Mencken's Way

Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is just plain tired of civil discourse between believers and unbelievers and thinks it's time to "try H. L. Mencken's way" of dealing with Christian theists:

The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.

True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge.

I had to laugh as I read this quote a second time through because the first time I read it I thought Mencken was talking about Darwinians. The description in the second paragraph, especially, certainly fit.

Anyway, it's an odd bit of advice that Coyne is urging upon his atheist confreres, given that it's the atheistic Darwinians who so often refuse to engage creationists or intelligent design advocates in open debate. Their reluctance is warranted, perhaps, by the fact that when one of their number, like Christopher Hitchens, does sally forth to do battle with the unwashed dolts, he often gets trounced.

So, to Mr. Coyne I say I hope you're successful in convincing your brethren to engage the best Christian theists in debate, but I caution you to be careful what you wish for.

RLC

Hitler and AGW

From Uncommon Descent:

Back in 2004, the German-Austrian film 'Downfall' was released. The film depicted Hitler's last days in his Berlin bunker. Since then, the portion of the film where a detached-from-all-reality Hitler goes on a tirade - lashing out and finally conceding all is lost - has been modified to poke fun at everything from Chicago Cubs personnel moves to Hillary Clinton's failed presidential campaign. Here it is in the context of the recent damning evidence of outright global warming fraud:

Pretty funny. I'll bet Al Gore isn't laughing, though.

RLC

Death Rates

The next time someone tells you that people are better off under socialized health care plans you might cite some statistics to them:

As the Congress prepared to vote to let us enter the world of waits for doctors, waits for specialists, waits for testing and waits for surgery, radiation and chemo, we should pause to consider the relative records of the private medical care system in the United States with the socialized system in the U.K.

In 2008, Britain had a cancer death rate 0.25% while the United States had a rate of only 0.18%. The UK cancer death rate was 38% higher than in the United States.

The Guardian, the UK's left wing daily, estimated that "up to 10,000 people" are dying each year of cancer "because their condition is diagnosed too late, according to research by the government's director of cancer services." While many people die because of late detection due to their own negligence, there is no reason to believe this self-neglect is more common in the UK than in the US.

In Canada, the cancer death rate is 16% higher than in the United States.

So, why is Congress and the White House pushing a health care reform bill that would essentially make us more like Britain and Canada? Go figure.

RLC

Incoherence

There's been a lot of controversy over President Obama's Afghanistan speech Tuesday night. Lefties fault him for agreeing to send more troops, and conservatives fault him for setting a deadline after which the troops will be pulled out. There's even more controversy about how sincere the president was with his deadline, given that he's been notorious for setting deadlines which he promptly proceeds to ignore (Iraq, Guantanamo Bay).

My problem with the speech, other than it seemed as if his heart wasn't really in it, is that the whole idea of a deadline strikes me as foolhardy. I don't see the point in telling the enemy how long you're prepared to fight, nor do I see how it can avoid having a negative impact both on the morale of the troops who know that as the deadline approaches they're putting their lives on the line for a mission that will be ending in a couple of weeks, and on that of Afghans who will be very reluctant, knowing that the Americans will be leaving, to be seen being friendly or helpful to U.S. troops. Who wants to go on a dangerous mission when soon none of it will matter? What Afghan wants to be seen helping the Americans when after they leave the Taliban will be free to seek retribution?

Nor do I see the logic in saying that we'll begin to withdraw on a date certain but that the withdrawal will be based on conditions on the ground. What does that mean? If the conditions don't permit a withdrawal will we stay there? If so, what's the point in setting the deadline in the first place?

My biggest objection to setting the withdrawal date, though, is this: If Afghanistan really is crucial to our national security then we should be there as long as it takes to pacify the place. If Mr. Obama is not going to stay until the task is successfully completed then, we can reasonably assume, he believes the war is not really critical to our security. And if that's what Obama believes then it's absolutely reprehensible that he doesn't pull out immediately before one more serviceman or woman is killed or maimed.

Either Afghanistan is crucial to our national security, and we should be prepared to be there for as long as it takes to end the threat, or it's not crucial, and we should be getting out ASAP. By setting a deadline, Mr. Obama is tacitly revealing that the latter is the case so for him to nevertheless spill more blood and waste more treasure there is unconscionable.

Mr. Obama's speech Tuesday night was a muddle of conflicting messages and incoherent ideas. Like the administration's baffling defense of its decision to bring Kalid Sheik Mohammed to New York to be tried in federal court, it reflects a White House more concerned about the political impact of what is said and done than with doing what is right.

The best I can say of the President's Afghanistan policy is that it seems amateurish, and his speech certainly wasn't the sort of effort one would expect from a President whose brilliance his admirers never tire of extolling.

RLC

The Logical Mind

It's hard to keep up with all the terrible arguments being introduced into the public square by today's atheists, but one does what one can. I recently came across a particularly unfortunate example in the British DailyMail by Andrew Alexander. He begins his column with this lede:

With Rome and Canterbury at loggerheads over doctrinal trivialities - in reality over power - now is a good moment to make a heartfelt plea for atheism. For those of us who embrace that view, it seems the only position for the logical mind.

Mr. Alexander then goes on to explain that because Charles Darwin sailed to the Galapagos, because there are exegetical problems with the Gospels, because some popes did bad things, and because pagans had stories about gods coming back to life, therefore we may safely conclude that Christianity is false. Perhaps that's how a logical mind works, I don't know, but Mr. Alexander's conclusion seems to me to be far grander than his premises warrant.

But let's pause for a moment to ask Mr. Alexander how he happens to come by the logical mind which he is so pleased to put on display for our benefit.

Presumably by "logical mind" he is referring to the ability to draw rational inferences, but I wonder if it ever occurred to him that if naturalism (the view that nature is all there is) is true then rationality is not only inexplicable, it's pretty much untrustworthy.

If naturalism is true then our minds are the product of non-rational processes that shaped us to survive life in the stone age, but, we should ask, how do non-rational processes like chance, natural selection, genetic mutation and the laws of physics produce a rational mind? How does the rational arise from the non-rational? Regrettably, Mr. Alexander doesn't even seem to be aware of the problem, much less offer an answer to it.

Suppose, though, that rationality somehow did manage to appear among early Homo sapiens. If so, our minds would have been selected for by evolution to aid our survival, not necessarily to discover truth, particularly metaphysical truth. Our minds are just as likely to hold false beliefs as true ones as long as the false beliefs have survival value.

Thus we have no reason to think that our beliefs, especially those which do not lend themselves to empirical verification, like our belief in naturalism, for example, are true, or that our reason is trustworthy. Indeed, in order to argue that reason is trustworthy we have to employ our reason, and thus we have to assume that reason is trustworthy in order to argue that it is trustworthy. This may seem perfectly sensible to Mr. Alexander's logical mind, but it sounds like a circular argument to me.

Mr. Alexander goes on:

Atheism is scepticism in its highest form; and without scepticism you cannot properly understand the way of the world.

If it is true that atheism is the highest form of skepticism wouldn't it be the case, then, that to be skeptical of atheism would be the greatest form of skepticism of all? Is Mr. Alexander skeptical of atheism? If not, why not?

Naturally enough, devout Christians find atheism shocking.

No, I don't think that's true. Christians find atheism sad, perhaps, or pathetic, or desperate, or intellectually destitute, but I doubt many thoughtful Christians are shocked by it. We see it too often to be shocked.

Without religion, the human race, being what it is, will work out its own rules for right and wrong. The Greeks were doing it rather well before Christ.

Well, maybe, but many Greeks rooted their morality in the will of the gods. Their moral authority was something beyond themselves. Others, like Aristotle, embraced a kind of virtue ethics which reduces essentially to subjectivism. He believed we should behave virtuously, but not only could he give no satisfactory answer to the question why the virtues are obligatory upon us and the vices are not, he couldn't even give us a principle by which we can reliably identify the virtues. It turns out that what is virtuous is relative to what a society, or individuals in a society, think it is, but if this is so morality is purely a matter of social consensus, like women's fashion.

The fact is that any attempt to develop an ethics rooted in a naturalistic worldview is doomed to founder on the shoals of subjectivism: What's right is what feels right to me. What's right is what works for me. What's right is whatever makes me happy. Those are the rules that the human race works out for itself when it rejects God. "Look out for #1" is the common expression of the rules, and concern for others at the expense of oneself makes no sense, either in ethical or evolutionary terms.

It may be that there is no God, but if one such as Mr. Alexander really believes this then let's have no flummery from him about how we can all be moral anyway, as if we had any idea at all what that means in a world without God.

I'm surprised someone as logical as Mr. Alexander doesn't see the problem.

RLC

Will We or Won't We?

Now that Honduras has held an election, and the winner has been declared we wonder whether the U.S. will recognize the new government.

Earlier, Brazil and Argentina said they would not recognize the election results. Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica said they would accept them.

U.S. officials have indicated the election is a key step forward for Honduras, but they have not said whether they will accept the outcome.

Perhaps the better question is how the Obama administration can not recognize the new government in Honduras, even if he thinks that the whole process was unjust. After all, he offered congratulations to the thugs in Iran following their sham of an election and the popular uprising it ignited. Why would he scruple to withhold his imprimatur from the freely-elected new Honduran government? Will President Obama now side with the people of Honduras as he clearly failed to do in Iran? Or will he continue to express his dudgeon over the Hondurans' removal from office of a man, Manuel Zelaya, whose leftist proclivities Mr. Obama finds congenial?

The new President of Honduras is Porfirio Lobo a wealthy rancher who narrowly lost to Zelaya four years ago. Zelaya, a leftist in the mold of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, was removed from office on charges of treason and abuse of power. The removal precipitated international condemnation of what was incorrectly portrayed, even by our own state department, as a military coup.

Zelaya is currently living in the Brazilian embassy to avoid arrest by the Honduran authorities, but now that the people of Honduras have spoken perhaps Mr. Obama will invite him to take up residence in the White House.

RLC

Reflections on Responses to <i>Twilight</i>

I was amused by the responses to the post on Twilight's Unfortunate Messages based on a critique by John Lewinski. The male respondents were in almost universal agreement with Lewinski whereas many females sounded like they wanted to strangle him.

I haven't read the books nor seen the movies, so I make no judgment of them, but I was a little surprised by some of the reasons many of the respondents gave in defense of the films. These included the fact that the messages promoted by the latest movie are nothing new, the story is just harmless fantasy, there's lots worse stuff out there, most people can handle bad themes without doing damage to their psyches, and the claim that Lewinski focuses too much on the negatives rather than trying to see the positives of the film.

This was interesting to me because though all of this may be true these are essentially the same justifications men use to rationalize looking at pornography.

Not that I'm saying Twilight is pornographic, mind you - again, I don't know much about it - but pornography in film is not just a matter of the visuals. Pornography is a matter of the messages that the movie sends. The problem with pornography, the thing that makes it really insidious, is not just that it makes public what should be private, not just that it perverts sex by focusing exclusively on the physical to the exclusion of the emotional, psychological, and spiritual elements of our sexuality, what's really harmful is that it creates in a young man a completely unrealistic expectation of what romance should be and what his wife should be like.

A young man who has spent many hours viewing pornography often sets a standard for the woman in his life that she simply cannot attain or does not want to attain. He tends to see women primarily as opportunities for sexual gratification, he sees them as objects rather than as persons, and he's often profoundly disappointed when they do not measure up, either in appearance or behavior, to what he has viewed on the screen. That's why pornography is often a marriage-wrecker.

But any book or film that sends messages to the viewer which pervert romance and create unrealistic expectations of the opposite sex commits essentially the same sin. Books or movies that present adulterous affairs in a positive light (does Twilight do this?) or that create an image of a man or woman to which most people could never measure up even if they wanted to, are sending messages that are every bit as harmful as those of Hustler magazine. Any book or movie that sends the messages that Lewinski imputes to Twilight is distorting romance, creating unrealistic expectations, and setting girls and women up for big disappointments in their own relationships with men.

So, the reply to Lewinski should not be that the movie is just a harmless fantasy, that most people know it's fantasy, that there's worse fantasies out there, that most girls can handle the fantasy, and that the fantasy is nothing new. All this can be said of pornography. The reply should be that the movie does not, in fact, send the messages about men and women that Lewinski says it does. Unfortunately, too many of our respondents agreed that the movie does indeed send these messages, but they liked it anyway.

That sounds a lot like something a college kid sitting in front of his computer thrilling to video of some sexual debauch might say.

RLC

Greatest Scientific Scandal in History

Well, isn't this something?

Now it turns out that not only have leading climatologists in the anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming debate conspired to freeze out dissenters, not only have they admitted that their data for the last ten years don't support the hypothesis that the earth is warming or that long-term warming is caused by human activity, not only have they admitted to massaging the data to make it conform to their theoretical stance on AGW, not only have they refused to let other researchers see their data and advised colleagues to destroy it should they be forced by Freedom of information laws to disclose it, but now it turns out that they actually have destroyed the data upon which the whole AGW thesis was based in the first place:

Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals - stored on paper and magnetic tape - were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU's director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

This revelation follows those discovered in the...

...highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

These are the people upon whose word nations are prepared to spend trillions of dollars to reduce carbon emissions to reverse a warming trend that, to the extent that it exists, has no demonstrable relation to carbon. They have, by association, ruined the reputation of tens of thousands of honest scientists and disgraced themselves by their odious behavior. They are responsible for the greatest scientific scandal perhaps in the history of science and should be banned from the profession.

Meanwhile, the lesson for the rest of us is to stop listening to people who tell us to just shut up and take the word of experts. When the "experts" are unwilling to present their data, when they appear to be promoting an ideological agenda, then we should be very skeptical indeed of whatever they tell us.

RLC

Defenseless

Doubtless part of the reason the death toll was so high at Fort Hood was that no one in the building where the shootings occurred was armed, except the shooter. It may seem odd that on a military base no one is allowed to carry weapons, but in 1993 one of the first things President Clinton undertook upon taking office was to sign a directive that forbade all military personnel except military police from carrying firearms on base.

The President no doubt meant well but the directive insured that any terrorist who wanted to kill American soldiers would have a pretty easy time of it by attacking them on their bases. Indeed, as someone put it, a mass killer would probably face greater risk of return fire at the local Wal-Mart than on a military base.

In fact, all the public shootings that have occurred in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed have occurred in places where concealed handguns have been banned. Had an administrator at Columbine had access to a weapon fewer kids may have died. Had a professor at Virginia Tech had access to the means to stop the lunatic who killed so many students there the carnage may have been less. Had soldiers at Fort Hood carried sidearms, as they do every day when they are deployed, Nidal Malik Hasan would probably never even have tried to do what he did.

It's a mistake to think that we're making people more safe by taking away their ability to protect themselves. The only people who obey laws prohibiting firearms are those who obey laws. Criminals pay them no heed, and our good intentions wind up making it easier for mass murderers to carry out their horrific crimes.

We live in a society where it's impossible to prevent killers from getting guns and it's impossible for the police to protect people from them. Given those impossibilities, it makes no sense to try to solve the problem of social violence by taking away from people the means to protect themselves and those they love from the thugs and predators in our midst.

RLC

Eternal Vigilance

The university was once a bastion of free speech and freedom of thought, but that was a long time ago. Today the university is on the forefront of the progressive attempt to throttle free speech and thought wherever they can.

The latest instance of this movement to impose a stifling conformity upon the public has come to light at the University of Minnesota. U of M is establishing a policy whereby students applying for admission to their teacher education program will be screened to assess whether they hold the correct ideological commitments. Apparently, if you wish to be a teacher you will not be allowed to be a conservative and probably not a religious person. Such is the world the progressives would have us inhabit - a world in which freedom is something to be found only in intellectual antique markets.

Fortunately, FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), a free-speech activist group that fights political-correctness codes on college campuses, is on the case. You can read about this shameful attempt to impose ideological uniformity on Minnesota's public school students at Hot Air, and you can find other examples of academia's intolerance by doing a Viewpoint search for Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

Young people growing up in the post WWII era took their freedom to hold dissenting opinions for granted, but there are many people in the contemporary left, in universities and in government, who see that freedom as an enemy. They want to be able to dictate what you'll be able to say and, if they can, even what you think, and they're relentless in their push to get their way. If they succeed students will one day be saying the 21st century equivalent of Heil Hitler before classes each morning just as today they recite the pledge of allegiance.

It really is true, as the 19th century abolitionist Wendall Phillips once said, that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

RLC

Atheists Have Won So Stop Arguing

Byron linked me to an article by Lisa Miller in a recent edition of Newsweek in which Ms Miller voices a weariness with the argumentiveness of the "New Atheists." It's not that she's unimpressed with their arguments, mind you. Rather, she seems to be persuaded that the atheists have won the debate about the rationality of belief in God, that further argument is tedious and pointless, and that we need to move on and recognize that people are not going to be persuaded to believe one way or another about God by appeals to reason.

Ms Miller gives far too much credit to the work of people like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens - as though their books, like a massive artillery barrage, have somehow swept the field, there's no point in continuing the shelling, and all that's left is for believers to retreat into irrelevant, isolated enclaves of nonrational, subjective faith reinforced by the beauties of poetry.

Three statements in particular bothered me in this essay. Miller writes:

Three charismatic men - Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Hitchens - have not just dominated the conversation, they've crushed it.

"Crushed it"? In whose judgment? By what standard? All three of these men have done little beyond embarrass themselves whenever they've either written on, or debated, religion. That Miller isn't aware of this is a poor reflection on how thoroughly she knows her subject.

The whole thing has started to feel like being trapped in a seminar room with the three smartest guys in school, each showing off to impress ... whom? Let's move on.

Move on to what? Poetry? She wants to cede the flag of rationality to the atheist when in fact the atheist has lost it everywhere but in popular culture. Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens are doubtless very smart, but so are their opponents. Why does Miller give the impression that the atheists simply outshine their competition intellectually? Has she not watched the debates between Hitchens and William Lane Craig? Has she not read any of the scathing reviews of Dawkins' or Harris' books by people like Alvin Plantinga? Guess not.

This week Harvard's humanist chaplain Greg Epstein comes out with Good Without God, a book arguing that people can have everything religion offers-community, transcendence, and, above all, morality - without the supernatural. This seems to me self-evident...

This is a very odd claim. The atheist belief that he can have all those goods without the supernatural may be true - I argue that it's not - but it's possible that it is. What it's not, though, is self-evident. Miller just doesn't know what she's talking about here anymore than she did when she wrote a column sometime back on why Christians should accept gay marriage.

Her assertion that atheists can have morality without God is, I think, either trivially true or it's false. It's true that atheists can live by the same values that theists call "moral" but their choice to do so is purely subjective and arbitrary. It's not grounded in anything but their own feelings. Thus, they can be "moral" in the sense that they live by certain values that Christians also live by. But the claim to "have morality," if it means anything significant, means 1) to have grounds for making moral judgments about the behavior of others and 2) to be obligated to do one thing rather than another. Neither of these can apply to an atheist.

The atheist cannot say that others are wrong if they choose, say, to withhold charity from those who suffer, nor can he say that anyone is obligated to be charitable. What on earth could possibly obligate someone to help another? Our genes? Our shared humanity? The greater good? The most that an atheist can say is that he likes charity and wishes that others did, too, but he could just as "morally" claim to like stinginess. It makes no difference.

The shallowness of Miller's piece reminded me why I stopped reading Newsweek a long time ago, but I'm sure the article will, nevertheless, be a big hit on the cable talk shows.

RLC

White Flight

This is an interesting datum - interesting for what it says about our perceptions of how Mr. Obama is doing thus far into his presidency and how those perceptions are influenced by race:

Just 39 percent of white Americans now approve of President Obama's job performance, a steep drop-off of support since he was inaugurated in January, according to the latest Gallup Poll.

In his first full week in office, starting Jan. 26, just over six in 10 white people gave him their approval. Now that number is down to under four in 10, indicating a net drop of 22 points.

Black voters, meanwhile, have continued to support Obama to the tune of approximately 90 percent.

In other words, were President Obama a white man it's very doubtful that he would have held onto black support to the extent that he has. Were he white his approval numbers among blacks would probably be about what they are among whites and he'd be under 40% in his overall approval rating. That's quite a drop in the first ten months of a presidency. It's probably even "unprecedented."

That there is such a gap between how whites perceive the Obama presidency and how blacks do is unfortunate but understandable. As the first black president, he's the repository of so much of the hope and pride of black America. Blacks are heavily invested in his success and are loath to give up on him and admit that the man in whom they had placed so much confidence and optimism is showing himself unable to do the job.

Perhaps the lesson for voters of all races is that one's vote for president should not be cast for the person whose skin is the right color or for the candidate whose gender satisfies some politically correct requirement. The candidate who wins our vote should be the person we think is the best qualified to do the job, and race and gender are not, or should not be, relevant qualifications.

RLC

<i>Twilight's</i> Unfortunate Messages

If teenage girls issued fatwahs John Lewinski might need round the clock police protection after writing his critique of The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Lewinski lists twenty unfortunate messages young girls take home from Twilight. I haven't seen the movie so I can't say how accurate he is, but I think the twenty lessons are pretty much ubiquitous in our culture anyway, sadly. Here's Lewinski's amusing lede:

From a male point of view, the only redeeming feature of the Twilight books and movies is the ammunition they provide against female claims of innate moral superiority over men.

Whenever a woman criticizes a man's lust, aggression, shallowness or any other lesser angel of his personality, the quick-witted fellow can point to the millions of women addicted to the base, insipid, bad-boy-worshiping, misogynist syrup so many female viewers of all ages knelt to this past weekend, when The Twilight Saga: New Moon raked in $147 million at the box office, setting several records.

In the spirit of speaking truth to diamond-skinned power, enjoy this list of unfortunate lessons girls learn from Twilight. (The list operates under the principle that any grownup female who embraces Twilight's junior-high dreck temporarily sacrifices her "woman card.") And so, with an insincere "love is forever," we begin.

Go to the link to read the twenty lessons. If you know someone who has seen the movie you might want to share them with that person as well. The lessons could have been titled, with a nod to Laura Schlessinger, Twenty Stupid Things Girls Believe That Make a Wreck Out of Their Lives.

RLC

Microfinance

One of the innovative ways in which the internet is being put to use to help poor people around the globe is what might be called internet microfinance.

The way it works in a nutshell is this: You go to the website of an organization doing microfinance (providing small loans to the working poor) and view pictures and summaries of entrepreneurs from third world countries who need loans (usually a couple hundred dollars or less) to get a business going or to get over a rough spot, etc.

One such organization that works to provide loans to such people is a group called Kiva. Kiva has field partners in countries around the globe who dispense loans to small businessmen and women. You and others make a contribution to the loan (usually $25.00 or more) which, in aggregate, gives the field partner the capital he needs to secure the loan. When the loan is repaid you get your money back and can use it to fund other loans.

If you're looking for a good way to help people but feel that handouts are often counterproductive this is an excellent way to give people who are working hard a hand up. Check out the Kiva site to get a better idea of what they do.

RLC

Thanksgiving Meditation

Perhaps on this Thanksgiving eve it might be well to remind ourselves of the adjuration given to the Israelites who had much to be thankful for but who, like us, often took too much for granted. This would be an appropriate reading as we sit down with our families and friends to partake of the Thanksgiving feast.

Moses says to the children of Israel (Deuteronomy 8:10-14; 17-18):

When you have eaten and are satisfied, you shall thank the Lord your God for the good land He has given you.

Be careful not to forget the Lord your God by not keeping His commandments and His ordinances and His statutes which I am commanding you today. Lest when you have eaten and are satisfied and have built good houses and lived in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply, and your silver and gold multiply, and all you have multiplies, then your heart becomes proud, and you forget the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery....[and] you say in your heart, "My power and the strength of my hand made me this wealth."

But you shall remember the Lord your God, for it is He who is giving you the power to make wealth...

Indeed. Anyone who thinks their "wealth" isn't fragile and ephemeral need only consider the stock market and how entire fortunes, accumulated over years of effort, could be wiped out in a couple of days of market collapse. We only need think of how quickly jobs, houses, possessions, and health can all slip away from us in a mere instant.

All of life's goods hang by a thread, and we should be thankful to God for every moment that the thread doesn't break.

Have a wonderful and gratitude-filled Thanksgiving.

RLC

Ocean Beauties

Fox News has a photo gallery of twenty two newly discovered species of marine creatures. Many of the photos are gorgeous. Here's an example:

Comb jelly

Such beauty raises a host of questions. Why are we so drawn to beauty? How did our love of beauty come to be? If the Darwinians are correct, what survival value does appreciating beauty have that caused it to be selected for?

Some Darwinians argue that our delight in beauty has no particular survival value but rather evolved because it supervenes on other traits that are chosen by natural selection for their fitness. Imagine a basketball coach selecting players to play a particular position in which they must be able to get rebounds. Most such players will have large hands, because large hands supervene upon height (they often "occur together") and height is a trait which would assist in getting rebounds, the behavior being selected for.

The problem with the supervenience explanation, however, is that as a scientific hypothesis it's pretty much useless since there's no way to test it. A theory that can't be tested can't be shown either to be true or to be false and thus falls outside the bounds of science.

Our fascination with beauty - the fact that we find some things beautiful and enjoy them - is hard to explain in terms of blind, mindless forces acting randomly. It's hard to imagine that chemical reactions occurring in our brains somehow translate into the apprehension of beauty. How does such a thing happen? It's not hard to imagine at all, however, if we allow for the possibility that our sense of beauty were imparted to us by an intelligent creator who created not only our ability to discern the beautiful but also created the beauty he wishes us to enjoy.

For more of this beauty go to the link.

RLC

Game Changer

On the eve of the Copenhagen Summit on global climate change the credibility of the proponents of man-caused global warming (Anthropogenic Global Warming - AGW) has taken a hit from which it may not recover. Strangely (or not so strangely) the media isn't saying much of anything about this, but it would seem to be a major story. What happened is that some hackers broke into the servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit(Hadley CRU), one of the major seats of global warming research in the world, and released confidential files and emails onto the internet.

James Delingpole at the UK Telegraph comments:

When you read some of those files - including 1079 emails and 72 documents - you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be "the greatest in modern science". These alleged emails - supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory - suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

What the researchers were discovered to be doing was trying to silence their academic opponents by denying them venues to get their views published and colluding to discredit those who challenge their data about AGW. Here's one of the emails laying out a strategy for suppressing dissent:

This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics [of AGW] for not publishing in the "peer-reviewed literature." Obviously, they found a solution to that - take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering Climate Research [the dissenters' journal] as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board...what do others think?"

I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor. It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past.

In other words, this AGW proponent is saying that they have a problem as long as their opponents have a venue for publishing their dissent, so they need to discredit the journal they publish in and then they can claim that no dissenters are scientifically credible because they're not published in legitimate scientific journals. Instead of a commitment to truth these people are committed to winning the debate even if they have to lie about the numbers and silence the opposition to do it. This isn't how real scientists operate.

Other emails talk about how researchers manipulated data to support AGW. Still others lament that they can't show evidence that the earth is actually warming:

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data ... shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

It's quite a scandal, or should be, since it potentially changes everything with regard to global warming and the credibility of the scientists who have been warning us about it. Since the perpetrators are on the "right side" of this controversial issue, however, the media has been sluggish in looking into it. Even so, if these emails become widely circulated it'll make the AGW cause look ridiculous and consequently make it all the harder for the Obama administration to pass their climate change legislation.

I expect this story is going to explode in the next couple of days.

RLC

The Hole in Iran's Defenses

As the world gears up for the expected Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear weapons production facilities, two questions present themselves:

1. What role, if any, will the U.S. play in the assault?

2. If the answer to #1 is (as I expect it is) "nothing overt" then can the Israelis succeed on their own?

DEBKAfile has a piece that sheds a little light on this second question.

The Iranians were counting on the Russians to deliver S-300 missiles which would be needed to shoot down attacking aircraft, but the Russians have evidently decided to renege on the deal (due to American diplomacy?) leaving the Iranians critically exposed and defenseless against a sophisticated air assault:

For two weeks, high-ranking Iranian politicians and generals bombarded Moscow to make good on its contract to supply the key weapon, to no avail. Saturday, Nov. 21, Iran's air force commander Brig. Gen. Ahmad Mighani spoke at length about the highly sophisticated S-300, without which, DEBKAfile's military sources say, Iran has no real defense against US and Israeli aerial or missile strikes against its nuclear installations.

Our sources report that, aside from the Russian-made Tor-M 1 short-range interceptor, Iran's air defense systems are outdated and pretty useless against US stealth bombers or the Israeli air force's electronic jamming instruments. Syria likewise lacked the weapons for stopping Israel attack its North-Korean-made nuclear reactor two years ago. The Iranian air force has nowhere near the capacity to take on US or Israeli air might.

Iranian strategists are trying to make do with three alternatives:

1. As many nuclear installations as possible are being moved to secret subterranean sites - among them most of the research laboratories working on the development of nuclear weapons and missiles.

2. Bogus installations have been planted not far from genuine plants to mislead assailants.

3. Tehran's most powerful defense is the deterrent strength of its ballistic missiles and the missiles distributed to its Middle East allies, Syria, the Lebanese Hizballah and the Palestinian Hamas. Therefore, Iran's first response to attack will not be to attack Israeli population centers as the Revolutionary Guards officer threatened, but to strike the home bases of its air force, missile and radar as well as the Israel-based US military facilities, so that Israeli warplanes will have no facilities to come back to, and its missiles are knocked off their launch pads.

When the Israelis finally do launch their attack - or attacks - the world will scream in outrage at this intolerable aggression even as they heave a sigh of relief that the Israelis removed the threat of nuclear war, at least temporarily, from the Middle East. It'll be a shame if we don't participate in the military strike because success can only be guaranteed if we do, but it'll be a greater disgrace if we join in the hypocritical chorus of condemnation. If the Israelis pull it off everyone in the world should thank them for having the courage and skill to do what the world should have done but lacked the spine and/or the ability to do.

RLC

Re: Fading Glory

Jason D. writes with some questions based on our recent post titled Fading Glory which addressed the diminishing luster of Mr. Obama's presidency. Jason asks me to answer the following questions, and I thought it might be good to share the exchange:

1) Why, in spite of all this failure to produce, are numerous media sources still backing him? Why have they not highlighted these issues more and used their influence to 'force' change?

The media are sympathetic to the President's goal of expanding the reach of government over individual lives. They share his basic values and were heavily invested in his election. He's their best hope for accomplishing what they'd like to see done in this country, and they're quite naturally slow to give up on him. We have to keep in mind that journalists today see themselves as advocates for policy, not reporters of events. Just as most talk radio hosts see their role as promoting a conservative vision of what America should be, network television and most of the print media see their primary role as promoting a liberal/progressive vision.

2) Why would Obama open up a new can of worms by addressing the censorship issue in China, when he has too much unresolved on his plate so as it is?

I can't answer this except to say that I'm glad he did. I wish that he would have been more outspoken than he was about human rights abuses, both in China and in Myanmar (Burma). I also wish he would have publicly complained about the muzzle the Chinese put on his public appearances, perhaps out of fear that the President would talk about human rights. On the other hand, I don't think human rights are Mr. Obama's priority. If they are I don't understand why he spurned a meeting with the Dalai Lama before he left for the Orient.

3) In light of all this 'failure', as I will call it, on Obama's part, how should we as Christians balance our disagreements with him with our mandate to treat him appropriately as a leader? Is prayer the answer, or is there more to it?

I think Christians are certainly called upon to pray for their leaders and the best thing conservative Christians can do is pray for God to give the Obama administration wisdom and moral integrity. At the same time, as citizens we also have to be prepared to stand against the administration when they seek to arrogate more power to themselves than is healthy for the fluorishing of a free people. Pace what the secularists maintain, all government policy is essentially moral, and this is especially true of economic policy. As such, our political life is something about which Christians should be concerned and actively trying to influence.

But, and this is crucial, we should never do to Barack Obama what was done to George Bush. We should always keep our criticism respectful and never personalize it. Bush's critics were often cruel and vulgar. Christians should eschew such tactics and express whatever opposition they have toward the President's policies and ideas in a manner free of hate, vitriol, and insults. This doesn't mean that we can't use humor or even light sarcasm. Nor does it mean we can't poke a little fun at those with whom we disagree. Rather it means that we should always be prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to our opponents, to delay judgment until we have the relevant facts, to keep our criticisms tentative pending new information coming to light, and not assume that those with whom we disagree have evil or corrupt motives until we have, and can articulate, very good reason to think that such motives are the most plausible explanation for their actions.

Finally, I hear people talk bad on G.W. Bush still. However, I already feel that he was a better president than Obama. He knew that he did not have forever-and-a-day to make important decisions about the War on Terror, and it is quite frustrating that Obama can not commit to a decision himself.

It is true that whereas President Bush was frequently derided for having called himself the "decider," President Obama is earning for himself the sobriquet of the "un-decider." He has had since last summer to make a decision on Afghanistan. In fact, he spoke during the campaign as if he had already thought the matter through so his inability to make up his mind now is hard to explain and justify.

It's also true that Bush was a much better president than the media give him credit for being. He kept us safe from terror attacks for over seven years, liberated 50 million people from tyranny, did more for suffering Africans than probably any other American president, and appointed two excellent supreme court jurists. His tax cuts led to six years of prosperity. He gave us a fine example of personal rectitude, courage, and magnanimity toward opponents, and, despite the best efforts of his enemies to hang one on him, his presidency was free of major scandal. Few presidents can match that record.

This is not to say that everything he did was great, but rather to say that those who attack him, including those in the succeeding administration, are often simply not being fair in their assessment of the man.

RLC

Oink

To illustrate the rank dishonesty of our political class, I offer the following tale of shame: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, Nevada) needed all sixty Democrat senators on board to begin debate on the health care reform bill. Several members of his caucus, still capable of glimmers of conscience, were balking. Among these was Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisianna. What to do? Needing her vote, Senator Reid did what any venal politician would do. He bribed her with an offer of $100 million to $300 million dollars in Medicaid.

Now, of course, he couldn't just write a check to the senator, so he had to put the bribe into the bill and make it look like it wasn't a bribe. Here's the language he inserted that won Landrieu's support. I don't expect anyone to read more than just a couple of lines of this travesty, and that's the point. I doubt if most of the senators who voted to proceed with debate Saturday night have read it either, a dereliction which seems pretty close to criminal malfeasance, given the stakes.

In case you're wondering, there's only one state to which all this gobbledygook applies: Lousianna:

''(aa)(1) Notwithstanding subsection (b), beginning January 1, 2011, the Federal medical assistance percentage for a fiscal year for a disaster-recovery FMAP adjustment State shall be equal to the following:

'(A) In the case of the first fiscal year (or part of a fiscal year) for which this subsection applies to the State, the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), increased by 50 percent of the number of percentage points by which the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), is less than the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the preceding fiscal year after the application of only subsection (a) of section 5001 of Public Law 111-5 (if applicable to the preceding fiscal year) and without regard to this subsection, subsection (y), and subsections (b) and (c) of section 5001 of Public Law 111-5.

''(B) In the case of the second or any succeeding fiscal year for which this subsection applies to the State, the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the preceding fiscal year under this subsection for the State, increased by 25 percent of the number of percentage points by which the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), is less than the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the preceding fiscal year under this subsection.

''(2) In this subsection, the term 'disaster-recovery FMAP adjustment State' means a State that is one of the 50 States or the District of Columbia, for which, at any time during the preceding 7 fiscal years, the President has declared a major disaster under section 401 of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act and determined as a result of such disaster that every county or parish in the State warrant individual and public assistance or public assistance from the Federal Government under such Act and for which- ''(A) in the case of the first fiscal year (or part of a fiscal year) for which this subsection applies to the State, the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), is less than the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the preceding fiscal year after the application of only subsection (a) of section 5001 of Public Law 111-5 (if applicable to the preceding fiscal year) and without regard to this subsection, subsection (y), and subsections (b) and (c) of section 5001 of Public Law 111-5, by at least 3 percentage points; and ''(B) in the case of the second or any succeeding fiscal year for which this subsection applies to the State, the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), is less than the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the preceding fiscal year under this subsection by at least 3 percentage points.

''(3) The Federal medical assistance percentage determined for a disaster-recovery FMAP adjustment State under paragraph (1) shall apply for purposes of this title (other than with respect to disproportionate share hospital payments described in section 1923 and payments under this title that are based on the enhanced FMAP described in 2105(b)) and shall not apply with respect to payments under title IV (other than under part E of title IV) or payments under title XXI.''(via Uncommon Descent)

Senator Landrieu beamed as she announced that she'd been bought off:

And so it came to pass that Landrieu walked onto the Senate floor midafternoon Saturday to announce her aye vote -- and to trumpet the financial "fix" she had arranged for Louisiana. "I am not going to be defensive," she declared. "And it's not a $100 million fix. It's a $300 million fix."

If the bill was so bad that she would have voted not to bring it to debate before she was bribed it was certainly no better after the bribe. The only thing that changed was that after the bribe Louisianna would get hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money. No doubt there are many other senators out there eager, like Senator Landrieu, to sell both their votes and their souls, and to sell the rest of us down the river. Open your wallets citizens. The congressional hogs are lining up at the trough and they're very hungry.

RLC