Testy, Testy

Well, another Democrat congressman has made it big on YouTube. Robert Ethridge from North Carolina's 2nd District is greeted on a Washington street by a student who asks him if he fully supports the President's agenda. The question certainly seems reasonable, the young man is dressed in coat and tie and hardly appears threatening, but the congressman reacts in a way that would get anyone else arrested:

Apparently, Democrats regard being asked if they support the President as though it were some sort of insult to their sanity or perhaps a threat to their safety. Come to think of it, I guess it is, at least if by safety one means political safety.

Hopefully, this guy will be gone in November. He's in a Republican district and his opponent, Renee Ellmers, sounds like the sort of candidate with which the state of North Carolina would feel comfortable. She's pro-life, fiscally conservative, supports border enforcement, and opposes Obamacare. And she promises if elected not to mug any young people on the streets of the nation's capital.

RLC

Maher on the Media

This is twice in the last couple of months that I think Bill Maher has it right. In the video below, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC expresses skepticism that there are many pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli voices in the MSM. Maher doesn't actually answer Maddow, who asks a fair but answerable question, rather he just assumes there are such people and then gives a rather insulting, but understandable, explanation as to why.

The part that I think he has right, and the part more people need to comprehend, is the last thing he says:

I say his explanation is insulting but understandable because I think it's true that in the West the benefit of the doubt often goes, inexplicably, to those who are seen either as the underdog or as foes of the U.S. It seems both illogical and perverse, but that's how the liberal mind often works. It's why, perhaps, the use of deadly force by the Israelis to defend their lives has been condemned by many Western liberals as "disproportionate."

The reasoning, such as it is, goes like this: The Palestinians can't match Israeli firepower so it's unfair for the Israelis to use it. They should limit themselves in any fight to the death to the same weapons as those used by their opponents. It's this sort of thinking, probably, that underlies Maher's remark about "stupidity."

As for the last part of what he says, the Palestinians have indeed brought much of their suffering upon themselves. They elect a "government," Hamas, which declares the extirpation of Israel to be its primary goal and reason for being. They blow Israeli children to bits whenever they can, and then the world, silent withal, rouses itself to condemn the Israelis whenever they've had enough and undertake stiff measures, like a blockade, to defend themselves.

Anyway, while we're on the subject of the perversity of some of the anti-Israeli arguments one hears, we might lighten the mood with this little parody by an Israeli troupe called Latma of the "peace activists" aboard the Mavi Marmara:

Conning the world isn't hard to do, I suppose, when the world is so eager to be conned.

Thanks to Atlas Shrugs for the video.

RLC

Shame

Timothy Morgan at Christianity Today informs us of what appears on the surface, at least, to be a shameful decision by Janet Napolitano's Department of Homeland Security. You might recall I wrote last March about a book by Mosab Yousef titled Son of Hamas. Yousef was the son of one of the founders of Hamas who grew disenchanted with the terrorism and brutality of the organization, worked for the Israeli spy agency Mossad, and eventually converted to Christianity. He then emigrated to the U.S. where he wrote a book about his experience. Now DHS is trying to deport him.

The Obama administration is reluctant to stem the flow of illegal aliens, many of them criminals, into this country, Obama's Kenyan aunt was even granted "political asylum" recently, but this young man, who is almost certain to be killed if he returns to his homeland, is being told he can't stay here.

What can possibly be the justification? If DHS thinks he's a sleeper terrorist or some sort of double agent then they should produce the evidence. Otherwise, how is justice served by sending him to his death?

Read the article at the link. Unless DHS knows something it's not telling us it'll make you ashamed of your government.

RLC

Degeneracy

Sometimes we need to be reminded of the kind of people these are who seek to impose their will and their religion on the rest of the world. This story affords us a horrifying glimpse of the true face of those Muslims who are engaged in waging a generational war against the West. The story also gives us an idea of what it would be like living in a world where these people dominate the culture. It gives us a picture of pure barbarism:

Twisted Taliban militants took terror to a new low by accusing a 7-year-old boy of spying - and hanging him high.

That outrage drew immediate condemnation from the Afghan president, who called the execution a "crime against humanity."

"I don't think there's a crime bigger than that, that even the most inhuman forces on earth can commit," Hamid Karzai said Thursday. "A 7-year-old boy cannot be a spy. A 7-year-old boy cannot be anything but a 7-year-old boy.

The execution happened Tuesday in the embattled Helmand province, said Dawoud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the provincial governor.

"The innocent boy was not a spy, but he may have informed the police or soldiers about planted explosives," Ahmadi told Central Asia Today.

"If this is true, it is an absolutely horrific crime," added British Prime Minister David Cameron, while on a stop in Kabul. "I think it says more about the Taliban than any book, than any article, than any speech could ever say."

Indeed it does. It illustrates the utter savagery and degeneracy of Islamists like the Taliban. These, and others like them, are people who stone to death their wives and daughters, execute homosexuals, behead journalists, blow up Jewish schoolchildren, and who are working feverishly to obtain nuclear weapons.

RLC

The Last Generation

Philosopher Peter Singer seems to delight in making himself controversial if not blatantly outrageous. In a recent post at Opinionator.com he affords us an interesting glimpse of one aspect of the death wish that follows hard upon the modern denial of God. In the post he discusses the ethics of perpetuating the human species:

[H]uman lives are, in general, much less good than we think they are. We spend most of our lives with unfulfilled desires, and the occasional satisfactions that are all most of us can achieve are insufficient to outweigh these prolonged negative states. If we think that this is a tolerable state of affairs it is because we are, in Benatar's view, victims of the illusion of pollyannaism. This illusion may have evolved because it helped our ancestors survive, but it is an illusion nonetheless. If we could see our lives objectively, we would see that they are not something we should inflict on anyone.

So why don't we make ourselves the last generation on earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required - we could party our way into extinction!

Of course, it would be impossible to get agreement on universal sterilization, but just imagine that we could. Then is there anything wrong with this scenario? Even if we take a less pessimistic view of human existence than Benatar, we could still defend it, because it makes us better off - for one thing, we can get rid of all that guilt about what we are doing to future generations - and it doesn't make anyone worse off, because there won't be anyone else to be worse off.

Is a world with people in it better than one without? Put aside what we do to other species - that's a different issue. Let's assume that the choice is between a world like ours and one with no sentient beings in it at all. And assume, too - here we have to get fictitious, as philosophers often do - that if we choose to bring about the world with no sentient beings at all, everyone will agree to do that. No one's rights will be violated - at least, not the rights of any existing people. Can non-existent people have a right to come into existence?

I do think it would be wrong to choose the non-sentient universe. In my judgment, for most people, life is worth living. Even if that is not yet the case, I am enough of an optimist to believe that, should humans survive for another century or two, we will learn from our past mistakes and bring about a world in which there is far less suffering than there is now. But justifying that choice forces us to reconsider the deep issues with which I began. Is life worth living? Are the interests of a future child a reason for bringing that child into existence? And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent future human beings?

Now this may seem like a very odd argument for an evolutionist like Singer to make, and it reveals, I think, the profound emptiness to which any atheistic worldview must ineluctably lead. The reason I say that it may seem odd is that for Darwinians our whole purpose is bound up in survival of the species. Our perpetuation is the ground for all ethics. Any action that runs contrary to the imperative to promote species survival is, for the Darwinian, ipso facto immoral.

I'm also perplexed by Singer's concern for individual rights. Exactly how, in a non-theistic universe, does anyone come to have rights? Who bestows them and what are they based upon? What should it matter whether someone is compelled to do something he doesn't want to do? In a world without God what's "right" is, as Plato told us in The Republic, whatever is in the interest of the stronger.

These quarrels aside, I have to say that I agree with Singer about this much: Life in his world is indeed a miserable affair. We're born, we're bored, we suffer, we have unfulfilled yearnings, and then we die and, if Singer is right, we pass into nothingness. It's a view of life that has led many thoughtful people to embrace nihilism and despair (I'm reminded of the line in the Smashing Pumpkins' song Jellybelly: "We're nowhere, we're nowhere, we're nowhere. Living makes me sick. So sick I want to die.").

The solution to this existential predicament, however, is not to allow humanity to extinguish itself. The solution is to embrace the one thing that makes the meaninglessness meaningful: A God who offers us life everlasting. It's remarkable that Singer, with a modest reservation, would prefer to see the human race go extinct rather than turn to the one thing that could make life's trials meaningful and worthwhile. There seems to be something perverse in this.

I could understand his reluctance to turn to faith were there compelling reasons to think that such a God doesn't exist, but there simply isn't, and, in fact, the opposite is the case. In any event, I think Singer's argument is important, revealing plainly for all to see the culture of death to which atheism leads.

RLC

Re: Underwater Dive

A former student named Andrew writes to fill us in on some interesting details related to our post featuring Guillaume Nery (See: Underwater Dive):

I work in jewelry so I had to say something about your post. If you check out Guillaume's wet suit you will notice BALL as a sponser. They are a brand of watches with a great American heritage that we carry here at my store. Webster Ball started the company back in 1892 by request of the Lake Shore Railroad. Essentially they made accurate pocket watches and then monitored the pocket watches of all persons working on the railroad system to make sure they had no variation more than 30 seconds. By the end of the railroad era, Ball's system was being used by nearly 75% of the railroads in America. Ball State and the term "on the ball" both come from Ball watch. It's a pretty neat story. Webster Ball was even fundamental in the birth of Hamilton Watch Co. that was here in Lancaster for so many years.

Thanks to Ball I've know of Nery for quite a while. He is a four time world record holder in the sport of Free Diving in which you see how deep you can go on just one breath. I believe he holds the record at nearly 113 meters with no assistance other than a large "monofin."

Ball watch has some interesting info about the company on their website ballwatchusa.com I will tell you... they aren't cheap watches... from $1000-$5000. Back in the day they were the "expensive" pocket watch at $60-$80 dollars instead of the $20-$30 that Elgin and Bulova charged. They also use this very interesting technology that you as a former science teacher might find interesting. They capture Tritium gas in tiny tubes to use as a glowing agent. The gas makes the little tube glow for 25 years! It's pretty cool, I have one of the watches myself and love it... a little piece of American history on my wrist!

Good stuff. Thanks, Andrew.

RLC

Getting Hit From All Sides

In a fine piece of commentary, Dorothy Rabinowitz of the WSJ puts her finger on the source of growing disenchantment with our president. In her view, which I think is correct, Mr. Obama's worldview is alien to that of most Americans who live their lives at altitudes considerably lower than the rarified atmosphere inhabited by our university academics. Rabinowitz writes:

For it was clear from the first that this president-single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival-was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for them, the nation's voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn't lacking in concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voice-and for good reason.

Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric; Mr. Obama had proved himself a dab hand at that on the campaign trail. They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.

A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.

And it's not just the organs of the conservatism, like the WSJ, that are calling attention to the many manifest shortcomings of the man in the Oval Office.

Lefty icon Daniel Ellsberg has called Mr. Obama a liar and worse. The Daily Show's Jon Stewart humorously blasts Mr. Obama for his sophomoric "Kickass" comment. Even the sycophantic Chris Matthews and yellow-dog Democrat James Carville have unloaded on the man who every day validates the foresight of those who predicted that he would not, and could not, live up to the promise of competence upon which so many based their vote.

I'm certainly not saying that the Left misses George Bush, but I do think they're beginning to realize that they made a huge mistake in denying the nomination to Hillary Clinton. Whatever they thought of Hillary, with her they would at least have also had Bill. They rejected her thinking that with Barack Obama they would have a Sidney Poitier or Denzel Washington character in the White House. What they got instead is beginning to look more like the Chris Tucker character in Rush Hour.

Anyway, read Rabinowitz's column. It's very good.

RLC

Underwater Dive

The Huffpo has a video of world champion freediver Guillaume Nery diving underwater into Dean's Blue Hole.

Dean's Blue Hole is the world's largest underwater sinkhole, plunging 663 feet to the ocean floor in a bay west of the Bahamas. Nery says he never reached the bottom; the distance is so far as to make it impossible. Nery says, "This movie is an artistic project, a fiction." He shot it with his girlfriend over the course of four afternoons:

It may be a fiction but it's nevertheless quite beautiful.

RLC

The More We Learn the Less We Know

A piece at Evolution News and Views reminds us that for every question science answers it raises a dozen more. Just as we approach what we think will be a complete understanding of the genetic code inscribed in the DNA molecule it turns out that new layers of complexity and mystery come into view. James LeFanu writes of the totally unexpected puzzles researchers are confronting as they study biological inheritance. I've edited the following slightly to make it more clear:

The most obvious of those 'puzzling questions' ... is the 'gene number dilemma' epitomized by the most astonishing revelation of the Human Genome Project: that we have roughly the same number of genes, a modest 20,000, as the millimeter long worm, C.elegans [which] is fashioned from just 1,000 cells (compared to our 60 trillion) and has neither a circulatory system nor internal skeleton and a life expectancy of just two weeks. Every newly sequenced genome has added its own further twist to this surprising lack of any correspondence between gene numbers and organismic complexity. Flies and chickens have a third fewer genes than the diminutive C.elegans while, at the other extreme, plants such as rice and soya bean have twice as many.

The further yet more 'puzzling question' is the revelation of the interchangeability of the master or homeotic genes across diverse species. For example, the same gene that orchestrates the fly's distinctive compound eye does so for the very different mammalian camera-type eye. That interchangeability across species reaches its zenith with the finding that we share 99% of our genes with a mouse. How so trivial a genetic difference can generate such diversity of form defies all explanation, other than to suppose it must be 'something to do' with gene regulation, i.e. 'the turning on and off of genes at different times and places in the course of development.'

The implications are clear enough. Biologists could, in theory, sequence every living creature on the face of the planet, but this would only confirm that they all share the same core set of genes that account for the nuts and bolts of the proteins and enzymes of the cell of which all living things are made. But beyond that the really interesting question, the question of 'form' or what it is that so readily distinguishes the elephant from the octopus, fireflies from foxes, would remain as elusive as ever.

The genetic instructions must be there, of course, because otherwise the tens of millions of our fellow species would not replicate themselves with such fidelity from generation to generation. But we are compelled in the light of these extraordinary findings of the recent past [to conclude] that we have no conception of why we should become so different from a worm or fly.

In other words, neither the number of genes nor the specific structure of the genes seems to account for the differences between very different organisms. So what does?

[T]he myriad of random genetic mutations that would provide a basis for the transformation of one form of life into another are nowhere to be found. "We cannot see in this why we are so different from chimpanzees," observed Svante Paabo, Chairman of the Chimpanzee Genome Project, on its publication in 2005. "Part of the secret is hidden in there, but we don't understand it." Nothing has subsequently emerged to challenge that conclusion.

One gets the impression that despite the vast amount of knowledge we've accumulated since Watson and Crick first elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule some sixty years ago, we've barely broken the surface of what is there to be learned. The complexity and engineering of DNA replication and protein transcription is far greater than we imagined just a decade or so ago. Beneath the structure of the double helix itself is a congeries of regulatory systems, a series of software programs along with the necessary bio-mechanical hardware, that control a myriad of gene functions. These systems tell the gene when to turn on and off, the timing of which has profound consequences for what type of structure will result. They also cause a gene to program for one protein at one time and a different protein at another time. There are yet other systems which cause different genes to work in tandem, in certain situations, to produce a particular effect at a particular moment. Yet other systems patrol the double helix repairing breaks and other damage. It's all so complex that had a human being developed it we would think him to possess perhaps the most brilliant mind ever to appear on the planet.

Even so, our materialist friends insist, one should resist with all one's might the temptation to think that it's beyond the power of chance and physics to account for this breath-taking complexity and organization. We must have faith that such intricate, astonishing, and multi-layered precision could have evolved purely by accident given billions of years of time, just as given enough time Windows XP and the PCs to run it could have been produced by a random symbol generator along with the laws of chance and physics. It sounds hard to believe, the materialist acknowledges in his more reflective moments, in fact to the layman it sounds miraculous, but it just must have happened. Why? Because the alternative - that a mind was somehow involved - is just, well, too d�class�, too religious, to be seriously entertained by such sophisticated and intelligent people as ourselves.

RLC

Who Christians Are

I've a friend who recently did something I think is truly amazing. When I tell him that, though, he just shrugs his shoulders and tells me that he doesn't see it that way at all. I asked him to share his story with us, and he agreed as long as I don't mention his name. Here it is:

I know an elderly couple with a forty-year-old son who's been a dialysis patient for the past four years. He's only a few years older than me, and he also has an eleven-year-old son (the same age as my oldest.) His dad told me he'd been on a waiting list for a transplant from a cadaver kidney for quite a while. I knew from having a grandmother on dialysis that four years is usually well over the half way point once the weekly treatments begin. So I told the dad I'd sign up to be a living kidney donor for his son.

When I found out I didn't have compatible blood type to donate to him directly, I was told about the paired donation program, by which information on groups of prospective donors and recipients are put into a data base where they are crossed matched, so that I could donate to a compatible stranger and another compatible stranger could donate to my newfound friend.

I went through all the screening to make sure I was healthy enough to donate. Three months later a match for both of us was found. Shortly thereafter, we went through surgery. Now I'm a few ounces lighter, and he's no longer a regular at the dialysis center. And hopefully it will be a few more decades before his son has to worry about living without a dad.

Several people have asked me about my motivations for donating. My first response is that I'm a Christian, and this is what I believe Christ would do. That made it a fairly simple decision. Some people (even in my own church) were shocked at this, but being shocked at a Christian donating a kidney to a dialysis patient is like being shocked at a policeman arresting a robber or a fireman putting out a fire; this is who we are and what we do.

In a more general sense, anyone who hates disease and is saddened at the thought of an eleven-year-old boy at his dad's funeral should be able to see the wisdom in kidney donation. The cost for the donor (basically a little time off work and soreness for a few weeks) is disproportionate to the great benefit for the recipient. Yes, there's always some level of risk with surgery, but what can we do of any significance that doesn't entail some kind of risk.

I also can't help commenting here on the logical outcome of kidney donations and other such pursuits for society as a whole. There are tens of thousands of people on dialysis hoping for a kidney transplant to avoid a premature departure from their loved ones, and there are more than enough healthy, potential donors. It is overwhelming to think of the suffering that could be prevented if every eligible person sought to donate a kidney to someone who would otherwise die of kidney failure. And not only that, but it stuns the imagination to consider the magnitude of anguish that could be prevented if all the resources expended in the production and consumption of something like pornography or illicit drugs were focused on medical and economic developments that would cure diseases.

Thinking of all this brings to mind two sobering quotes:

"When we examine the amazing capabilities humans possess and then compare it to what we have done with them, we have a hard time explaining the contrast." William Wilberforce

"I was going to ask God why he didn't do more to prevent human suffering, but I was afraid he would ask me the same question." Anonymous

I still think it's amazing to give a kidney to someone you don't even know whether my friend does or not.

RLC

Obama Might Vote Republican in November

Fred Barnes speculates in the WSJ that Mr. Obama's best hope for political survival in 2012 is that the GOP wins back Congress in November. I can't think of a better way to keep Republican voters home in November than to tell them that voting for Republicans is Mr. Obama's best hope for reelection, but Barnes makes a convincing argument:

Let's assume Mr. Obama recognizes that the fiscal and economic peril facing the country because of trillion dollar deficits is a problem for him as well. At the moment, the 10-year deficit tab is pegged to be as low as $6 billion (Congressional Budget Office) or as high as $13 trillion (Heritage Foundation). Either way, the public is alarmed.

Mr. Obama's re-election to a second term is heavily dependent on his ability to deal effectively with the fiscal mess. He could try to push a big tax hike, like a value-added tax, through a lame duck Congress after the November election. But that's very much a long shot. Besides, higher taxes-on top of those from expiration of the Bush tax cuts-could infuriate voters all the more.

For Mr. Obama, serious spending cuts are the only sensible means of dealing with a potential debt crisis or at least an unsustainable fiscal situation. However, he may not be able to rely on reductions in military spending, as liberal Democrats usually prefer. Mr. Obama has already included deep defense cuts in his budget, and Republicans are unlikely to go along with even deeper cuts.

Mrs. Pelosi won't be any help. She's committed to enacting the Democratic Party's entire liberal agenda, and next to the president she is the most powerful person in Washington. When the president flirted with scaling back his health-care bill last January, Ms. Pelosi stiffened his spine, and the bill passed. As long as she is House speaker, bucking her would be painful, especially if Mr. Obama proposes to eliminate a chunk of the spending she was instrumental in passing in 2009 and 2010.

But if Republicans win the House, everything changes. Mrs. Pelosi's influence as minority leader would be minimal-that is, assuming she's not ousted by Democrats upset over losing the majority.

A GOP victory in November would be good for the country, good for the world, and, paradoxically, good for the President. God must have a sense of humor.

By the way, guess who has been the most fiscally conservative president, after Reagan, since Kennedy. Read the rest of Barnes' article for the answer.

RLC

Preservatives

A former colleague of mine, a high school chemistry teacher, sent me an email saying that she was grading final exams and one question was to list two things a company can do to slow the spoilage rate of food in order to extend shelf life.

One student answered that the company could "add different conservatives to foods." Pretty funny.

Maybe the student somewhere along the line learned to associate conservatives with the salt of the earth.

RLC

Hypocrisy and Decadence

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson offers a much needed admonition in an essay on how we tend to treat politicians caught up in sexual infidelity. Gerson writes:

There is a difference between breaking a vow out of weakness and smashing it out of malice. Sexual behavior can reveal our shared foolishness. Or it can reveal coldness, compulsion, cruelty, exploitation, arrogance and recklessness. Who can deny that these traits of character are potentially dangerous in a political leader?

But while sexual conduct is not irrelevant, it is also not everything. I have known politicians who are cold, arrogant, reckless -- and faithful to their spouses. And I have known politicians who have been unfaithful and served the public well.

Moral conservatives need to admit that political character is more complex than marital fidelity and that less sensual vices also can be disturbing. "The sins of the flesh are bad," said C.S. Lewis, "but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither."

Yet moral liberals have something to learn as well. The failure of human beings to meet their own ideals does not disprove or discredit those ideals. The fact that some are cowards does not make courage a myth. The fact that some are faithless does not make fidelity a joke. All moral standards create the possibility of hypocrisy. But I would rather live among those who recognize standards and fail to meet them than among those who mock all standards as lies. In the end, hypocrisy is preferable to decadence.

What we really need is to combine high moral standards with humility.

Sexual infidelity is a serious thing, but as Gerson notes, the condition of the heart out of which it arises is much more serious. And yet the delight people seem to take in exposing and reading about these sad scandals and in hounding the people who've fallen into them may belie a heart far more encrusted with malice than are the hearts of those whose failures they gleefully exploit.

Why this fascination with the sexual foibles and failures of our political leadership and indeed, our entire celebrity class? Why the appetite for reporting and devouring every salacious detail? Are those who gloat over these personal scandals and those who feed our fascination for them not just as spiritually disordered as the people involved in them?

The politics of personal destruction wherein defeating an opponent's ideas is accomplished by tearing him down as a person has become politics as usual in much of our media and in our country, and it speaks very poorly of who and what we are as human beings.

RLC

The Audacity of Blame

Allahpundit wonders how anyone who has done nothing but blame his predecessor for every difficulty he's faced since being elected can urge students not to blame others for their problems. Good question. Allahpundit quotes Charles Krauthammer as saying that by October last year Mr. Obama had blamed George Bush for "the economy, global warming, the credit crisis, Middle East stalemate, the deficit, anti-Americanism abroad - everything but swine flu."

And now he advises graduates not to point fingers at others for their problems. You certainly can't say he's short on audacity. Or shamelessness:

RLC

$7000 an Ounce?

Bill sends along this good news/bad news item for any investors among our readers to ponder:

The "real move" in gold is to come, predicted Egon von Gruyerz, founder of precious metals investment and storage company GoldSwitzerland.com, on Monday.

He told CNBC he sees the inflation-adjusted price of gold "easily" rising to six times its current price ($1,210) to around $7,000 an ounce in the future on "normal" inflation.

"Adjusted for real inflation the 1980 gold peak in today's prices corresponds to around $7,200 today. So gold could easily go up 6 times from the current price of $1,220 and still be within normal parameters," von Gruyerz's latest report for GoldSwitzerland.com said.

But von Gruyerz told CNBC gold could go higher if the world encounters hyperinflation.

The fears stemming from the European debt crisis will enhance gold's safe haven appeal, according to von Gruyerz.

"Gold is at this point not a bubble," he added. "It is not overbought."

The bad news, of course, is the reason for the price rise. According to von Gruyerz:

"Clueless governments still don't understand that their ruinous actions have created a credit-infested and bankrupt world. They will continue to prescribe the same remedy that caused the problem in the first place, namely more credit and more printed money. The consequences are clear: Inflation, hyperinflation, economic and human misery as well as social unrest."

These are interesting times.

RLC

Ten Highest and Lowest

Trying to decide on a career? Here's a list of the ten highest paying jobs in American (and the ten lowest).

Speaking of careers, Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee has a brief piece in the Washington Examiner predicting that the next bubble to burst in our economy is going to be the higher education bubble.

A New York Times profile last week described Courtney Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University with nearly $100,000 in student loan debt -- debt that her degree in Religious and Women's Studies did not equip her to repay. Payments on the debt are about $700 per month, equivalent to a respectable house payment, and a major bite on her monthly income of $2,300 as a photographer's assistant earning an hourly wage. And, unlike a bad mortgage on an underwater house, Munna can't simply walk away from her student loans, which cannot be expunged in a bankruptcy. She's stuck in a financial trap.

Some might say that she deserves it -- who borrows $100,000 to finance a degree in women's and religious studies that won't make you any money? She should have wised up, and others should learn from her mistake, instead of learning too late, as she did: "I don't want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back."

But bubbles burst when people catch on, and there's some evidence that people are beginning to catch on. Student loan demand, according to a recent report in the Washington Post, is going soft, and students are expressing a willingness to go to a cheaper school rather than run up debt. Things haven't collapsed yet, but they're looking shakier -- kind of like the housing market looked in 2007.

If Reynolds is right, young people are soon going to stop borrowing large sums and start looking for cheaper educational alternatives. Colleges will have to adjust or go under. He predicts that a lot of frivolous majors, like Munna's, will simply dry up as students realize that degrees in such disciplines will not pay off their debt. Maybe that would be a silver lining.

RLC

Conceding the Debate

Bilbo at Telic Thoughts comments on remarks by Craig Venter who recently succeeded in coaxing a cell to accept the synthesized DNA from a different species. An article in Technology Review says of this feat:

Venter also points to what the cells--powered by genomes made in a lab from four bottles of chemicals, based on instructions stored on a computer--reveal about what life is. "This is as much a philosophical as a technological advance," he says. "The notion that this is possible means bacterial cells are software-driven biological machines. If you change the software, you build a new machine. I'm still amazed by it."

Bilbo says that Venter has in these four sentences conceded the debate over intelligent design to the IDers. I think he's right, but materialists will surely object. If they stay true to past practice one thing they can be counted on to do is criticize IDers for quoting them. Darwinian materialists hate it when IDers quote their own words because it's so unfair to have to be on one's guard all the time, fearing that one's frank admissions will be used as evidence against one. It's misleading, too, because it should be understood that materialists would not be nearly so clear and forthright if they knew that their antagonists would be taking their words seriously and embarrassing them with them.

As for Venter's statement, it's exactly what IDers have been saying for almost thirty years: Cells are software (information) driven biological machines. Neither information nor machines are the product of random processes conjoined with physical forces. Four bottles of chemicals mixed together for billions of years by wind and sun would never produce a library of coherent information. Neither would they produce DNA. Only a mind can do that and Venter pretty much acknowledges the fact.

I'm sure he's already received dozens of emails from colleagues telling him to just shut up.

RLC

Everyone Has Their Price

Renowned blogger Mickey Kaus has entered the Democratic primary against incumbent California Senator Barbara Boxer and, in the spirit of Democratic political machinations, has announced that he can be bought off if the Obama administration is willing to bribe him with any of three jobs. Kaus declares that he could be persuaded to drop out of the race by being offered:

--Head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement so that he could push for an actual physical fence on the Mexico border to stop illegal immigrants and to end the "anointed incumbent...Boxer's obsessive talk of amnesty, sorry, 'a path to citizenship'" that actually acts as a powerful lure for even more illegal immigrants.

--Second, Kaus kindly offers, Obama could put him on the National Labor Relations Board so he could thwart "Big Labor's attempt to add to their dwindling memberships by avoiding secret ballots in union organizing drives."

--Finally, Kaus offered to accept an administration job offer to the Department of Education to write "a scathing report" on California teachers' unions and their deleterious impact on the state.

Kaus is tweaking the Democrat establishment, of course, particularly the Obama administration which has been embarrassed by revelations that they have been bribing primary candidates with offers of jobs in the administration.

His announcement is pretty funny, especially since Kaus is a liberal, or at least I always thought that he was, and you might expect that he would have actually supported the positions he skewers. I doubt that he'll be welcome at many Democrat functions after this.

RLC

Wrong Gig?

You gotta watch the drummer. Steve Moore is his name. I don't know how hard all of this is to do, but it certainly looks impressive, and the video has apparently gone viral. You can read about Moore here. Enjoy.

The ZZ Top tune is perfect for this guy.

Thanks to Hot Air for the video.

RLC

What Goes Around

Should the public be angry with the president over his seemingly desultory response to the oil spill? Probably not. At least they shouldn't fault Mr. Obama to the extent some commentators are.

There are things the president could have done but didn't do, to be sure, but the appearance of detachment doesn't mean that his administration hasn't been engaged. Indeed, much of the criticism of the president's insouciance in the midst of the crisis sounds like Monday-morning second-guessing and an attempt to squeeze out of the disaster a few political points. I'm willing to give Mr. Obama the benefit of the doubt that, aside from granting Louisiana permission to build the sand berms they wanted to build, it may be that there's just not much more he could've done.

But. Do I think growing public anger at the president is poetic justice? Absolutely. When George Bush's administration was reluctant to override local authorities after Katrina, the Democrats, including Senator Obama prominent among them, criticized him mercilessly and unfairly for his hesitation. Indeed, it was the withering criticism of Mr. Bush from such as Mr. Obama for waiting a day or two before losing patience with the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans and restoring order to the city of New Orleans himself that caused Americans to begin to lose confidence in his competence in 2005.

Moreover, it was candidate Obama who prophesied that people would look back on his nomination as the day that the seas stopped rising and the planet began to heal. That sort of pomposity makes it hard to feel sorry for the man who finds himself helpless in the face of what may turn out to be the worst ecological disaster in our nation's history.

Finally, the problem with capping the leak is that it's a mile under the ocean. Why are we drilling in such deep waters in the first place when there's so much easily accessible oil on land and in shallower seas? Because the Democrats, including Mr. Obama, have blocked for decades attempts to drill for oil in places like Alaska or in shallower waters where leaks could be plugged in a matter of hours.

So, the criticism of Mr. Obama's failure to stop the BP oil spill may be technically a bit unfair, but given the harshness of his judgment of Mr. Bush, given his almost buffoonish confidence in his own ability to bring about ecological healing, and given the fact of his complicity in forcing the oil companies to mine in much more treacherous locales than they would prefer, it's hard to be sympathetic.

RLC