Time-Travel Sabotage

I admire scientists who are willing to entertain ideas that seem crazy but which just might be true. You find such people treading outside the boundary lines in every field of science - except perhaps, in evolutionary biology, which seems populated by individuals who lack the gene for being able to consider any hypothesis for apparent design that actually implies a Designer - and it's fun to speculate along with them.

Even so, I think this latest theory in physics is a bit much. According to a New York Times story, the problems besetting the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which was built to recreate conditions approximating the Big Bang and which, it is hoped, will produce evidence of a sub-atomic particle called the Higgs Boson, are due to the Higgs actually traveling back in time to sabotage the LHC. The theory has it that the Higgs doesn't want to be discovered (it's not clear how a subatomic particle could actually "want" anything) and has "decided" (ditto) to travel back in time to sabotage the device that would discover it, or something.

You'll have to read about it at the link. Maybe the NYT writer can make it sound more plausible than I can. It's true that the LHC has had problems getting going, and it's true that the people who proffer this hypothesis are serious and accomplished physicists, so we shouldn't dismiss their idea out of hand, but still - intentionality among sub-atomic particles? Does this mean that they have minds?

Thanks to Telic Thoughts for the tip on the article.

RLC

The Bow Seen 'Round the World

There's been a lot of fuss about the President's very odd bow to the emperor of Japan just as there was following his bow to the Saudi king. I think the bows make him look a bit like a doofus, sort of like John Cleese doing a Fawlty Towers skit, but otherwise I guess they're harmless:

I wonder, though, how he decides which world leader to whom he will bow and which with whom he'll just shake hands? If you're an important poobah and you are favored with a mere handshake from the President of the United States after the emperor of Japan has just had a perfect jacknife executed right in front of him, should you feel slighted? Has the President been insufficiently and thus insultingly deferential toward you? If bowing is deemed appropriate when greeting royalty can genuflecting be far behind? These are weighty questions for which I have no answers.

I did come across this power point presentation, however, which was smuggled out of a top secret White House meeting of aides strategizing about how to counter GOP criticism of the President's embarrassing spasms when in the presence of foreign dignitaries:

RLC

Complicity and Sympathy

Several readers wrote to remind us that most Muslims only want peace and that we should be careful not to implicate the majority in the crimes of the minority, even if it's quite a large minority. This is true, of course, although it could've been said about Germans under the Nazis that most of them only wanted peace even as they worked to impose the will of the power-mad minority on the rest of the world.

In any event, the problem isn't just with the violent minority, it's also with a majority that doesn't raise a loud voice against the minority, but rather seeks to excuse or ignore the actions of the extremists. I'm reminded of a quote I came across recently:

"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people."

The words are those of Martin Luther King and came from his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. King was lamenting the failure of churches, particularly white churches, to speak out against the injustice of racial segregation. Substitute "Muslims" for "people" and I think his words perfectly fit the present situation. If Muslims are not going to demand that their co-religionists stop the madness, then it'll be difficult for them to avoid the charge of complicity and sympathy with acts of Islamic terrorism just as the white church could not escape similar charges of complicity and sympathy with the injustice of forced segregation in the 1960s.

RLC

Is This Really the Reason?

Andy McCarthy was the prosecutor who got Sheik Abdul Rahman convicted in the first World Trade Tower bombing. He also is of the opinion that the decision to bring the 9/11 terrorists to New York is really a ploy to embarrass Bush and both destroy his legacy and the CIA. He writes:

This summer, I theorized that Attorney General Eric Holder - and his boss - had a hidden agenda in ordering a re-investigation of the CIA for six-year-old alleged interrogation excesses that had already been scrutinized by non-partisan DOJ prosecutors who had found no basis for prosecution. The continuing investigations of Bush-era counterterrorism policies (i.e., the policies that kept us safe from more domestic terror attacks), coupled with the Holder Justice Department's obsession to disclose classified national-defense information from that period, enable Holder to give the hard Left the "reckoning" that he and Obama promised during the 2008 campaign.

It would be too politically explosive for Obama/Holder to do the dirty work of charging Bush administration officials; but as new revelations from investigations and declassifications are churned out, Leftist lawyers use them to urge European and international tribunals to bring "torture" and "war crimes" indictments. Thus, administration cooperation gives Obama's base the reckoning it demands but Obama gets to deny responsibility for any actual prosecutions.

Today's announcement that KSM and other top al-Qaeda terrorists will be transferred to Manhattan federal court for civilian trials neatly fits this hidden agenda. Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials. They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses - intelligence sources - must expose themselves and their secrets.

There's more at the link where McCarthy explains that the terrorists have already confessed, they have no defense, and that the only purpose of going through a highly public trial is to produce an ideological coup against the hated Bushies and the CIA. It's pretty depressing to reflect on the possibility that a man with such antipathies occupies the highest office in the land.

RLC

Debating Aid

Although the media hasn't done much to bring it to our attention there's a very interesting debate going on in think tanks, churches, and government agencies today over the extent and nature of the aid we send to alleviate the suffering of the poor in third-world countries. That we should in some way be helping these people few would deny. Richard Stearns, the president of World Vision, has a fine book out on the moral imperative to exercise compassion toward the world's suffering poor (The book is titled The Hole in Our Gospel).

At the same time, most people agree that just sending money, goods, and food to dysfunctional states is wasteful and unproductive (It's interesting, parenthetically, that almost everyone recognizes that throwing money at third-world poverty does nothing to mitigate the misery of the poor, but some think that the answer to poverty in this country is to do exactly what we realize is futile when done for the poor in other countries). So the debate focuses on what form our aid should take, and if it would actually be more helpful to stop giving aid altogether.

Two fascinating books have been published recently on this topic. One is by Paul Collier whose book The Bottom Billion (see our discussion of it here) is an excellent analysis of why third world poverty persists despite our best efforts to eradicate it, and what has to be done to alleviate it. Another is titled Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo who argues that aid, no matter how well-intentioned, is counterproductive and should be ended.

I recommend all three books to anyone interested in how we should approach the question of what the wisest, most effective way to really do something to help people is, but if you don't have time to read you may want to catch Collier and Moyo (along with two associates) debate these issues as part of the Munk debate series. You can either watch the debate or read the transcript, but in either case I think it's interesting that Collier and Moyo seem to agree more than they disagree that, as Moyo says, "Evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that aid to Africa has made the poor poorer, and the growth slower."

Thanks to Byron for the link to the debate.

RLC

Civil Rights Are Unconstitutional

Those law school professors sure are a caution, aren't they? They sometimes say the zaniest things. A professor by the name of Marci Hamilton, for example, claims that the Stupak amendment to the House Healthcare Reform Bill is unconstitutional. The Stupak amendment effectively rules out the use of taxpayer money to subsidize abortions. Professor Hamilton offers the following as one reason for thinking that this measure violates the Constitution:

First, the [Stupak] Amendment violates the Constitution's separation of church and state. The anti-abortion movement is plainly religious in motivation, and its lobbyists and spokespersons represent religious groups, as is illustrated by the fact that the most visible lobbyists in the Stupak Amendment's favor have been the Catholic Bishops. This is a brazen and frank attempt to impose a minority's religious worldview on the entirety of American healthcare. (A majority of Americans have favored a woman's right to choose for many years.)

Set aside the dubiety of the parenthetical remark. What she says in the rest of the quote could also be said of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as John Pitney reminds us at National Review Online:

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, along with other religious leaders and groups, led the fight for [the Civil Rights Act's] enactment. "We needed the help of the clergy, and this was assiduously encouraged," said Senator Hubert Humphrey. "I have said a number of times, and I repeat it now, that without the clergy, we couldn't have possibly passed this bill."

Sen. Richard B. Russell of Georgia, a segregationist, agreed with Humphrey that the clergy were the bill's most visible lobbyists, but he was not happy about it. He complained that the clergy were using "powers of the Federal Government to coerce the people into accepting their views under threat of dire punishment" - a "philosophy of coercion" that he compared to the doctrines of Torquemada "in the infamous days of the Spanish Inquisition."

Now, let's ask Ms Hamilton whether anyone in her circle of friends and colleagues thinks the Civil Rights Act is unconstitutional. I doubt that she could find anyone who does, yet the logic of her objection to Stupak certainly leads to that conclusion. Pitney goes on to quote another constitutional lawyer who vigorously disagrees with the position staked out by Ms Hamilton:

[S]ecularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

This is exactly right. The lawyer who wrote it was Barack Obama.

RLC

Why?

In all of the talk that we've heard so far about what an awful decision it was to bring the 9/11 terrorists to trial in New York City - a decision which certainly baffles me - there's one concern that I haven't yet heard raised. Among the reasons for thinking that this decision was among the most inept of this administration's remarkably rich record of ineptitude are:

1. The fear it would provoke another terrorist attack against New York,
   
2. It's likely there'd be attempts by terrorists to free the Gitmo Five,
   
3. The fact that these are not American citizens but rather enemies of this country and should not be afforded the same rights and protections an American citizen would be given,
   
4. The extraordinary cost to taxpayers paying for security and a trial that may last for years,
   
5. The probability that the trial will be turned into a circus by the defendants,
   
6. The very real possibility that one or several of the terrorists might actually be acquitted because they weren't mirandized or because the evidence against them is deemed inadmissable.
   

Parenthetically, if this last were to happen I think national outrage at Obama would be such that he would be finished as president. He would either be compelled to resign or limp along until the next election in which he would suffer the worst defeat in American presidential history. Mr. Holder assured reporters at a press conference yesterday that these men will be convicted, but I don't know how he knows that unless they plan to somehow rig the jury.

At any rate, all of the above are certainly legitimate concerns, but the question I had was who do the courts expect to get to serve on the jury? Once the trial begins it may prove very hard to keep the jurors' identities secret which means that they and their families may well be targets of terrorist reprisals. Knowing that, how can Messers Obama and Holder in good conscience put people in such a dangerous position when there's no need for it? They can promise the jurors anonymity, I suppose, but they certainly can't guarantee it. Indeed, I wonder if they've even given the matter any thought.

So why are they doing this if it's all unnecessary? The only explanation I've heard that makes any sense, alas, is that what they really want to do is use this trial to put the Bush administration and our intelligence agencies in the dock and thoroughly discredit both. If this is indeed what their goal is then they really are playing a dangerous and contemptible game. They know full well that intelligence agency personnel will be deposed on their secret intelligence gathering and interrogation methods and procedures. Not only will this mean that successful techniques will become known to those who wish to do us harm but also a lot of identities of informants and operatives will become available to the terrorists' allies around the world, which will at best cancel their usefulness and at worst place the lives of these individuals and their families in grave danger.

If the reason the administration has decided to try these men in a civilian court rather than by military tribunal is because they see a public trial as a political opportunity to destroy the people who kept us safe for eight years then the American people should be outraged. Perhaps there is some other reason that makes more sense and is a lot more noble but, if so, I haven't heard it yet.

RLC

Ideas Have Consequences

The Times Online has an excellent article by David Sewell on the moral implications of a Darwinian worldview. It's fascinating stuff, but I'm a little surprised that it passed editorial scrutiny. Perhaps the Brits are more open-minded about such things, but I can't imagine an article like this appearing in, say, The New York Times.

Sewell starts off by noting the eerie and strangely underreported fact that overt Darwinian tropes recur among serial killers. Eric Harris wore a t-shirt that extolled natural selection as he gunned down classmates at Columbine High School, and Pekka-Eric Auvinen, a Finn, murdered his teacher and a number of his fellow students on the basis of their lack of "evolutionary fitness."

Although Darwin himself would have been appalled by such horrors, they are the logical consequence of his ideas. Sewell writes:

One conclusion implicit in evolutionary theory is that human existence has no ultimate purpose or special significance. Any psychologically well-adjusted person would regard this as regrettable, if true. But some people get a thrill from peering into the void and acknowledging that life is utterly meaningless.

Darwin also taught that morality has no essential authority, but is something that itself evolved - a set of sentiments or intuitions that developed from adaptive responses to environmental pressures tens of thousands of years ago. This does not merely explain the origin of morals, it totally explains them away. Whether an individual opts to obey a particular ethical precept, or to regard it as a redundant evolutionary carry-over, thus becomes a matter of personal choice. Cheerleaders celebrating Darwin's 200th birthday in colleges across America last February sang "Randomness is good enough for me, If there's no design it means I'm free" - lines from a song by the band Scientific Gospel. Clearly they see evolution as something that emancipates them from the strict sexual morality insisted upon by their parents. But wackos such as Harris and Auvinen can just as readily interpret it as a licence to kill.

The American conservative controversialist Ann Coulter is one of Darwin's fiercest critics, lambasting him in her book Godless and via cable TV. Coulter claims she is not surprised that psychopaths gravitate towards Darwin's ideas. "Instead of enshrining moral values," she says, Darwin "enshrined biological instincts." Coulter believes Darwin's theory appeals to liberals because it "lets them off the hook morally. Do whatever you feel like doing - screw your secretary, kill Grandma, abort your defective child - Darwin says it will benefit humanity".

Today's evolutionary scientists go some way towards Coulter's view when they describe ethics as merely an illusion produced by genes. From a Darwinian perspective, there is nothing objectively wrong with shooting your classmates; it's just that most of us have an inherited tendency to kid ourselves that it's wrong - and that's something that helps our species in the longer run by keeping playground massacres to an acceptable minimum.

Not only does a Darwinian worldview lead to the conclusion that life is ultimately pointless and that morality is an illusion "fobbed off on us by our genes" as E.O. Wilson puts it, but Darwin himself believed that his ideas led to racial purification:

Darwin looked forward to a time when Europeans and Americans would exterminate those he termed "savages". Many of the anthropomorphous apes would also be wiped out, he predicted, and the break between man and beast would then occur "between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon; instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla". He took a sanguine view of genocide, believing it to be imminent and inevitable. "Looking to the world at no very distant date," he wrote to a friend in 1881, "what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world."

For many years after his death, Darwin's racial theories remained the consensus position of the international scientific community. In 1906, the director of the Bronx Zoo decided to give New Yorkers an object lesson in human evolution by putting a 23-year-old Congolese pygmy on public display in his monkey house. The pygmy, Ota Benga, shared his cage with an orang-utan. The spectacle drew enormous crowds. Before long, they were asking the questions the exhibitors hoped they would: was Ota Benga an ape or a man? Or, as the zoo-keeper himself speculated, was this perhaps a transitional form between the two, the elusive missing link?

When a group of African-American clergymen objected to a human being being put on show, they were told that Darwin's theories were now accepted scientific facts, that the "lower races" were psychologically closer to pigs and dogs than to human beings, and that a different value should be put on their lives. Truths that the founders of the United States had held to be self-evident - that all men are created equal and had certain inalienable rights - were being denied by the promoters of Darwinian science. By the end of the first world war, it was not only blacks who were deemed genetically inferior by many of America's top geneticists and biologists, but Italian, Greek and Jewish immigrants too.

Nowhere was the toxic doctrine of racial superiority more enthusiastically taken up than in the Third Reich. The Nazis believed that the Aryan race was already the most highly evolved, but could evolve further if defective genes could be eliminated. To purify the German gene pool, they decided to exterminate all the physically and mentally handicapped.

Darwin summed up his moral philosophy by saying that a man who believed neither in God nor an afterlife could "only follow those ideas and impulses that seem best to him". Darwinian ideas - eugenics and its corollary, eugenic euthanasia - were accepted by the mainstream of the German scientific and medical professions, but also by many of the educated elite in the United States in the first four decades of the twentieth century. It wasn't until the ghastly crimes of the Nazis came to light in the mid-1940s that eugenics acquired a bad odor among American progressives.

Ideas have consequences, and when we no longer hold fast to the idea that man is made in the image of God then no longer will we find anything about us that has any intrinsic worth. Man thus devalues himself, losing his dignity in the process and reducing himself to a simple brute, a mass of mere protoplasm. What almost inevitably follows are genocidal holocausts such as those of the 20th century in atheistic regimes in Germany, the USSR, China, Cambodia, Rwanda, and elsewhere. Darwin's theory was a powerful impetus to the spread of atheism and a powerful justification, or rationalization, for those seeking scientific warrant for the depersonalization of their victims. The 20th century was simply Columbine High School writ large.

RLC

The Real Victim at Fort Hood

David Brooks at The New York Times puts his finger on a quirk of American psychology:

When Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan [murdered and maimed dozens of helpless victims] in Fort Hood, Tex., last week, many Americans had an understandable and, in some ways, admirable reaction. They didn't want the horror to become a pretext for anti-Muslim bigotry.

So immediately the coverage took on a certain cast. The possibility of Islamic extremism was immediately played down. This was an isolated personal breakdown, not an ideological assault, many people emphasized.

Major Hasan was portrayed as a disturbed individual who was under a lot of stress. We learned about pre-traumatic stress syndrome, and secondary stress disorder, which one gets from hearing about other people's stress. We heard the theory (unlikely in retrospect) that Hasan was so traumatized by the thought of going into a combat zone that he decided to take a gun and create one of his own.

A shroud of political correctness settled over the conversation. Hasan was portrayed as a victim of society, a poor soul who was pushed over the edge by prejudice and unhappiness.

There was a national rush to therapy. Hasan was a loner who had trouble finding a wife and socializing with his neighbors.

This response was understandable. It's important to tamp down vengeful hatreds in moments of passion. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts. If public commentary wasn't carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage.

Worse, it absolved Hasan - before the real evidence was in - of his responsibility. He didn't have the choice to be lonely or unhappy. But he did have a choice over what story to build out of those circumstances. And evidence is now mounting to suggest he chose the extremist War on Islam narrative that so often leads to murderous results.

The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.

It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn't the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.

Indeed. One might have gotten the impression, listening to some of the commentary on this atrocity, that Nidal Hasan was an unfortunate victim of forces beyond his control. The excuses and rationalizations that were being offered for his heinous act almost made me think that the people I should be angry with in this incident were the cops that shot this poor, pathetic man.

Such are the times in which we live.

RLC

Back to Nature

George Will weighs in on the climate change debate and observes that it is passing strange that there is such terror about the threat to our environment posed by a warming earth when, in fact, the earth's mean temperature hasn't changed in over eleven years. Such details, however, are mere nuisances to climate change true believers who, when they rise in the morning and go to bed at night, reverently recite their mantra: "Al Gore said it, I believe it, that settles it."

Will, however, holds to the peculiar view that our policy should be based on data and there simply is no data to support the eco-alarmists. To get a sense of the sheer weirdness of the Democrats' determination to save us from an environmental catastrophe for which there is scarcely any unambiguous evidence think about what Will says here:

[Unfortunately], the crusade against warming will brook no interference from information. With the Waxman-Markey bill, the House of Representatives has endorsed reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 83 per-cent below 2005 levels by 2050. This is surely the most preposterous legislation ever hatched in the House. Using Energy Department historical statistics, Kenneth P. Green and Steven F. Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute have calculated this:

Waxman-Markey's goal is just slightly more than 1 billion tons of greenhouse-gas emissions in 2050. The last time this nation had that small an amount was 1910, when there were only 92 million Americans, 328 million fewer than the 420 million projected for 2050. To meet the 83 percent reduction target in a nation of 420 million, per capita carbon-dioxide emissions would have to be no more than 2.4 tons per person, which is one quarter the per capita emissions of 1910, a level probably last seen when the population was 45 million-in 1875.

If you're young it might be a good idea to buy stock in bicycle manufacturers. It's hard to imagine how we could meet such draconian emission standards and still maintain anything approximating a modern life-style. This is not to say that we couldn't use energy more efficiently, but to reduce our carbon footprint to the level Waxman-Markey requires would require us to abandon most of modern technology and become a third-world nation.

Who votes for these people?

RLC

How to Win an Argument

I wonder if this guy is any relation to Louis "Skip" Gates. He certainly needs a lesson in how to dialogue with people with whom he disagrees, and he also needs a lesson on how to treat women:

Police busted Lionel McIntyre, 59, for assault yesterday after his bruised victim, Camille Davis, filed charges. McIntyre and Davis, who works as a production manager in the school's theater department, are both regulars at Toast, a popular university bar on Broadway and 125th Street, sources said.

The professor, who is black, had been engaged in a fiery discussion about "white privilege" with Davis, who is white, and another male regular, who is also white, Friday night at 10:30 when fists started flying, patrons said.

McIntyre, who is known as "Mac" at the bar, shoved Davis, and when the other patron and a bar employee tried to break it up, the prof slugged Davis in the face, witnesses said. "The punch was so loud, the kitchen workers in the back heard it over all the noise," bar back Richie Velez, 28, told The Post. "I was on my way over when he punched Camille and she fell on top of me."

The other patron involved in the dispute said McIntyre then took a swing at him after he yelled, "You don't hit a woman!"

"He knocked the glasses right off my face," said the man, who would only give his first name as "Shannon." "The punch came out of nowhere. Mac was talking to us about white privilege and what I was doing about it -- apparently I wasn't doing enough."

I guess Mr. McIntyre had exhausted all of his best arguments and felt the need to press his case in a more robust and convincing fashion. I wonder if he'll keep his job. I'm fairly sure that were the races of the people involved in this ugly episode reversed he would not, but I could be wrong. If he does avoid being dismissed, though, perhaps he can claim to have been the beneficiary of black privilege.

Anyway, do you think the media will ask President Obama to comment on this altercation? If they do, do you think he'll dare venture his opinion after the mess he made of the Skip Gates affair? Do you think it's time for another beer summit at the White House?

RLC

PC Blindness

Ralph Peters, like a lot of us, wonders why the Muslim officer, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 soldiers at Fort Hood and wounded dozens more, was promoted to major, why his radicalism wasn't uncovered before he committed the crimes, and why this administration is so afraid to use the term "Islamic terrorism."

Government authorities have punctiliously avoided mention of the killer's religion and his associations with radical Islamists in the days following the massacre at Fort Hood. President Obama admonishes us not jump to conclusions, but this sounds a little strange coming from the man who had no trouble jumping to the conclusion that Professor "Skip" Gates was the victim of "stupid" racist cops in Cambridge Massachussetts last summer.

Imagine how quick everyone would be to "jump to conclusions" had a Christian walked into an abortion clinic shooting everyone in the place while shouting "Jesus is Lord." Would President Obama be urging us to withhold judgment about the killer's motivations until "all the facts were in"? If a fundamentalist pastor walked into a gay bar and opened fire would the media recoil from calling the man a domestic terrorist? Would the President say that the killer might have "just snapped," and that we shouldn't assume that the man's religion played a role? I very much doubt it.

There would, in fact, be no end of pontificating on the alleged deep current of misogyny, hatred and bigotry running through American Christianity, but Hasan, we must understand, was a Muslim so we must tread lightly so as not to smear the millions of good Muslims in this country. We must be careful not to assume that he was in fact acting on the same motives that inspire his co-religionists around the world to kill and maim whomever and whenever they can.

There was no reticence whatsoever among our political leaders last summer to portray angry retirees at town hall meetings as terrorists, but we dare not suggest that a Muslim mass murderer is a terrorist until every i is dotted and t crossed even if the man has just perpetrated a classic act of Islamic terrorism.

Of course we should not paint all Muslims as murderers, but we also need to realize that there are a billion Muslims around the world. If only 1% are radical extremists - a conservative figure, perhaps - that's 10 million people out there who are willing to die for the opportunity to kill you and your children. That's a startling number. It's even more startling to realize that there are millions more who, though not killers themselves, would delight to see you and your children blown to bits.

Anyway, Peters concludes that Hasan's victims were in fact victims not only of this looney Islamist, but also of an out-of-control political correctness that infects our political and military leadership as well as our media. Here's part of his column:

It gets worse: On Sunday evening, a ranking officer in Hasan's medical chain of command raced to cover her butt. Asked why the killer was promoted to major after receiving career-killer performance reviews at Walter Reed, the officer claimed that Hasan faced the same promotion board requirements as everyone else.

Liar, liar, uniform on fire: A dirty big secret in our Army has been that officers' promotion boards have quotas for minorities. We don't call them quotas, of course. But if a board doesn't hit the floor numbers, its results are held up until the list has been corrected. It's almost impossible for the Army's politically correct promotion system to pass over a Muslim physician.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, one of the few lawmakers willing to whisper the word "terrorism," needs to call the officers who sat on Hasan's promotion board before the Senate, put them under oath, then ask if Hasan made major because of minority-quota requirements.

This corrupt (and now deadly) affirmative-action system does a severe disservice to the bulk of minority officers, who make the grade on quality and professionalism. It leaves other officers wondering if the new guy who just showed up in the unit is a "real" officer or an affirmative-action baby.

Ditto for our government's unwillingness to take on Muslim extremists on US soil. Blathering about freedom of religion, we foster hate speech. By protecting the fanatics, we betray the peaceful majority of our Muslim citizens, leaving them afraid to speak out, since the feds shield the fanatics in charge of their mosques and communities.

Hasan gave ample evidence that he was unstable and sympathetic to jihad. If an officer of his rank had said the things about blacks or gays that Hasan said about Americans in general and military personnel in particular - He told a gathering of doctors (!), for instance, that infidels (non-Muslims) should all be beheaded and have hot oil poured down their throats - he would have rightly been busted in rank and maybe even drummed out of the service. But in our politically correct age we must pretend that certain people are not what they obviously are. See no evil, hear no evil is the word of the day when a Muslim says what anyone else would be cleaning latrines for saying. Welcome to the Brave New World of Orwellian progressivism.

RLC

Religion Had Nothing to Do with It

IowaHawk puts together a tongue-in-cheek montage spoofing liberal media analysis of the Fort Hood murders. The Left has been blaming everything for this act of terrorism except the most obvious thing - Nidal Hasan's belief that it was his religious duty to kill infidel soldiers.

American liberals seem to possess the peculiar characteristic of being able to look at the sky at noon on a clear day without seeing the sun.

RLC

Slings and Arrows

Uh, oh. Now he's done it. The President gave an otherwise unremarkable speech yesterday at Fort Hood to memorialize the victims of the latest act of Islamic terrorism on our soil, but his speech contained some unfortunate theological allusions which, we've come to learn, is a no-no for American presidents. Mr. Obama actually averred that no just and loving God would condone what Nidal Hasan did in the name of Allah and that the Muslim murderer of thirteen servicemen and women would pay a terrible price for his crime in the afterlife.

What was Mr. Obama thinking? You can bet that he's going to hear about that from the secular left. Editorials will be popping up like overnight mushrooms on op-ed pages across this great secularized continent chastising the President for this unconscionable breach of the wall of separation between church and state. Commentators on the major networks, as well as CNN and MSNBC, will soon be upbraiding him for an inappropriate, unwarranted, and flagrantly unconstitutional injection of religion into our public discourse. As President, Mr. Obama should not be using his office to give support to sectarian dogmas, he'll be admonished, especially those no graduate of Harvard Law School could possibly sincerely believe.

Yes sir, he is about to feel the heat. I know this because that's exactly what happened to President Bush every time he made even the most innocuous religious reference. Once he was asked, in what seemed like a mean-spirited attempt to make him look simple-minded, who his favorite philosopher was. One could almost hear the chortles wafting from the media elites who assumed that Bush couldn't even spell "philosopher" let alone name one, but when he answered "Jesus Christ, because he changed my life," it was as if someone had thrown a snake into the primate cage at the zoo. It drove our secular sachems into a frenzy to hear someone who had risen to such prominence as had Mr. Bush actually affirm something so déclassé.

So, now it's Mr. Obama's turn to play General Custer to our secular Indians. I haven't seen any arrows launched at him just yet, but I bet they'll start flying by tomorrow. It's going to look like that scene in the movie 300 where the Persians shot so many darts at the Spartans that they darkened the sky. Mr. Obama is really in for it now.

Why do you look so skeptical? They did it to Bush, didn't they?

RLC

A Better Way

Dr. Scott W. Atlas is a professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at the university. He's an expert on health care and is very cool to the various health care reform proposals being bandied about by congressional Democrats. To read much of the reportage on the matter one might think health care in America ranks near the bottom of the Western world. In an op-ed piece in the Washington Times, however, Dr. Atlas points out that this simply isn't true:

Inexplicably, the facts published in the world's top medical journals about our system continue to be ignored:

• Americans have the best survival rates from cancer and most serious diseases, and the most rapid decline in breast and prostate cancer deaths despite being hindered with severe obesity and the largest burden of smokers over 50 of any Western nation.
• Americans have the most successful, most available treatment for chronic diseases like high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
• Americans have the shortest wait times for life-changing surgeries, like cataract and hip replacements, that may not increase survival but greatly impact quality of life.
• Americans have the best access to the newest, most effective drugs.
• Americans have the quickest access to the safest, most advanced medical technologies.
• Americans have the easiest access to specialty doctors, doctors of their choice, doctors who lead the world in health care innovation, regardless of what metrics are assessed.

Instead of solely considering costs, shouldn't we ask if Americans are willing to die sooner from cancer, to give up access to specialists, to be refused safer, more accurate diagnostic imaging, to lose the most accessible screening programs, and to lose their autonomy in pursuing treatments for their families? Shouldn't we ask if Americans want to replace the most advanced and successful medical care in history with the restricted care and lower cost social programs of Europe, and insure the less than 5 percent of people who don't buy insurance but receive care anyway?

What needs reformed is certainly not the quality of care. The problem is keeping the quality high while making it cheaper, and nothing the Democrats are proposing will accomplish that:

The Max Baucus plan is paid by massive taxes on existing insurance plans that exceed our government's arbitrary threshold and by significant cuts to Medicare. Its Federal Exchange overtly skews the playing field by subsidizing - directly or indirectly - insurance plans that meet government definitions, and by penalizing existing plans that don't, plans already held by millions of Americans. The House proposals force a government-run "public option" - an option that shifts huge numbers of privately insured Americans to become the burden of an already unsustainable, taxpayer-funded entitlement program that ultimately eliminates private insurance choices.

A public option would interpose bureaucrats between doctors and patients, restricting access to new drugs, to innovative new cures, and to choice of doctors. It is already proven a failure the world over, even by our own Medicaid program, where government-imposed, below-cost payments have created patients who cannot even find doctors to care for them. While Congress and the administration claim otherwise, costs to the taxpayer increase, and choice and access disappear with a public option.

Meanwhile, serious alternative solutions that reduce costs but do not harm the excellence already in our health system are totally ignored, including:

• Allowing people to shop for insurance across state lines at competitive prices.
• Stripping back on costly coverage mandates that most Americans may not value, like acupuncture, massage therapy, in vitro fertilization, and wigs.
• Expanding the availability of high-deductible plans for catastrophic coverage with health savings accounts, making insurance a good value for the millions of Americans who can afford insurance but (perhaps wisely) don't buy it.
• Bold tax reforms like refundable tax credits, cash even for those who pay no income tax, or vouchers instead of tax deductions, to foster personal ownership and control of insurance, creating millions of value-seeking shoppers.
• Forcing doctors and hospitals to post prices, qualifications and outcomes - information that is essential to value-based purchasing and fundamental for stimulating competition.

Atlas could also point out the exorbitant cost of medical malpractice insurance and the expense of a medical school education. Both of these are costs that get passed on to the consumer, but the Democrats' are not inclined to do anything about either. Instead Democrats, if their plan is eventually passed, will make criminals out of those who don't want insurance and choose not to buy it. Under their plan, people who, for whatever reason, don't think they need health coverage will nevertheless be forced to buy it or pay a penalty. If they don't pay the penalty they will go to jail. This is an unprecedented abridgement of individual freedom in this country, but taking a way freedom is simply what progressives do whenever they have the power to do it.

RLC

Lots of <i>Assuming</i> Going On

There's an interesting article on human evolution at MSNBC. The piece starts out by claiming that Neanderthals were a separate species from modern Homo sapiens, but everything in the article suggests that Neanderthals and H. sapiens interbred and produced feertile offspring. Since the ability to produce fertile offspring is the distinguishing characteristic of a species the finding that Neanderthals and H. sapiens were interfertile would mean that they're really members of the same species.

Indeed, none of the alleged predecessors of modern humans are actually known to have been unable to breed successfully with H. sapiens. It's simply assumed that sexual unions between them would have been sterile because it's assumed that they were different species. And it's assumed that they were different species because it's assumed that H. sapiens is the culmination of a long evolutionary history with lots of ancestral species leading up to it. But, for all we really know, creatures like H. habilis and H. erectus could have been conspecific with H. sapiens. We simply don't know whether they were capable of producing fertile offspring or not.

Of course, if it were ever found that these members of genus Homo were all the same species it would throw modern human evolution models into a state of complete chaos, so I suppose we have to assume that they really were all distinct species.

RLC

The Day the Music Died

Mark Butterworth observes that there has never been so much talent or ambition in the music world but that that world is on life support. Young and/or unknown artists, particularly writers and composers, simply lack the resources to do quality work. Here's why:

Recorded music costs a lot of money, but recorded music isn't making any money.

Here are a few facts: ... U.S. album sales in 2008: More than 115,000 albums were released, but only 110 sold more than 250,000 copies, a mere 1,500 topped 10,000 sales, and fewer than 6,000 cracked the 1,000 barrier -- further evidence that sales of recorded music are not the way of the future for artists.

Butterworth laments that the production costs of recorded music are so high as to exclude all but the already highly successful artists and even they make little money on their albums. The value of recording them lies in the reknown they bring to the artist who can parlay that fame into sold-out concerts and other venues:

Yes, I know people have home studios and are cranking out tunes by the millions and putting them on their Facebook or MySpace pages, but nearly 100% of them are crap.

Crap, you say? Why? Talent often requires a good deal of instruction, competition, and criticism to develop to the point where it becomes good enough to interest others. Hobbyists don't get that. Hollywood does a good deal of development, and yet 95% of their movies are nearly unwatchable now, and never has so much money been spent on film except for one thing -- the writing. Old Hollywood often spent 25% of a film budget on writing alone. Even the best-paid writers now get nothing like that much.

One hundred thousand or so books a year are published in the USA now, yet millions more are written...and of those 100K, few make money.

So, here are some interesting questions: Assuming he's right about all this, what is the future of music in our culture? Will we be seeing a decline in the quality of our popular music (many would argue that we already have)? Is the decline inevitable? What would it take to reverse it and is it worth reversing? Is a government bailout of the music industry on the horizon?

RLC

Compassion Genes

As part of the discussion of free will and determinism in my philosophy classes we talked about evolutionary psychology and the idea of the "selfish gene." One of the foremost popularizers of this view is Robert Wright who in the lecture below claims that human compassion and the Golden Rule are genetically based and hard wired into our biological nature by evolution.

This view is fraught with problems. For example, Wright seems to argue that because we have the genes for compassion that therefore compassion is good, but then cruelty and selfishness must also be genetic. So, why are they not good? What standard does Wright use to decide that compassion is good and cruelty is not? Unfortunately, he has none other than that he prefers one and not the other. It's a purely arbitrary judgment on his part. He likes what compassion does and dislikes what cruelty does, and so he declares compassion good, and counts on an audience steeped in the subliminal assumptions of a Judeo-Christian heritage to agree with him. He could have made the same argument, though, substituting cruelty, and it would be just as valid. If our genes program us to act cruelly, which they surely must, then cruelty is good.

The first nine minutes or so of the video are the most interesting:

How do we know that we have a "compassion gene" anyway? Such a gene has never been found and its existence is purely speculative, but it leads us to one of the interesting aspects of Wright's hypothesis. The theory that there is a gene for compassion may be testable. If Wright's correct then as we elucidate more and more of the genome we should be able to find genes that program us for compassionate behavior. If we don't the idea of a genetic basis for morality becomes much less likely to be true, and we'll have to look elsewhere for a basis for human moral sentiments.

RLC

Wide of the Mark

I don't like the title on this graph, but the data it reflects are too important to ignore just because the heading is more tendentious than I'd like:

The red line is the actual unemployment rate. The other lines represent what we were promised by the Obama administration. Either these people were lying to us about the effects their massive stimulus package would have or they're just incompetent. I prefer to believe the latter explanation. It's more charitable but no more comforting.

RLC

Leaving the Left

A feminist leftist named Meryl Yourish explains why she has become a feminist conservative. In a nutshell, she realized that the Left is hostile to most of the things she believes in.

Today, I will be voting in the blowout victory of Republican candidate for governor Bob McDonnell, and it's highly likely that I will be voting for pretty much the entire Republican ticket.

Only nine years ago, I voted for Al Gore and the straight Democratic ticket in New Jersey-line A all the way, as the slogan went. (Funny how even though the position of Line A was a coin flip, the Dems had Line A almost every single year I voted in NJ.)

The question is, who changed: Me, or them?

Well, I've changed. I have become more centrist, and less willing to part with my hard-earned dollars because a politician says he can spend my money better than I. I'm definitely tired of state-run charity programs for the perpetually unemployed. Or the state wanting to run my healthcare. (Or, for that matter, auto companies and banks.)

But there were two major turning points in my march towards the center. The first came on September 11, 2001. The second came in the bloody Israeli spring of 2002. That was when I realized that the left-leaning crowd that I ran with didn't think that Israel had the right to use military means against the Palestinians to stop the terrorists. That was when I realized that the left-leaning crowd that I ran with were justifying Palestinian suicide attacks against Israelis by using the excuse that the Palestinians were oppressed. That was when I realized that the left-leaning crowd I ran with was full of anti-Semites who call themselves anti-Zionists.

You can find the rest of her essay at the link. There really are two kinds of people. There are those who value individual liberty and will fight to keep it, and there are those who hold their liberty cheap and are eager to surrender it to a government whose design is to gain as much control over our lives as it can. Ms Yourish, evidently, belongs to the first group. Most of those in power in Washington today hope you belong to the second.

RLC