Myth of the Moderate Muslim

David Horowitz is a Jew and former communist who today speaks and writes about the threat of Islamic extremism, not just abroad but on American campuses. A few days ago he was confronted by an American Muslim student whose answer to a question he poses is both chilling and clarifying. It certainly shows that some people who look moderate and sound moderate are in their hearts just as murderous as any terrorist who blows up school busses in Israel:

There is a myth that has gained currency in this country, especially among liberals, that holds that the overwhelming number of Muslims are peace-loving folk who condemn terrorism, Hezbollah, and Hamas. I say it is a myth because although I believe that such Muslims probably exist, and certainly hope that they do, it's very difficult to actually find one of them. It's especially hard to find them on our university campuses.

Check out Horowitz's website FrontPage Mag where he documents many of his encounters with Muslim students, and you'll understand what I mean.

RLC

Looting the World

Bill adds a very important observation to our post titled Death Spiral:

On your Death Spiral post, I just wanted to mention that while all of what you wrote is probably true, you may have missed a not so insignificant fact. The bail out of Greece is not actually a bail out of "Greece" rather it's a bailout of the banks, primarily in Germany and France, that have leant Greece money by buying Greek bonds.

It's no different than what happened in this country. For example AIG had insured investments that Goldman Sachs had made and when those investments went bust, AIG couldn't pay so the taxpayer footed the bill. Tens of billions of dollars of the bailout to AIG went directly to GS. GS didn't lose a penny. The interesting thing about this is that when the bonds from a company go bad (AIG), the bond holders (GS) ALWAYS take a haircut by negotiating for some percentage of pennies on the dollar. Not so in this case, and the banks were made completely whole as the US Treasury and the Fed didn't even attempt to negotiate a settlement.

The same thing is happening with Greece. The moral hazard has gone over the top. The banks know that they can make whatever investments they choose and all losses will be paid for by the public. The big banks have firmly fixed the IV into the arm of the public and will slowly suck out every drop of blood. Unfortunately, nobody seems interested in doing anything about this.

Sadly, these bailouts don't fix anything, rather they simply kick the debt can down the road for a couple of years and the same thing or worse will happen again. If Greece was ready to default today, what are they going to do that will enable them to pay off their present debt (that they can't pay today) along with an additional hundreds of billions that will come due in two years? Giving them the loans just enables them to continue to be grasshoppers.

All that had to be done was for Greece to default and leave the ECU and the Euro until they got their fiscal house in order at which time they could rejoin the union. Greece would have been better off, the ECU and the Euro would have been better off, but the banks would have lost some money. Guess we can't have that now, can we?

The ECU really screwed up because they have sent the message to the world that they aren't really serious about a solid Euro currency. It's just another fiat currency with no discipline...just like the dollar. The Euro price is dropping like a rock as people are bailing out, and that's primarily why the price of gold is going up.

Further, look what's happening every Friday afternoon on the FDIC website where they announce the closing of banks for the week. It doesn't take much to figure out that the assets of the closed banks are being assumed by other banks with the FDIC assuming the garbage assets that aren't wanted.

So what we're getting is more and more banks growing bigger and bigger as the smaller ones go under. The big fish are eating the little fish. At some point all of them will be too big to fail.

The banks are looting the world...

Meanwhile the president, all his tough talk notwithstanding, does nothing to stanch the looting, which isn't surprising given the number of former Goldman Sachs bigwigs with which he has stocked his administration.

RLC

Petty

It's human nature, I suppose, to whine and complain about how tough things are, how boring life is, how there's nothing to do, how awful George Bush was, and so on. Next time you're tempted to complain about your life perhaps you'll recall a story told me by one of my students, an immigrant from one of the most hellish places on earth - Sudan. He recounted an event that happened to him when he was a boy (he's thirty-something now). His name is Jacob, and here's what he said:

When the Muslims attacked our people and drove us out of our villages, we walked hundreds of miles as a group to safety. One time we were being chased by the militia so we were running to cross the river to get away. Most of us had not learned to swim and the river was full of crocodiles so the crossing was full of danger but we had to cross because the militia was coming upon us with guns and swords. Then, on the other side came Arab soldiers to shoot us when we got across. It was a terrible time. Some strong men carried a rope across the river for people to hang onto as they crossed. Some of us were killed by crocodiles. Many older men, women and children drowned. Many others were shot in the water from both sides of the river. I was a boy at the time and fortunately I knew how to swim. I do not know how, but I got across the river even though my two friends were killed. I was able to climb to safety on the other side along with the others who got across safely. I believe it was God's power that saved me on that day!

Kind of makes many of our concerns and troubles seem petty, doesn't it.

RLC

Mirror Images

Why do some atheists think it's a bad idea to draw too close a relationship between naturalism and Darwinism? One possible reason is they fear that eventually some astute judge will realize that Darwinism is essentially of the same philosophical genre as intelligent design and will conclude that if ID is religious then so, too, must Darwinism be. This judicial epiphany will ultimately eventuate in the loss of Darwinism's position of privilege in publicly funded schools.

Casey Luskin makes this point in an interesting essay at Evolution News and Views.

The fact that Darwinism and ID are philosophical mirror images should be obvious to all but the most otiose of observers, but for some reason, it's not. Darwinism claims that physical processes and forces are capable of explaining all of the biological facts of nature. ID is simply the denial of this claim. Why, then, should the latter be ruled "religious" while the former is not? How can one claim be deemed to be science, while it's negation is deemed to be religious?

If the courts ever realize how simple this matter is they're going to find themselves in the awkward position of having to rule that either ID is science, even if it's false (Richard Dawkins' position), or that Darwinism is essentially religious, even if it's true. It'll be interesting to watch judges and lawyers trying to massage that porcupine.

RLC

Econ 101

Here's a fast-paced primer on why our economic predicament is so dire. It's good, but I advise that you use the pause button to allow you to digest the information:

Whether it's Greece or California, it seems clear that excessive spending and borrowing leads only to disaster. I can't think of any example from history when it hasn't. So why has the Obama administration, and to a lesser extent the Bush administration, nevertheless spent us to the brink of catastrophic collapse? Are these people economic or historical illiterates? Are they stupid? Are they deliberately trying to destroy our economy? Are there any other possible explanations?

RLC

Flight of the Intellectuals

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks historian Paul Berman, a man of the Left, wrote a book titled Terror and Liberalism in which he punctured the pretensions of his fellow liberal intellectuals for their fascination with terrorism and their reluctance to think ill of the people who perpetrate it.

Now Berman has come out with a follow-up book titled The Flight of the Intellectuals which, I understand, picks up where his first book leaves off.

I haven't read the second book yet but I have read Terror and Liberalism and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the strange relationship between liberalism and radical Islamism and the motives behind this infatuation.

I also urge readers to read through an interview Berman does with journalist Michael Totten on the themes of his two books. It's an extraordinary piece. Berman has his predilections and prejudices but he is one of the most fair-minded people I've ever encountered. He didn't like George Bush much at all, and that certainly comes through in the interview, but he doesn't hesitate to give Bush credit for his clear-sightedness in the war against Islamic terrorism.

Here's an excerpt taken from a portion of the interview in which Berman and Totten are talking about the mindset of a certain group of liberal intellectuals who are willing to celebrate tyrants if the tyrants are anti-American. Berman observes that:

[T]here's another idea that appeals to many people, which is based not on our own feeling of superiority, but on our own inferiority. We look at ourselves in the Western countries and we say that, if we are rich, relatively speaking, as a society, it is because we have plundered our wealth from other people. Our wealth is a sign of our guilt. If we are powerful, compared with the rest of the world, it is because we treat people in other parts of the world in oppressive and morally objectionable ways. Our privileged position in the world is actually a sign of how racist we are and how imperialistic and exploitative we are. All the wonderful successes of our society are actually the signs of how morally inferior we are, and we have much to regret and feel guilty about. So when we look at the world, we should look at it in a spirit of humility and remorse, and we should recognize that other people have been unfairly treated.

We should recognize the superiority of those other people over ourselves. Money-wise, we may be richer. But, morally, the other people are richer. And so, we should despise ourselves, and we should love the other people -- the people who possess qualities so superior to our own as barely to be human. And then, filled with those very peculiar ideas, we set about looking for messianic figures who might express the superior culture of the other people, and might lead the human race to a higher stage of development. And if someone objects to this analysis, we say, oh, we inferior Westerners are incapable of understanding the mysterious thought-patterns of those other people, so who are you to judge?

The interview is a little long, but it'll be the most intellectually profitable 15 minutes you'll spend today.

RLC

Death Spiral

Newsweek's Robert Samuelson discusses the causes of the crisis in Greece, and what he describes sounds eerily like the situation the United States will find itself in about four years. The problem is fewer workers supporting more and more non-workers and a profligate spending binge leading to ever increasing budget deficits.

Here's an excerpt from Samuelson's column:

Budget deficits and debt are the real problems; and these stem from all the welfare benefits (unemployment insurance, old-age assistance, health insurance) provided by modern governments.

Countries everywhere already have high budget deficits, aggravated by the recession. Greece is exceptional only by degree. In 2009, its budget deficit was 13.6 percent of its gross domestic product (a measure of its economy); its debt, the accumulation of past deficits, was 115 percent of GDP. Spain's deficit was 11.2 percent of GDP, its debt 56.2 percent; Portugal's figures were 9.4 percent and 76.8 percent. Comparable figures for the United States -- calculated slightly differently -- were 9.9 percent and 53 percent.

There are no hard rules as to what's excessive, but financial markets -- the banks and investors that buy government bonds -- are obviously worried. Aging populations make the outlook worse. In Greece, the 65-and-over population is projected to go from 18 percent of the total in 2005 to 25 percent in 2030. For Spain, the increase is from 17 percent to 25 percent.

The welfare state's death spiral is this: Almost anything governments might do with their budgets threatens to make matters worse by slowing the economy or triggering a recession. By allowing deficits to balloon, they risk a financial crisis as investors one day -- no one knows when -- doubt governments' ability to service their debts and, as with Greece, refuse to lend except at exorbitant rates. Cutting welfare benefits or raising taxes all would, at least temporarily, weaken the economy. Perversely, that would make paying the remaining benefits harder.

But we shouldn't worry. Eat, drink, and be merry. Revel in hope and change. Enjoy American Idol. No great superpower lasts forever. After a while, all governments spend themselves into oblivion. Those among our elites who so admire Europe and European ways can take comfort in the fact that we're on course to follow them right down the drain.

RLC

Elena Miers Kagan

When George Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme court the firestorm of protest was so hot that she withdrew her name from consideration. Ms. Miers, it was argued from both the right and the left, had almost no relevant experience to qualify her for the court. Surely, many observers opined, there must be others more qualified than Ms Miers who was awarded the nomination, it was widely suspected, simply because she was a friend of George Bush's.

Well, now Barack Obama has nominated a woman, a friend of his, with no judicial experience and little courtroom experience to be the next Supreme Court Justice. Elena Kagan has no written body of work upon which anyone can base an assessment of her qualifications. She is Barack Obama's Harriet Miers - and also his dopplegänger - with one exception. No one among congressional Democrats thinks her selection is anything less than "superb" as Senator Leahy inexplicably declared.

When Bush nominated Miers, Republicans let him know how disappointed they were that he didn't select the best candidate in the field. He eventually came to his senses and gave us the brilliant Samuel Alito instead. When Obama nominated Kagan, on the other hand, Democrats all lined up to praise the nominee, but none of them can say exactly what it is they're praising her for. It's certainly not her qualifications to sit on the highest court in the land. I guess they feel that in the age of Obama qualifications for high office are just so 20th century.

RLC

Backwards Reasoning

One of the arguments against the idea of an intelligent designer, going back at least to David Hume, is that if such a designer exists it must be incompetent given all the "bad" designs found in nature. One of the prized exhibits in this argument has for years been the "backwards" design of the retina, but, unfortunately for many authors who've hitched their Darwinian wagon to it, this old horse appears headed for the glue factory.

An article in New Scientist explains why:

It looks wrong, but the strange, "backwards" structure of the vertebrate retina actually improves vision. Certain cells act as optical fibres, and rather than being just a workaround to make up for the eye's peculiarities, they help filter and focus light, making images clearer and keeping colours sharp.

Although rods and cones are responsible for capturing light, they are in a curious position. Hidden at the base of the retina, they are covered by several layers of cells as well as the bed of nerves that carries visual information to the brain. One result is a blind spot in our visual field, leading the vertebrate retina to be listed among evolution's biggest "mistakes".

Light clearly gets through, however, and in 2007 researchers analysing the retinas of guinea pigs reported that the glial cells which nourish and physically support the bed of neurons also act as optical fibres for the rods and cones. These M�ller cells are funnel-shaped, with wide tops that cover the surface of the retina and a long slender body that guides light to the receptors below.

Now Amichai Labin and Erez Ribak of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have used data from human eye cells to model the workings of the retina. Their findings suggest that sending light via the M�ller cells offers several advantages.

The rest of the article gives a very interesting explanation of the two advantages these researchers have discovered. Besides these there are other excellent reasons for wiring the retina the way it is that have been understood for some time and which are discussed in this article.

One might think that theists would be heartened by such findings since they seem to support the idea that a designer played some role in the creation. Not so Ken Miller, however. Miller is a theistic evolutionist whose career is heavily invested in persuading people that there's absolutely no evidence for intelligent design in biology, particularly in the human eye, and he's adamant that we not draw any inferences from the research cited by New Scientist that would support ID:

However, Kenneth Miller, a biologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island cautions that this doesn't mean that the backwards retina itself helps us to see. Rather, it emphasises the extent to which evolution has coped with the flawed layout. "The shape, orientation and structure of the M�ller cells help the retina to overcome one of the principal shortcomings of its inside-out wiring," says Miller.

Well, this is certainly an odd take on the research. One might think that the backwards wiring of the retina is only backwards if it impedes vision, but this system actually aids vision. Nevertheless, Miller assumes it's still backwards, apparently because it's not how he would have designed it, and then marvels at how evolution has compensated for the engineering error.

I think probably the retina is less backwards than is Miller's reasoning. If Professor Miller wants my advice it would be to stop digging, throw down his shovel, and pretend that he never heard of the retina.

RLC

Values Clarification

Thomas Sowell reflects upon his childhood and suggests that the moral distance we've traveled in the last seventy years or so is inversely correlated to how educated we've become. Here's his lede:

One of the many fashionable notions that have caught on among some of the intelligentsia is that old people have "a duty to die," rather than become a burden to others.

This is more than just an idea discussed around a seminar table. Already the government-run medical system in Britain is restricting what medications or treatments it will authorize for the elderly. Moreover, it seems almost certain that similar attempts to contain runaway costs will lead to similar policies when American medical care is taken over by the government.

Make no mistake about it, letting old people die is a lot cheaper than spending the kind of money required to keep them alive and well. If a government-run medical system is going to save any serious amount of money, it is almost certain to do so by sacrificing the elderly.

There was a time-- fortunately, now long past-- when some desperately poor societies had to abandon old people to their fate, because there was just not enough margin for everyone to survive. Sometimes the elderly themselves would simply go off from their family and community to face their fate alone.

But is that where we are today?

Sowell goes on to illustrate with a poignant anecdote how we have shifted from a focus on helping others to focussing on living for ourselves. Check it out.

It's a modern conceit that somehow education and technology have, in ways that matter, made us superior to our forebears. This attitude is a naive bit of chauvinistic self-congratulation. Knowing more about physics makes us neither wiser nor more ethical than those who lived prior to the knowledge explosion. Indeed, more people can read today than at any time in history, we can enjoy films, we can surf the web, we can drive cars, but how do we use these wonderful gifts? Much of what we read and watch is junk. For all of our knowledge, wealth, and technology we're certainly no happier than were our grandparents, our families are less stable, and our mental health much more precarious.

Why is that? Perhaps it's because our grandparents knew something that many moderns don't: Happiness is not something that one can obtain through deliberate pursuit. It's not a drug, nor is it the result of the accumulation of knowledge or goods. It is, rather, a by-product of living a life of virtue, meaning, and caring for others.

Modernity, however, scoffs at this. Moderns believe that we should look out for #1 and that when other people stand in the way of our well-being they need to be shoved out of the way. That's why the abortion industry is so lucrative and why there's political presure to limit the care we provide to the elderly. Moderns also deny that there's any such thing as virtue and they hold that meaning can be injected into life by gratifying one's desires, whether sensual or material.

Unfortunately, there's not much evidence to support these beliefs. Surely Shakespeare was correct that, if death is the end of our existence, life is simply "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Sowell thinks the modern world has lost something crucially important to human flourishing. I think he's right.

RLC

New Moral Categories

Dennis Prager observes that those who are miffed with the tea party folks who oppose expnsive government power regularly note that tea partiers are overwhelmingly white. This criticism, Prager claims, is intended by opponents to disqualify the tea parties from serious moral consideration (MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann come immediately to mind in this regard.). In the course of explaining his case Prager notes something about the way lefties often think that's helpful to those who wish to understand how the liberal mind works.

He writes:

The fact that the Left believes that the preponderance of whites among tea partiers invalidates the tea party movement tells us much more about the Left than it does about the tea partiers.

It confirms that the Left really does see the world through the prism of race, gender and class rather than through the moral prism of right and wrong.

One of the more dangerous features of the Left has been its replacement of moral categories of right and wrong, and good and evil with three other categories: black and white (race), male and female (gender) and rich and poor (class).

Therefore the Left pays attention to the skin color -- and gender (not just "whites" but "white males") -- of the tea partiers rather than to their ideas.

As a Leftist rule of thumb -- once again rendering intellectual debate unnecessary and impossible -- white is wrong or bad, and non-white is right and good; male is wrong and bad, and female is right and good; and the rich are wrong and bad, and the poor right and good. For the record, there is one additional division on the Left -- strong and weak -- to which the same rule applies: The strong are wrong and bad, and the weak are right and good. That is a major reason for Leftist support of the Palestinians (weak) against the Israelis (strong), for example.

Presumably, then, in the eyes of many on the Left if you're a rich white male you're automatically suspect (despite the peculiar fact that so many Lefties are themselves rich, white males). If a powerful nation has a grievance with a weaker nation then the powerful nation is assumed to be in the wrong until they prove themselves innocent. If a largely white American legislature passes a law that would prevent poor, dark-skinned people from pouring across the border, it's the white legislature that's assumed to be wrong, not those who break the law to enter the country.

I can see why some people would find this an attractive formula. It has a number of advantages, not the least of which is that it relieves those who embrace it of the responsibility of having to actually think.

Read the rest of Prager's column at the link.

RLC

O Brother Where Art Thou?

A lot of folks in the conservative media are wondering where the President has been while Nashville suffered through a major disaster last week.

Mr. Obama was quick to send aid to Haiti and to claim that the government is doing all it can to force BP to clean up the Gulf oil spill. Yet a once in a century flood has devastated Nashville, and it doesn't seem to be prominently featured on his radar screen. Some cynics think that the reason the man who was quick to criticize President Bush for waiting a day or two too long to rush aid to New Orleans has been dilatory on Tennessee is because Tennessee is a red state and not likely to vote Democratic. I don't know if that's true, but I hope it's not. I don't like to think that our president is that small-minded and vindictive. Such a motive would, moreover, be counterproductive for the president since administrative indifference is a good way to insure that Tennessee never votes Democratic.

I think, though, that the reason for the lack of apparent concern for the people of Tennessee in the administration and the media may be something that is at once less political and more subconsciously sinister. Perhaps, as with the Mississippi river floods a couple of years ago, people just assume that the victims in these regions don't need government help to cope, that they're a self-reliant, proud breed capable of taking care of themselves, which may well be true. But if this is what's in the back of the minds of administration officials what does that say about their attitude, no doubt subliminal, toward the victims in New Orleans and elsewhere as a result of Katrina? Were those people helpless to do anything to help themselves? Why, with fleets of school busses available couldn't the local authorities evacuate their people? Why couldn't the citizens of the city provide care for each other? Were they so lacking in initiative, so dependent on the federal government, that they just sat around in their City Hall offices and their houses waiting for the government to come in and rescue them?

If that's so, then we need to ask why it is so. Is it because the New Orleans victims were poor, or is it because they've been behaviorally conditioned by a paternalistic welfare state to accept a permanent lassitude, indolence and child-like dependency that the proud people of Nashville and elsewhere disdain? Just wondering.

RLC

No Evidence Required

A friend writes to chide me for making the claim that many liberals don't require evidence to believe what they believe. They often think as they do, I averred, simply because it comports or coheres with their liberal worldview. My friend thought this was tantamount to calling liberals liars. On the contrary, I certainly was not saying that many liberals are liars - although if pressed I'd have to agree that some surely are and that many of these even endorse lying as a strategy (read, for instance, Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals).

In my post, however, I was making the more modest claim that many on the left are simply uncritical and gullible. For example, here's a list of ten beliefs many liberals hold, sometimes devoutly, despite the fact that they have little or no evidence for them:

1) That candidate Obama was qualified to hold the highest office in the land.

2) That President Obama is a natural born citizen of the U.S. (This is not to say he isn't, but rather that belief that he is requires an act of faith since he refuses to present his birth certificate).

3) That the Democrats' health care reform proposal will be good for the country.

4) That global warming is caused by human activity and is an imminent threat to the world.

5) That the Arizona law will result in oppressive police tactics against innocent Americans.

6) That intelligent design is just gussied up creationism (Most lay-people who believe this know nothing about ID. They just know that it's wrong.).

7) That tea-partiers are racists.

8) That George Bush and the CIA were behind the 9/11 attacks on New York.

9) That the Palestinians genuinely desire to live in peace with Israel.

10) That an unborn child is nothing more, ontologically speaking, than a blob of tissue.

You can probably think of more examples. If so, please feel free to share them with us.

RLC

Not Funny, Mr. President

Arizona governor Jan Brewer responds to President Obama's criticism of her state's attempt to get a handle on the problem of illegal immigration with this ad:

Perhaps the president's disdain for Arizona's frustration lies in part in the fact that he's pretty much sympatico with the organization La Raza, a radical racial supremicist group which opposes all attempts to limit the flow of Hispanics across our southern border and which holds that much of the southwest actually belongs to Mexico.

HT: Right Wing News

RLC

Interests and Desires

Here are some questions for the metaphysical naturalist: On naturalism (or materialism) what is it that gives human beings inherent value? Where do the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness come from? Why should we think that all must be equal before the law? What gives us the right to to be treated respectfully and justly?

Some naturalist philosophers have answered that it is the fact that human beings have "interests and desires" that confers upon them these rights, but it's a mystery as to how that could be. What does the existence of our interests and desires have to do with the obligation of others to treat us respectfully? It's hard to see what the connection might be. If one asks why, exactly, I should care about the interests of others, the answer is likely to amount to some variation of "We just should." The attempt to ground my moral duties in the fact that others have interests and desires strikes me as a purely arbitrary, and desperate, attempt to salvage human rights from the nihilism to which naturalism inevitably leads.

But suppose for a moment that we accept the answer. What follows? Are not some interests and desires more valuable than others? Is not the satisfaction of some interests and desires more worthy than others? If so, then what obligates us to respect equally the life, liberty and happiness of those whose interests and desires are less worthy?

The fact of the matter is that unless our worth and our rights derive from a transcendent source, then they are grounded in nothing. Apart from a transcendent ground we have no dignity, no inherent value, no matter how many interests and desires we have. John Locke and Thomas Jefferson both recognized this which is why both men based human rights in a Creator God.

When secularists and atheists go blathering on about human rights and equality they are like men who are attempting the intellectual equivalent of walking on water. It would pretty remarkable if they could pull it off, but we, and they, are pretty sure they'll accomplish nothing more than making themselves look foolish.

RLC

Twenty Most Brilliant

College Crunch, which bills itself as "the best college resource online...ever," features a listing of the Twenty Most Brilliant Christian Professors. I don't know how they arrived at their selections, but it is indeed an impressive list.

Unfortunately, many of the luminaries are either retired or semi-retired, but there are others, many others, I'm sure, who are currently in the prime of their careers and who merit being on such a list.

Lucky is the student who gets the chance to study under one of them.

RLC

Family Tree

One of the difficulties with most theories of human evolution is that they assume that many of the alleged early hominids were members of different species, and that each of these species gradually gave way to another over millions of years on the way to producing modern man.

The problem is that the concept of a species is so nebulous as to be almost useless in these speculations. The textbook definition of species is a reproductively isolated population. In other words, if members of two disparate populations are unable, for whatever reason, to produce fertile offspring they are said to be reproductively isolated and thus belong to different species.

This definition entails that organisms isolated by geographical, physical, behavioral, or even temporal factors would be different species even if they were genetically compatible. Two individuals would be reproductively isolated if they were separated from each other by either distance or time (as are members of different generations of humans), or if they were physically incompatible, or if behavioral idiosyncrasies prevented synchronization of mating cycles.

This being the case it's a little absurd to think that just because two different hominids were physically different and/or lived at different times that they were therefore different species, but that's the assumption that's almost always made in the study of human evolution. Now, however, comes a story in the New York Times that bodes ill for this assumption. The report explains that indeed two different lines of hominids actually did interbreed and, though the Times never draws this conclusion, were thus conspecific:

Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.

The biologists, led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have been slowly reconstructing the genome of Neanderthals, the stocky hunters that dominated Europe until 30,000 years ago, by extracting the fragments of DNA that still exist in their fossil bones. Just last year, when the biologists first announced that they had decoded the Neanderthal genome, they reported no significant evidence of interbreeding.

Scientists say they have recovered 60 percent of the genome so far and hope to complete it. By comparing that genome with those of various present day humans, the team concluded that about 1 percent to 4 percent of the genome of non-Africans today is derived from Neanderthals.

It's interesting that the implications of this discovery are not mentioned in the article which insists on referring to "human-Neanderthal" interbreeding as if Neanderthals were not humans. The fact is that if such unions produced viable offspring then Neanderthals were human, and if that's the case then there wouldn't seem to be much warrant for treating Homo habilis and Homo erectus as different species from H. sapiens.

RLC

Only in America

This may be very hard for those still in possession of their rational faculties to believe but five high school students were threatened with suspension by their high school administrators the other day because they wore T-shirts that sported an American flag and refused to turn them inside out. Why were they told to turn them inside out? Because it was Cinco de Mayo and the California school they attended has a large Mexican-American population, and the principals were afraid that the Mexican students would be insulted by the shirts, which, of course, some of them were.

Here's an excerpt from the news report:

But to many Mexican-American students at Live Oak High School, this was a big deal. They say they were offended by the five boys and others for wearing American colors on a Mexican holiday.

"I think they should apologize cause it is a Mexican Heritage Day," Annicia Nunez, a Live Oak High student, said. "We don't deserve to be get disrespected like that. We wouldn't do that on Fourth of July."

As for an apology, the boys and their families say, 'fat chance.'

"I'm not going to apologize. I did nothing wrong," Galli said. "I went along with my normal day. I might have worn an American flag, but I'm an American and I'm proud to be an American."

Let's understand. These were American kids in an American school paid for by American taxpayers, but they weren't allowed to wear an American flag T-shirt because it was offensive to Mexican-American students who came to this country ostensibly to be Americans, or so we're always told.

I wonder if the school also took down the American flags around campus so as not to offend the sensibilities of Mexican students. I wonder if they ran a Mexican flag up the flag pole that morning. I wonder if they recited the pledge of allegiance in their classrooms to start the day.

Can you imagine Mexican officials threatening Mexican students for wearing Mexican flags on their shirts on the Fourth of July in a school in which there's a sizable minority of American students? Me neither.

At any rate, the district administrators were apparently appalled by the poor judgment and shameless, abject political correctness of their building principals. In a move that must have been a considerable embarrassment to the principals the district overruled them:

The five boys and their families met with a Morgan Hill Unified School District official Wednesday night. The district and the school do not see eye-to-eye on the incident and released the following statement:

The district does not concur with the Live Oak High School administration's interpretation of either board or district policy related to these actions.

The boys will not be suspended and were allowed to return to school Thursday. We spotted one of them when he got to campus -- and, yes, he was sporting an American flag T-shirt.

At least someone in that district has some common sense.

RLC

How Liberals Think

Robin, the Berkeley psychoanalyst and recovering liberal, is back with another penetrating analysis of the liberal mind. It'd be hard to argue with her even were I inclined to do so.

She offers a lot of interesting and humorous insights into the mysteries of the liberal psyche, one of which is her explanation of why liberals so despise Sarah Palin: Apparently it's because she's more of a man than they are, and they know it.

Anyway, read the rest of Robin's ruminations at the link.

Meanwhile, this is making the rounds - McDonald's new Obama Value Meal: The guy ahead of you in the drive-thru orders anything he wants and you have to pay for it.

RLC

Race Matters

A report out of Ann Arbor, Michigan simply defies belief. Apparently, an elementary school took students to hear a successful scientist speak on how one becomes a successful scientist. Astonishingly, though, since the scientist was white, the principle, who is also white, did not allow black students to go along. He felt they would not be able to relate to what was essentially a white experience.

I think we can all agree that this man is either incredibly stupid or deeply bigoted, or both. In either case he should not be the principal of a dog kennel let alone an elementary school.

The principal even allegedly belittled a Muslim girl who complained about being excluded from the trip.

He defended his decision to irate parents of black students by explaining that those who were selected to go on the field trip were members of a club exclusively for white students who the school felt needed to have an experience that would expose them to successful role models. As such, black students would be out of place. As you might imagine, this did little to mollify the parents.

Perhaps you think this episode is so bizarre and outrageous that you doubt that it really happened, but you can read about it for yourself here.

I don't know why this story isn't national news and this principal isn't being pilloried in the press.

Well, that's not quite true. I think I do know why. I cheated by switching the races in the story. In point of fact, the principal, students and scientist were all black and the excluded students, including the Muslim girl, were not. In our race-obsessed society, and the media which services it and abets the obsession, it makes a huge difference which race is being favored and which discriminated against. The story has gained little purchase in the media, I suspect, because discrimination against white students is acceptable, or at least understandable, in the ideological waters in which they swim.

This is the sort of attitude, however, which only serves to exacerbate racial friction in this country. We'll never get past these frictions until we get over our preoccupation with skin color. Indeed, in my opinion, one way to tell if one is a bigot is by reflecting on your reaction to this story. If you were outraged by the way the story was represented in the above paragraphs but not so outraged when you learned the truth then you're probably a bigot. You can also tell if someone is arrantly liberal if he thinks the race of the students and the principal in this tale should actually matter.

RLC