Why Democrats Won't Fix Health Coverage

Read this brief but disturbing article in the New York Post and you'll understand all you need to know about the disingenuousness of the Democrats' health care reform proposals:

Dr. Jacquelline Perlman, who's helped deliver hundreds of Brooklyn babies in her 12-year OB-GYN career, is calling it quits -- and citing sky-high malpractice insurance and plunging income.

"I've decided to retire from obstetrics," said Perlman, 42. "It breaks my heart. Malpractice costs are a big part of it. It's a very sad story.

The last straw, she said, came last spring when her insurer, the Combined Coordinating Council, noting the high risk of covering obstetricians, canceled her policy and those of doctors she practiced with at Brooklyn Women's Health Care, a New York Methodist Hospital affiliate.

She found a new insurer, but the damage was done. Her annual malpractice premium now runs about $160,000 -- for a doctor against whom no malpractice case or even so much as a settlement has ever been upheld. And, she said, in the last five years, as her malpractice-insurance costs have risen, her income has dropped by 20 percent.

The reason doctors have to pay so much is not simply because of extortionist insurance companies which, as we've seen recently, operate on very slim profit margins, but because of tort law that allows doctors to be sued for exorbitant amounts of money. Suing doctors is profitable business for trial lawyers and because settlements are often very high insurance companies have to charge a high premium for their coverage. Not only does this drive doctors like Perlman out of the profession it causes those who stay in to charge their patients more which means that patient insurance becomes more expensive as well.

What's the solution? Tort reform. Is tort reform in any of the Democratic plans? No. The reason is, as DNC chairman Howard Dean admits, trial lawyers are among the biggest contributors to Democrat politicians and as such they hum the tune to which the Dems dance.

It's pretty clear that Democrats are not really interested in making health care cheaper and keeping doctors in the business. If they were they'd defy their lawyer friends and include genuine reforms in their legislation. No, the health care reform Obama and the Democrats are pushing, it seems plausible to conclude, is not about reforming health care at all. It's about turning more control over individuals' lives to the government and making us all wards of the state.

RLC

Puzzlement

President Obama told a gathering of military personnel the other day that he "would never rush the solemn decision of sending [them] into harm's way." Neither does he seem inclined to hurry the decision to send reinforcements to their brothers in arms struggling to stay alive in Afghanistan.

Which makes me wonder. At the same time the President counsels prudence and patience in Afghanistan, he's insisting that we absolutely cannot wait another month to pass health care reform. It's a matter of the highest urgency that it be passed now because thousands are losing their jobs and thus their coverage every day. It's so urgent, in fact, that we cannot even delay long enough to allow legislators and the public to study the bill. Yet even if one of the plans currently before Congress passes tomorrow the reforms won't really kick in until 2013, so why the rush?

Why must we wait month upon month before deciding whether we'll send reinforcements to our troops in Afghanistan who are in critical need right now of more men and equipment, but trip all over ourselves in our hurry to pass legislation that won't take effect for another three years? It's a puzzlement, at least for those who believe Mr. Obama is being honest about his desire to do what's best for the country. For those more cynical, I suppose, it's perfectly understandable.

The cynical view is that Mr. Obama is dithering on Afghanistan because he's simply waiting for a justification for pulling out even though he has declared that conflict to be a "war of necessity." Meanwhile, he's trying to rush health care reform because he knows that the longer his party's proposals are scrutinized the more odious they'll look to both voters and lawmakers.

That's the cynical view, mind you, not necessarily our view here at Viewpoint.

RLC

Bumper Sticker Ads

An anonymous New Yorker has forked over $25,000 in order to place ads in city subway stations stating that "A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you?"

I think this is great, actually. It should afford numerous opportunities for intelligent theists to ask in all sorts of venues what such a claim means and to call attention to those who may not be aware of it the utter moral bankruptcy of the atheist worldview.

It would be great fun, for example, to ask someone who agrees with the ad what they mean by the phrase "good without God." What makes an act "good," anyway? Why, exactly, is kindness good and cruelty bad? Why, if atheism is true, is it good to preserve resources for future generations and why is squandering them on ourselves bad?

When all the smoke is blown away from the flustered and confused responses the atheist would make to these questions what remains is the claim that what's right is just whatever feels right to him or her. In a world without God there's nothing that makes kindness or conservation good and nothing that makes cruelty and profligacy bad. The preference for one rather than the other is simply a biochemical reaction occurring in our brains. It has no real significance and no authority. It can certainly impose no obligation upon us to live one way rather than another.

Listen to a few atheists on the matter of whether there's any moral good or bad in their world:

"If God is dead everything is permitted." - (Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov)

"One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life...only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best." - Charles Darwin (Autobiography)

"Ethics is just an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate." - biologist E. O. Wilson and philosopher Michael Ruse

"Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear .... There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death....There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will...." - Will Provine, professor of biology at Cornell

"There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it." Voldemort (Harry Potter)

"There is no good or bad there is only the law." Inspector Javert in Les Miserables (Movie, 1980)

I rather doubt that the organization placing the ads in the Manhattan subway stations will put up any of these quotes among them. Better to stick to bumper sticker slogans and hope that no one thinks too deeply about them.

RLC

Collapsing Icon

An article in the Wall Street Journal documents the continuing collapse of one of Darwinism's favorite missing links. Ever since the 19th century the fossilized remains of a creature named Archeopteryx have been touted as an intermediate animal between dinosaurs and birds, but accumulating evidence is casting grave doubt on whether Archaeopteryx qualifies as a bird at all. Indeed, intelligent design advocates of various stripes, including both young and old earth creationists, have been saying for decades that Archaeopteryx could not have been the ancestor of modern birds, but so much had been invested in this creature as an example of a missing link that few in the mainstream press would listen. Now it seems that the scientific community itself is moon-walking away from their earlier claims of iconic status for Archaeopteryx:

The feathered creature called Archaeopteryx, easily the world's most famous fossil remains, had been considered the first bird since Charles Darwin's day. When researchers put its celebrity bones under the microscope recently, though, they discovered that this icon of evolution might not have been a bird at all.

When the fossils of Archaeopteryx were found in 1861, it helped prove Charles Darwin's new theory of evolution. The creature that had both bird-like and dinosaur-like features has long been thought of as the archetypal bird. But a new study shows Archaeopteryx might not have been a bird at all.

An examination of its bone cells revealed for the first time that the 150-million-year-old creature had the slow growth rate of a dinosaur, not a bird, an international research team reported this month. Comparing it with other early fossils, the researchers concluded that the telltale physiology of modern birds likely didn't emerge until 20 million years or so after Archaeopteryx flapped its broad wings across primordial lagoons.

Newly discovered fossils have prompted scientists to revamp their assumptions about Archaeopteryx's distinguishing features over the last decade. A cornucopia of fossil finds in China demonstrated that feathers coated many dinosaur species, not just birds. Other surprises still may be concealed in trays of unexamined museum specimens. The first and most complete fossil of Archaeopteryx, found in 1855, was misidentified as a flying pterodactylus for 115 years. The newest finding, though, demonstrates that our understanding of even well-studied fossils like Archaeopteryx -- scrutinized, measured, modeled for 150 years -- can still be upended.

The cell structure showed that Archaeopteryx developed one-third as quickly as a typical bird today, more like a normal dinosaur, the researchers reported. Bone cells from the two other bird-like creatures also showed a similar, dinosaur-like growth pattern. The researchers concluded that the first physiologically modern bird was a species called Confuciusornis, which lived about 130 millions years ago -- about 20 million years after Archaeopteryx. Unlike Archaeopteryx, this species didn't have teeth or a reptilian tail.

Modern birds usually mature in a few weeks, but it might have taken Archaeopteryx two years or more, the scientists said. When fully grown, it was the size of a raven and weighed about 900 grams, three times as heavy as previous estimates. "We are going to have to revisit a lot of things on this creature," says Dr. Erickson. "This is not the final word on rewriting its biology."

It might not be a bird, but Archaeopteryx remains a key exhibit in the history of science, as the first step toward understanding avian evolution. All told, researchers have identified 100 anatomical features that birds share with theropod dinosaurs, such as tyrannosaurus or allosaurus.

There are lingering doubts that birds today are descendants of dinosaurs. Researchers at Oregon State University recently argued that the distinctive anatomy that gives birds the lung capacity needed for flight means it is unlikely that birds descended from dinosaurs like Archaeopteryx and its kin (We wrote about this last June)

There's more to this article at the link, but the upshot is that a lot of the stuff you learned in high school biology about evolution ... just isn't true.

RLC

New Feature

Jason writes to commend us for our new feature on Viewpoint. Other keen-eyed readers will note that our tech support has added a nifty innovation to our page. Brother Bill, my technical guru, has inserted a "share this" function at the bottom of each post that will enable readers who are so inclined to share posts in a number of different vehicles with their friends and acquaintances who might be interested in what we talk about on Viewpoint.

I'm excited about the opportunities this gives our readers to expose others to our site, and I encourage you to use it liberally. We like the traffic.

RLC

The Enemy in Afghanistan

Strategy Page offers an informative analysis of the nature of the enemy we face in Afghanistan. Contrary to what some might think, it's not just militant insurgents like the Taliban. The greater long term problem is posed by drug gangs:

The enemy in Afghanistan is a many headed beast. American intelligence has compiled a list of nearly 500 Taliban and drug gang leaders. If all these guys were to suddenly disappear, the violence would swiftly change to internal battles within the gangs, as lower level men fought for control of dozens of leaderless Taliban and heroin producing gangs. While you can't destroy the gangs, you can greatly reduce their effectiveness. This is particularly true of the ones that chiefly carry out terror attacks. The drug gangs have the incentive of money, which constantly brings in more ambitious people. This has been the experience in places like Colombia, where the only successful strategy has been to interrupt drug production, and deny the drug gangs actual control of territory. For Islamic terrorists like the Taliban, killing the leadership is the key, because these leaders (who include those with technical skills) are difficult to replace. Thus groups like the Taliban have been destroyed in many other countries in the last two decades. But in Afghanistan, the Taliban are not the main enemy; the drug gangs are. Without the drug money, the Taliban become a troublesome Pushtun faction, not a mercenary military power that seeks to run the entire country again. That's never going to happen, as the non-Pushtun majority would go back to the civil war (that the U.S. intervened in during its late 2001 invasion).

The lower level of foreign troop casualties in Afghanistan is largely due to the lower skill levels among terrorist leaders. Despite much money and effort, the roadside bomb campaign in Afghanistan is not nearly as lethal as the one in Iraq was....But in the long run, foreign governments have a more troublesome problem with Afghanistan, and that's the growing quantity of heroin coming out of there. This is causing more and more grief in the West. Leaving Afghanistan alone means doing nothing about the heroin supply, and this will eventually become politically unacceptable. Most Western politicians are aware of this, even if the media that reports on them is not (or, at least, is not admitting it yet.)

The drug gangs are protected by four large Taliban coalitions....Inside Afghanistan, there are field commanders for the Pakistan based organizations, as well as several drug gangs based in Helmand province (and other parts of southeastern Afghanistan). Helmand has become a difficult area for drug gangs to operate in, and they are trying to establish new operations farther north. But the locals are resisting this. Not because they don't want the cash the drug business can bring, but because they don't want the cheap opium and heroin, which they know, from experience, creates widespread addiction, especially among the young. For these tribal societies, such addiction is a poison that causes severe physical and social damage. While some Pushtuns down south have become addicted to the money and power of heroin, most Afghans want nothing to do with it. That's why most of the heroin production has been concentrated in one province - Helmand.

Russia is very concerned about how things turn out in Afghanistan. That's because Russia has become the main transportation route for Afghan heroin headed for the most lucrative markets in Western Europe and North America. The heroin is cheaper in Russia (because it gets more expensive the farther you have to smuggle it) and there are nearly three million addicts there (out of a global total of 16 million). This is a growing problem for the government, and attempts to seal the Afghan border have failed. The smugglers have a tremendous monetary incentive to get the heroin into Central Asia and thence to Russia. The heroin creates a trail of corruption and addiction as it makes its way across Eurasia. But the largest consumer of heroin, and its raw material, opium, is Iran (which lies astride the lucrative export route to the Persian Gulf). With nearly as many addicts as Russia (and less than half the population), the religious dictatorship in Iran is beside itself over the drug problem (which produces lots of crime and anti-social behavior). Pakistan also has an addict problem but not as bad as in Iran (where there is lots of oil money for drug purchases, and lots of upper class addiction).

Interesting stuff.

RLC

More Bad News

The U.K. Daily Express gives us a heads up on a report on a World Health Organization study due out later this year that links cell phone use to brain tumors. We've seen and posted other similar reports and although I don't know what to make of them, it certainly seems that the unanimous verdict has been that excessive use of these devices is not good for your brain's health.

The question I have is if the signal produced by these phones has enough energy to reach a cell phone tower what is it doing to your brain cells as it passes through your skull? Is the signal any more potentially ionizing than normal radio waves? I don't know. Anyway, here's the article:

Long-term mobile phone users could face a higher risk of developing cancer in later life, according to a decade-long study.

The report, to be published later this year, has reportedly found that heavy mobile use is linked to brain tumours.

The survey of 12,800 people in 13 countries has been overseen by the World Health Organisation.

Preliminary results of the inquiry, which is looking at whether mobile phone exposure is linked to three types of brain tumour and a tumour of the salivary gland, have been sent to a scientific journal.

The findings are expected to put pressure on the British Government - which has insisted that mobile phones are safe - to issue stronger warnings to users.

Have a nice day.

RLC

Rare Bird

This handsome little sprite is a Black-throated Gray warbler, a bird normally found in the west and southwestern U.S. I've seen them in Arizona but never east of there and in fact, it only occurs in Pennsylvania a few times in any decade. This week, though, a Black-throated Gray turned up near Carlisle, PA and was seen by dozens of observers.

It was a great find and a special treat for those us lucky enough to have the chance to enjoy it.

RLC

Why It's Hard to Build an Afghan Army

We often hear of the difficulties our troops face trying to get Afghan forces to fight their own war, but less often are we told what those difficulties actually are. This piece at Strategy Page gives us an idea. Essentially they are two: Not enough military trainers supplied by our allies and a largely illiterate pool of Afghan recruits:

Efforts to expand the Afghan army to 134,000, hopefully by 2011, are running into a lot of problems. One of the key ones is a shortage of foreign trainers. The government wants a force of 200,000, but first foreign allies must be convinced to donate enough money and trainers. The training center NATO has set up is reorganizing so that it can up the number of soldiers trained from 4,000 a month, to 5,000. This is being done by condensing the training and cutting the course length from 10 to 8 weeks for enlisted troops, and 25 to 20 weeks for officers. But there is a persistent shortage of foreign trainers. There should be about 8,000, but there are only about half that many.

The shortages are made up by using (often inexperienced) Afghans, which lowers the quality of the training. Then there is the illiteracy problem (most recruits, like most Afghans, can't read). Afghanistan is finding that illiteracy is a growing problem in the army. Only about 25 percent of recruit are literate. While this can be ignored for the lower ranking troops, NCOs need to read. Illiterate recruits also take longer to train, and more effort to work with. The U.S. has provided an intensive literacy course for troops, which gets most of them to basic ("functional") literacy within a year.

In addition to being able to read signs and maps, the newly semi-literate troops are taught to sign their names, and write out the serial number of their weapon. Illiterate troops selected for promotion to sergeant (NCO), are given more literacy training. That's because being able to read and write has long been a critical asset for any army. The Roman Empire, at its height 1800 years ago, had an army over 100,000 troops, a third of which were literate. But with modern armies, an abundance of technology makes literacy even more necessary. The Afghans can get by without it, but can do a lot better with it.

The article mentions a third problem as well:

The shortage of foreign trainers has meant that many troops get sub-standard training. But by Afghan standards, it's a pretty effective force. Nearly tripling its size will take several years, if the same training methods are used. That's because of the high desertion rate. Most Afghans see their tribe as their highest loyalty, while recognizing Afghanistan as something they are part of, but not necessarily fond of. The Afghans want a larger force to deal with the Taliban insurrection, the growing power of the drug gangs, and possible trouble with Pakistan or Iran. None of these issues are of any great concern to most Afghan soldiers, unless they are problems that affect their own tribe.

Afghanistan's a mess, and how President Obama handles it will largely decide how historians judge his foreign policy.

RLC

The Endgame

It has often been said that poverty needs no explanation. It's the natural state of humanity to be poor. What needs an explanation is why, at rare points in history, a society emerges in which a significantly large fraction of its people are economically well-off.

Any explanation for this phenomenon that credits governmental policies such as are espoused by our current political leadership, however, is a non-starter. The reason can be illustrated by a glance at a basic difference between economic conservatism and economic liberalism. Simply put, conservative policies are designed to make everyone wealthier whereas liberal policies ultimately make everyone poorer.

I don't say this to score a cheap political point, but rather to highlight an obvious truth. Liberal nostrums such as high debt burdens, high taxes, burdensome regulations on commerce, and heavy disincentives for taking economic risks - the very fuel of the entrepreneurial system - all have the inevitable result of stifling productivity, reducing jobs, and diminishing net income.

It makes one wonder why anyone would favor policies which have such baneful effects. I suspect the answer, in many cases, has to do with the liberal notion of social justice. As long as there's a disparity between the top and bottom classes in a society then that society is, in their minds, ipso facto unjust, and the greater the disparity the greater the injustice. Liberals tend to assume that if you have wealth you must have gotten it by taking it from someone else and therefore it's the role of government to take it away from you and return it to those you have exploited.

The most just society, in their minds, is one where the distribution of wealth is relatively uniform. This is certainly Barack Obama's view and he has said as much on several occasions. In this view, wealth is static. There's only so much to go around. The notion that wealth can be created and multiplied is outside their ken. So their goal is to redistribute what wealth there is so that everybody has roughly the same amount.

Conservatives, on the other hand, argue that the better solution is to give everyone the opportunity to become wealthier by, in part, inculcating in people a set of values that includes getting an education, staying away from alcohol and drugs, not having children outside of marriage, getting married and staying married, having a strong work ethic, etc. Nevertheless, such disciplines are hard and liberals think it basically unfair to expect people to impose such severe restraints upon themselves. It's much easier to simply take the wealth from those who have it and give it to those who don't, and this is the path that liberals almost always endorse.

Of course the easiest way is often the most foolish way. As soon as the upper classes realize that their hard work, sacrifice, and deferred gratification is being exploited to subsidize those for whom such exertions are anathema, they'll soon enough decide there's no point in subjecting themselves to those ascetic rigors any longer. Indeed, why should they toil when they can't keep but a small portion of what they earn anyway? Eventually, the goose will die and the golden eggs will stop flowing. There'll be no more wealth to redistribute, and the U.S. will become a giant second or even third world nation.

That's the likely end result of the President's policies whether he intends it for us or not, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to think that he doesn't.

RLC

Woman to Watch

Among conservatives there's a great deal of love for Sarah Palin. Even if they don't think she'd make a good Presidential candidate, most think she'd make a fine President, but the reality is that it's hard to imagine her getting through a campaign without being so savaged by the media that she becomes unelectable.

In the last year, however, another strong woman has emerged who, many conservatives believe, would someday make both an outstanding candidate and an outstanding President. She's bright, articulate, and principled, and so the Left, unsurprisingly, is beginning to turn the same guns on her that've been trained on Sarah Palin for the past year. The harder they try to destroy her, however, the better she looks.

To find out who this impressive woman is go here, read the article about her written by Noemie Emery, and remember her name. I think we'll be hearing a lot more about her in the years ahead.

RLC

Atheist Delusions

Theologian David Bentley Hart has favored us with a wonderful book which he has titled Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies, a takeoff from Richard Dawkins' God Delusion, the basic argument of which is the target of Hart's book. Hart doesn't spend much time deconstructing Dawkins' book itself but rather addresses himself to the larger genre of atheistic tomes which have flooded the marketplace of late.

Hart takes their main premise that religion generally, and Christianity specifically, have been toxins in the bloodstream of human civilization and with an eloquence that's often lapidary, exposes such claims as utterly lacking in significant historical foundation. By way of christening his rebuttal Hart launches in chapter one a witheringly eloquent assault on the thinking of such as Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and their epigones which is worth the price of the book all by itself.

Subsequent chapters take us on an excursis of the ancient world into which Christianity was introduced. It was a world of unbelievable brutality, violence, and superstition, a world in which women and slaves were property and newborn children were often left along roadsides to die from exposure. He then chronicles how Christianity changed all that, not all of a sudden and certainly not perfectly, but inexorably nevertheless. Along the way he puts to rest all sorts of myths about the history of the Christian church.

For instance, everyone has heard how Christianity oppresses women, but the history of Christianity simply doesn't support this myth and, in fact, shows that Christianity has done more to elevate women to equal status with men than any other belief system or culture had ever done. Consider how the status of women in the Roman world changed under the influence of the Christian church.

...there can be little question regarding the benefits that the new faith conferred upon ordinary women - women, that is, who were neither rich nor socially exalted - literally from birth to death. Christianity forbade the ancient pagan practice of the exposure of unwanted infants - which is almost certainly to say, in the great majority of cases, girls - and insisted upon communal provision for the needs of widows - than whom no class of persons in ancient society was typically more disadvantaged or helpless. Not only did the church demand that females be allowed, no less than males, to live; it provided the means for them to live out the full span of their lives with dignity and material security. Christian husbands, moreover, could not force their wives to submit to abortions or to consent to infanticide; and while many pagan women may have been perfectly content to commit their newborn daughters to rubbish heaps or deserted roadsides, to become carrion for dogs and birds or (if fortunate) to become foundlings, we can assume a very great many women were not. Christian husbands were even commanded to remain as faithful to their wives as they expected their wives to be to them; they were forbidden to treat their wives with cruelty; they could not abandon or divorce their wives; their wives were not their chattels but their sisters in Christ....Christians had been instructed by Paul that a man's body belonged to his wife no less than her body belonged to him, and that in Christ a difference in dignity between male and female did not exist....

Christian emperors instituted laws which, though we today might wish went further than they did, were nevertheless unprecedented among prechristian pagans:

Constantine decreed laws that eased the hardship of widows, shielded women from prosecution in public, forbade divorce on trivial grounds, made public accusations of adultery against women illegal, and protected girls against marriage by abduction and forcible proleptic "consummation."

Theodosius and his successors went even further....A wife abandoned by her husband simply on the grounds of domestic unhappiness was now entitled not only to reclaim her dowry but to retain her husband's betrothal gifts to her as well....inheritance law was made more equitable in general by assuring that the estates of deceased women passed uncontested to her children. A girl whose father prostituted her was entirely liberated from his authority, and (more remarkably) a slave girl similarly abused by her master ceased to be his property.

In other words, rights and protections were conferred upon women and slaves under the aegis of Christianity that had no parallel in any pagan culture, which is probably why the Faith had such a strong appeal to so many who had been historically disenfranchised and marginalized.

There's much more in this excellent book which would make a fine gift for someone you know who perhaps labors under the benighted delusion that Christianity has been a pernicious blight on human history. To the contrary, Christianity was the engine that produced the modern understanding of human rights, dignity, and the value of every person.

RLC

Confused Freedom Fighter

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a very brave woman. She lives under the threat of death because she dares to criticize the Islamic religion in which she was raised, yet she persists, and her courage has inspired millions. Unfortunately, she's as philosophically naive as she is courageous. An interview with her that appears in the LA Times suggests why. Here's part of the Times' story:

For five years Ali has lived under the threat of death from Islamic radicals, and in those five years, she has become an acclaimed and provocative author on matters about Islam and the West. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born into a Somali Muslim family and eventually made her way to the Netherlands as a refugee.

There she wrote a screenplay for a short film about women's treatment under Islam. Just over two months after it aired, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh was assassinated. A letter threatening Ali's life has meant she has lived under guard ever since -- most recently thanks to a fund set up by private donors.

Controversy follows her: In 2006, she resigned from the Netherlands parliament under fire for lying on her asylum papers; the complex charges and countercharges precipitated a Dutch political upheaval.

She now works for the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which is headquartered in Washington. She established her AHA foundation to defend the rights of women in the West against militant Islam. Her autobiography, "Infidel: My Life," which detailed her own genital mutilation in Somalia, was a bestseller, and her next book, "Nomad," is to be published in February.

Your own grandmother oversaw your genital mutilation when you were 5, even though your father opposed it.

That's why I keep hammering on principle. My grandmother was convinced she was doing something right. She was brainwashed. She was doing it out of love. She had done it to all her daughters; it was done to her, to her grandmother. She didn't know it was possible not to be, as she called it, "cleansed." Yes, education helps, but it had everything to do with the conviction that what she was doing was right.

Will any country ever go to war for rights and women's safety?

It looks like it will not happen. But I am very, very optimistic -- not about going to war but about human beings changing their minds. You'll remember how communism was stigmatized. The big problem is [how] to define the protection of women's rights as the problem of the 21st century. If the world does that, [women's inequality] will become like the eradication of apartheid -- people will insist that it's wrong, it's wrong, it's wrong, and that's when change happens.

And here's why Ms Ali, for all her courage and ideals, is quite confused. Ayaan, you see, is an atheist:

Do you regard yourself as an atheist?

Did God create man, or did man create God? I belong to the group who say man created God. I am comfortable to live without an outer force telling me what to do. I'd rather believe in human beings.

Ayaan has rejected the God of both Islam and Christianity, but if she's correct that there's no God upon what does she base her strong belief that her grandmother was wrong and that she is right? If there's no God then there's no reason why anyone should care about anyone other than themselves, no reason not to think that might makes right, and no reason for thinking that those who have the power to oppress women are doing anything wrong if they exercise that power.

Ms Ali doesn't like what they do, of course, nor should she, but if there's no "outer force" to act as a moral authority, if morality is just a matter of one's subjective intuitions, she has nothing upon which to base an assertion of the right of women not to be mutilated other than that such treatment offends her own personal sense of morality. If there is no God, if morality is nothing more than an expression of individual taste, like one's preference for Coke over Pepsi, then no one's morality is any better or worse than anyone else's.

Ms Ali doesn't think women should be reduced to chattel, others think they should. Neither side is right nor wrong any more than those who prefer Coke are right and those who prefer Pepsi wrong. Ayaan has no authority to which to appeal to support her asseveration that those who disagree with her are "wrong, wrong, wrong." It's all based on her preferences which are no more binding on others than is her preference in soda.

Only if God exists does the claim that something is morally wrong make any sense. Only if right and wrong are grounded in an objective transcendent moral authority can the claim that oppression and abuse are wrong rise to anything more substantive than the equivalent of "I don't like oppression." Only if practices such as genital mutilation violate the objective moral law of the Creator of the cosmos can we say that someone is wrong to do it. Otherwise, we are just emoting when we say something is wrong.

Anyway, despite the philosophical inadequacy of the foundations of her convictions she is a heroic woman. Read the rest of the interview with her at the link.

RLC

Another Weird Appointment

How many bizzare appointments must the Obama administration make before the media starts to catch on that there's something very wrong with the way these people see the world?

You might remember Mark Foley the Republican congressman from Florida who sent salacious emails to House pages and subsequently resigned his office, his reputation in tatters, even though he had evidently broken no laws. No less than 1400 news stories were written about his sleazy behavior, and it was universally agreed that such people have no place in our government.

Well, I say universally agreed, but it's not clear where the Obama administration stands on such behavior. No doubt they would be glad to see Foley discredited, because he was, after all, a Republican, but their opinion of the behaviour that Foley actually engaged in is more ambiguous.

I say this because Mr. Obama has appointed as his "safe school czar" a man named Kevin Jennings who makes Mark Foley look like the picture of moral rectitude. Mr. Jennings is a gay activist who wants schools to actively promote and affirm the gay lifestyle. He relates an incident that occurred when he was teaching at a private boarding academy in Massachussetts that is disturbing in what it reveals about his own attitudes toward gay sex. Jennings tells the story of a 15 year-old homosexual student named "Brewster" who confided to Jennings about an encounter he had had with a man in a Boston bus station rest room. Human Events provides the sordid details:

Jennings quotes the boy and then comments: "'I met someone in the bus station bathroom and I went home with him.' High school sophomore, 15 years old. That was the only way he knew how to meet gay people."

Did Jennings report this high-risk behavior to the authorities? To the school? To the boy's parents? No -- he just told the boy, "I hope you knew to use a condom." Sex between an adult and a young person below the "age of consent" (which varies from state to state) is a crime known as statutory rape, and some states mandate that people in certain professions report such abuse.

So, here we have a teacher of children who refrained from advising this boy to stay away from strange men in toilet stalls, impressing upon him only the importance of donning a prophylactic in such encounters. He's a man who apparently thinks that sex between boys and men is no big deal even if it's against the law, and even if it exploits and dehumanizes the boy. Yet in the eyes of this White House such a man is deemed qualified to be put in charge of the safety of our nation's schoolchildren.

What's the difference between Kevin Jennings and Mark Foley? Fourteen hundred news stories.

RLC

Out of the Body Experience

An article by Anil Ananthaswamy at New Scientist probes the phenomenon of out of the body experiences. These events appear to be generated by a particular part of the brain called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), but exactly what is going on in these experiences, which researchers don't doubt are genuine, remains a mystery.

Ananthaswamy seems to assume a dualistic view of the body and the self with the self somehow tied to the body unless released by certain triggers. Here's an account of one such episode that he cites as an introduction to his article:

The young man woke feeling dizzy. He got up and turned around, only to see himself still lying in bed. He shouted at his sleeping body, shook it, and jumped on it. The next thing he knew he was lying down again, but now seeing himself standing by the bed and shaking his sleeping body. Stricken with fear, he jumped out of the window. His room was on the third floor. He was found later, badly injured.

What this 21-year-old had just experienced was an out-of-body experience, one of the most peculiar states of consciousness. It was probably triggered by his epilepsy. "He didn't want to commit suicide," says Peter Brugger, the young man's neuropsychologist at University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland. "He jumped to find a match between body and self. He must have been having a seizure."

In the 15 years since that dramatic incident, Brugger and others have come a long way towards understanding out-of-body experiences. They have narrowed down the cause to malfunctions in a specific brain area and are now working out how these lead to the almost supernatural experience of leaving your own body and observing it from afar. They are also using out-of-body experiences to tackle a long-standing problem: how we create and maintain a sense of self.

Dramatised to great effect by such authors as Dostoevsky, Wilde, de Maupassant and Poe - some of whom wrote from first-hand knowledge - out-of-body experiences are usually associated with epilepsy, migraines, strokes, brain tumors, drug use and even near-death experiences. It is clear, though, that people with no obvious neurological disorders can have an out-of-body experience. By some estimates, about 5 per cent of healthy people have one at some point in their lives.

So what exactly is an out-of-body experience? A definition has recently emerged that involves a set of increasingly bizarre perceptions. The least severe of these is a doppelg�nger experience: you sense the presence of or see a person you know to be yourself, though you remain rooted in your own body. This often progresses to stage 2, where your sense of self moves back and forth between your real body and your doppelg�nger. This was what Brugger's young patient experienced. Finally, your self leaves your body altogether and observes it from outside, often an elevated position such as the ceiling. "This split is the most striking feature of an out-of-body experience," says Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

All this raises several questions: What exactly is it that's "outside" the body? Is it really outside the body or is the outsideness an illusion? If it is illusory how does it perceive things from an "outside" perspective? Is there something about us that's immaterial and yet can still perceive and move? How does it do this if it has no sense organs and no locomotive system? Can both the "outside" self and the body have simultaneous cognitive experience, i.e. can the mind be split between the two?

There's a debate among philosophers whether minds actually exist as a substance separate from material bodies and brains. Materialists usually hold that minds have no actual existence. For them mind is just a word we use to describe the function of the brain much like we use the word digestion to describe the function of the stomach. Dualists, on the other hand, believe that minds are an altogether different kind of "substance," an immaterial substance, from material bodies. No doubt materialists will try to explain out of body experiences in terms of purely physical mechanisms giving rise to illusory experience, but I don't see how the weight of the evidence doesn't at least offer prima facie support to mind/body dualism.

Read the rest of the article and see what you think.

RLC

Early Graduation

We recently did a post on extending the school year which I closed by saying that this would be of special benefit to the better students. There was quite a lot of response to this post and a number of readers asked why I added that last sentence. They wondered why it wouldn't also benefit the weaker students to have a longer school year.

Well, I'm not convinced that it would. In fact, I've long felt that we overschool weaker students, particularly those in the bottom fifth of their class. Indeed, I've advocated, not that anyone has paid any heed, that the state institute a two-tiered graduation that would allow students who feel unsuited to an academic setting to graduate after their sophomore year in high school. Here's why:

Research has shown that students in the lowest ranks of their class who persevere through their senior year learn no more than similar students who drop out after tenth grade. The additional two years of schooling turned out to be of almost no academic benefit to those who opted for them.

This finding will come as no surprise whatsoever to teachers who wear themselves out daily trying to motivate these particular students, but it does raise a question:

If these youngsters are unlikely to add significantly to their knowledge base in their last two years of school, and if it is the case, as some observers suggest, that many, perhaps most, of the jobs of the future are going to require unskilled workers, why do we expend so much effort and treasure trying to keep these kids in school for twelve years as if there was something magical about the number twelve?

Part of the answer, of course, is that a diploma generally opens more opportunities than are available to a high school drop-out, but if so, it might be much more to the benefit of these youngsters if schools offered two kinds of diploma.

Students who elect to remain in school through their senior year, perhaps 85% of an incoming freshman class, would be eligible for one type of diploma while students who choose to graduate after the successful completion of tenth grade would receive another.

A two-tiered graduation, similar to those found in some European countries, has a number of advantages:

1) Apathetic ninth-graders who often harbor a dread of having to endure four more years of schooling might be motivated to work a little harder if they knew that by so doing they can receive a diploma after less than two more years of effort.

Indeed, it's not inconceivable that the prospect of early graduation might spur some of these students to improve their academic work, their attitude, and their attendance during their freshman and sophomore years thus helping them to draw more benefit from these two terms alone than they would get were they to just hang on until they either drop out or eke out a traditional diploma.

2) Students who wish to attend a post-secondary trade or technical school but who would likely be defeated by two additional years of academic courses would be able to bypass these and get on with the vocational education that will eventually be of most use to them. Public schools might even wish to restructure their tech-ed programs to accommodate these graduates.

3) Kids who remain in school but who don't really want to be there are usually the most disruptive. The prospect of a tenth grade graduation gives them an incentive to improve their conduct while simultaneously providing a means of easing the frustrations that often lead to undesirable behavior.

4) Schools which are caught between the desperate need for additional space on the one hand and tight budgets on the other would obtain some measure of relief if every year a percentage of the sophomore class - and perhaps even some juniors - were to choose to graduate.

5) Those who might otherwise choose to drop out of school with nothing to show for the time they spent there would now have hope of obtaining a diploma which would reflect a modicum of achievement and confer some measure of dignity.

And, of course, some students who take advantage of early graduation might wish later to acquire a regular diploma. They could be allowed to return to school, motivated, perhaps, by an enhanced appreciation of the value of, and a new desire for, an academic education.

Early graduation could be immensely helpful for precisely those students who invariably benefit the least from traditional education. If keeping them in school until twelfth grade doesn't really help them, let's do something for them which might.

RLC

The Difference Between Us

Here's a piece that gives a lot of insight into the difference between how the U.S. and its allies wage war against our enemies and how our enemies wage war against us. While the Islamists are sending suicide bombers into markets and schools to blow innocent civilians to pieces Western forces do things like this:

Britain revealed that, last month, the pilot of a Harrier jet, maneuvering a Paveway IV laser guided bomb towards a moving vehicle carrying a Taliban leader, moved the bomb away at the last minute. This was because the Taliban vehicle suddenly stopped near some civilians, and the new ROE (Rules of Engagement) mandated that civilian casualties be avoided at all costs. The bomb went off in a nearby field, causing no injuries. The Taliban vehicle then sped away and was not caught again until several days later. At that point, a bomb took out the target. The Taliban leader had been under observation for weeks, and several opportunities had been lost because of nearby civilians.

I'd like to know what nation in history would have been so solicitous of innocent bystanders that they would do what our military, and that of our allies, does every day to avoid civilian casualties. Anyone who says that all cultures are equally worth celebrating and that our way of seeing the world is no better than that of other peoples simply doesn't know what they're talking about.

RLC

Alzheimer's Research

Alzheimer's disease results from the buildup of amyloid plaques in the brain. A recent discovery shows that mice can recover from Alzheinmer's by tweaking their brains' immune cells with a particular protein which causes the immune cells to remove the plaque.

If this can be made to work in humans it could be a wonderful breakthrough in the treatment and cure of this terrible disease. Science Daily has the story.

RLC

Protect Free Speech

Hovering below the media radar screen is an important piece of legislation now being considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The bill is titled The Free Speech Protection Act 2009, and it's extremely important that it be voted out of committee and brought to the Senate floor for a vote by the full Senate. Bill Dembski at Uncommon Descent explains why:

Paul Williams is a journalist who has written extensively about the threat of terrorism in North America. He is being sued by McMaster University [In Canada] for millions of dollars for alleging in print that they have abetted terrorists and allowed radioactive materials to be stolen. How could he be tried in a Canadian court given that he broke no U.S. law and did everything that McMaster University is upset about on U.S. soil?

As he explained to me, "Bill, I am being tried in Canada because of free trade agreements, including NAFTA. Such agreements give foreign entities the right to take action against American citizens. I am not the only journalist to suffer this fate. New York Times reporter Joe Sharkey is undergoing a similar plight for offending the 'dignity' of Brazil by criticizing an air-traffic control official. Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of Funding Evil, is being sued in England for criticizing Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi billionaire. Many more will suffer a similar fate in the coming years."

For more on this travesty go here.

People like Williams have been essentially stripped of their right to freedom of speech because of a provision in NAFTA that should be rescinded. American citizens should not lose their fundamental freedoms because people in another country don't appreciate the rights that we enjoy. The Free Speech Protection Act would guarantee American citizens would not be subjected to this kind of shameful harrassment which has already cost Williams in legal fees his entire life savings of $500,000.

This is a matter of basic justice upon which Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, should be able to agree. There are no constitutional rights more precious than those enshrined in our first amendment, and we should not suffer any agreement with another country that permits their abridgement.

RLC

Miracle Workers

If President Obama is not up to the task of reversing the rising seas as he promised he would do during the campaign, maybe we can get this guy to take care of it:

[T]he mayor of Moscow promises to keep it from snowing. For just a few million dollars, the mayor's office will hire the Russian Air Force to spray a fine chemical mist over the clouds before they reach the capital, forcing them to dump their snow outside the city. Authorities say this will be a boon for Moscow, which is typically covered with a blanket of snow from November to March. Road crews won't need to constantly clear the streets, and traffic - and quality of life - will undoubtedly improve.

The idea came from Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who is no stranger to playing God. In 2002, he spearheaded a project to reverse the flow of the vast River Ob through Siberia to help irrigate the country's parched Central Asian neighbors. Although that idea hasn't exactly turned out as planned - scientists have said it's not feasible - this time, Luzhkov says, there's no way he can fail.

I think it would be great to have a contest between these two to see who can perform the most spectacular miracles. The winner could be awarded the Nobel Prize for Sheer Awesomeness.

RLC