man we might wish all our political leaders would pattern themselves after.

RLC

Flip Flops

Mona Charen tells us that the Obama administration is reversing itself on many of the national security positions it took during the campaign. Having soundly and frequently rebuked the Bush administration for warrantless surveillance, Guantanamo, denial of trials to detainees, military tribunals, and other assorted crimes against humanity, it looks like Obama is quietly pursuing the same policies, and may even decide to keep Gitmo open for business:

You won't find it on the front pages, but the Obama administration has been walking back its position on many national-security questions. Attorney General Eric Holder has asserted that the U.S. has the right to hold suspected terrorists without charges. Solicitor General Elena Kagan has reiterated that position. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently told Congress that military commissions were "still very much on the table," and rumor has it that the Obama administration will soon formally reverse itself on Guant�namo.

The New York Times reported that "Officials who work on the Guantanamo issue say administration lawyers have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying some terrorism suspects in federal courts. Judges might make it difficult to prosecute detainees who were subjected to brutal treatment or for prosecutors to use hearsay evidence gathered by intelligence agencies." No kidding? Not only that, but not a single detainee was read his Miranda rights when he was taken into custody.

Additionally, Congress is balking at letting Guantanamo's inmates anywhere near their hometowns. Sen. Dianne Feinstein even put Alcatraz off limits. "It's a national park and tourist attraction," she explained.

Former senator Rick Santorum, now with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has been keeping an eye on other national-security flips by the new president. Remember how Obama had lambasted the Bush administration for relying on the "state secrets" privilege? The Obama Justice Department has already invoked the doctrine twice - most recently to defend the National Security Agency's surveillance of communications. The Justice Department explained that "attempting to address the allegations in this case could require the disclosure of intelligence sources and methods that are used in a lawful manner to protect national security. The administration cannot risk the disclosure of information that could cause such exceptional harm . . . " Query to the ACLU: Does that mean the Obama administration is "shredding the Constitution"?

It would be a lot easier to commend the president for bending to reason and choosing to follow the Bush polices were it not for the fact that he has been so contemptuous of those very policies and the people who implemented them. Instead of seeming wise he comes across like a callow teenager who takes shots at his elders on matters he scarcely comprehends and then is startled to learn that the most sensible course is to do the very things he condemned and derided others for doing.

A bigger man would publicly acknowledge his misjudgment and admit that Bush was correct after all.

RLC

Suspicious Minds

Uh oh. There's something fishy about that $328,000 photo of Air Force One over New York. Actually there are several things fishy. The folks here are saying that for some reason the White House's story doesn't add up and that the Obama administration isn't being straight up with us about this fiasco. Imagine that.

I don't know whether there's more to this that we aren't being told - after all this is the most transparent administration in history - but I have to say that there are some puzzling questions being raised, some of which had occurred to me but which I never really thought much about (Like why did the photo have to be done when it was and why is it of such amateurish quality?).

Anyway, check it out. It'll satisfy your minimum daily requirement for suspiciousness.

RLC

Unconditional Love

Dennis Prager is always worth reading and this recent column is no exception. In it he discusses the significance of the fact that English is the only major language that has the concept of "to earn":

One of the reasons for the ascendance of the English-speaking world has been that the English language is almost alone among major languages in having the word "earn." Those of us whose native language is English assume that the phrase "to earn a living" is universal. It isn't. It is almost unique to English. Few languages have the ability to say this.

In the Romance languages, for example - a list that includes such major languages as Spanish, French, and Italian -- the word used when saying someone "earns" money, is "ganar" in Spanish, "gagner" in French. The word literally means "to win." In Hebrew the word "marveach" means "profits." In German, the word "verdient" means "deserves."

Obviously, it is very different to "win" or to "deserve" or to "profit" than to "earn."

Since the 1960s-'70s, a concerted effort has been made to weed the word, and therefore the cultural value, of "earning" from American life. Increasingly little is earned. Instead of earning, we are increasingly owed, or we have more rights, or we are simply given.

Many American kids no longer earn awards or trophies for athletic success. They are given trophies and awards for showing up. These trophies are not earned, just granted -- essentially for breathing.

This is a good insight and I think there's a lot to it. Prager then builds on the idea of "earning something" by launching an interesting disquisition on the concept of unconditional love:

Another increasingly widespread concept that undermines the notion of earning is "unconditional love." The term, which was barely used prior to the 1960s, is now ubiquitous. It is a prominent goal, a human ideal to strive for. The idea of having to earn love is more than unheard of today; it would strike most moderns as morally suspect.

We expect unconditional love not only from parents to babies and toddlers, but to children of any age, no matter how they act. Parental unconditional love means that all people, no matter how disgracefully they act --- even toward a parent -- and no matter how old they are, must be shown infinite love from their parents. Parental love is never to be earned, always to be given.

We expect God to show unconditional love to all people, again no matter how they act. According to the doctrine of divine unconditional love, God loves sadists as much as He loves the kindest individuals. No one earns God's love; we receive it, like sports trophies, for breathing. Many fine people believe this about God, but I think it is religio-cultural-specific, and non-biblical. In 15 years of study in a yeshiva I had never heard the phrase, and it would have struck me, as it still does, as quite odd. It depicts God as a love machine who, like an air-conditioner that emits the same amount of cold air no matter how the inhabitants of a house act, emits the same amount of love no matter we act. It means that we in no way influence God's love for us. I don't find that comforting. And it is certainly no more likely to induce decent behavior in human beings than a God who does show conditional love based on human decency.

Here I think Prager slips. The Christian doctrine of the atonement is, I think, a paradigmatic example of unconditional love. It's predicated upon nothing that man deserves. God suffers and dies in Christ as a profound demonstration of his love for us and to pay the price for man's betrayal and infidelity. As a consequence each person is offered the gift of forgiveness and reconciliation to God. That seems to me to be an act of pure agape, or unconditional love. Of course, whether we accept that gift is up to us, and many people choose to reject it. God doesn't force it on them, but that He nevertheless makes it available to them is an act, I think, of pure unconditional love.

Prager has more to say about this, which you can read at the link, but the matter of forgiveness leads into the next part of his essay.

We also expect forgiveness to be given without being earned. Many people believe in what I call automatic forgiveness -- the obligation to forgive anyone any crime, committed against anyone, no matter how many victims and no matter how removed from my life. Thus the pastor of a church attended by then-President Bill Clinton told the president and all others at a Sunday service that all Christians were obligated to forgive Timothy McVeigh, the terrorist murderer of 168 people. Did McVeigh earn this forgiveness? Of course not. So where did the notion of unearned forgiveness come from, especially unearned forgiveness from people who were not the victims of the evil being forgiven? It is one thing for me to forgive those who have hurt me; it is quite another for others to forgive those who have hurt me. God Himself demands that we earn forgiveness. The term for that is repentance. No repentance, no forgiveness.

Here I think Prager is exactly right. Few things sound sillier to me than someone who lost nothing and no one in the 9/11 terror proclaiming that they forgive the terrorists. Who do such people think they are?

What does it mean to forgive someone who has done you no harm, anyway? To forgive a person does not mean to forget what they did, it means to not hold what they did against them - to not demand retribution. If someone murders another person's loved one it's simply absurd for a third individual, who had no connection to any of the people involved, to say that he forgives the murderer.

Finally, the increasingly powerful culture of entitlement and rights further undermines the value of earning anything. The more the state gives to its citizens, the less they have to earn. That is the basic concept of the welfare state -- you receive almost everything you need without having to earn any of it. About half of Americans now pay no federal income tax -- but they receive all government benefits just as if they had paid for, i.e., earned, them.

America became a great civilization thanks to a culture based on the value of having to earn almost everything an American got in life. As it abandons this value, it will become a mediocre civilization. And eventually it will not be America. It will be a large Sweden, and just as influential as the smaller one.

I think Prager is right about this, as well. We should be compassionate with those less fortunate, but it should be made clear to everyone involved that our largesse is the fruit of compassion and is not an entitlement. When people think they're entitled to the contents of your wallet the desire to help them dwindles as rapidly as resentment toward them rises.

It's a major difference between conservatives and liberals that conservatives see a sense of entitlement as a serious flaw in social welfare programs and liberals seem to be relatively unconcerned about it. Most liberals would be indifferent to your right to decide whether to keep and how to dispose of what you earned and they're much more inclined to think that those who have earned little are somehow entitled to have a share of what you have worked hard for.

RLC