Lying's No Big Deal

Anthony Weiner finally resigned his seat in congress today after having disgraced both himself and his office. Fox News commentator Alan Colmes, who is a liberal, argues that he should not have. Colmes argues that character doesn't matter as long as the congressman votes the way he wants him to vote, and that lying to the American people is not sufficient reason to relinquish one's power.

This is pretty stunning, I think. Is it not the case that if someone lies to his employer in the private sector it's grounds for firing? Is it not the case that our elected representatives, whom we remunerate with six-figure salaries and handsome benefit packages, should be held to a higher standard of conduct than the average American? Any elected official of whatever party who did what Weiner did should have resigned or been thrown out of office. Why should taxpayers be compelled to continue to pay people like this?

Colmes takes a stab at rationalizing Weiner's lying by saying that he was trying to preserve his dignity and marriage, but everyone who lies has some self-serving motive for doing so. Preserving one's personal dignity hardly justifies lying to the American people and further eroding the trust we have in our political class. When one believes that the greatest good is advancing one's political agenda (Weiner and Colmes are both left-liberals) then anything which accomplishes those goals is morally acceptable. This reasoning, though, puts us on course to agreeing that if lying would have enabled Weiner to ride out the scandal then lying is no big deal, and this leads inevitably to the conclusion that lying is almost never wrong.

People criticize Rush Limbaugh for asserting that it's in the nature of liberals to lie, but Colmes, to the extent that he's representative of the left, gives us a pretty vivid confirmation of Rush's claim.

Parenthetically, Colmes seems to have momentarily forgotten that he was on Fox News when he said that if we're going to demand Weiner's resignation we should also have demanded President Clinton's resignation for lying to the nation about his tryst with Monica Lewinsky. I think most Fox viewers watching that exchange were vigorously nodding their heads in agreement with that conclusion.

Fast and Furious

For those who may have missed the story the Department of Justice via the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was apparently running an operation named "Fast and Furious" that allowed criminals to smuggle guns from the U.S. to gangs in Mexico.

The ostensible purpose was to track the weapons to drug cartels to ascertain their hideouts, but several ATF agents complained about the operation, arging that it was illegal and predicting that allowing guns into the hands of criminals would not turn out well. Several of the guns subsequently turned up at the scene of violent crimes including the murder of an American border patrol agent and now the DoJ is on the hot seat.

Congressman Darryl Issa is holding hearings on the operation, and it looks as if some DoJ officials may have lied to his committee. If so, there will be contempt citations and more pressure on Attorney General Holder to resign.

Hot Air has the details. The evening news probably won't.

Bypassing Stem Cells

Science Daily is reporting another fascinating development in the quest to reprogram skin cells to build other kinds of tissue:

A research breakthrough has proven that it is possible to reprogram mature cells from human skin directly into brain cells, without passing through the stem cell stage. The unexpectedly simple technique involves activating three genes in the skin cells; genes which are already known to be active in the formation of brain cells at the fetal stage. The new technique avoids many of the ethical dilemmas that stem cell research has faced.

For the first time, a research group at Lund University in Sweden has succeeded in creating specific types of nerve cells from human skin. By reprogramming connective tissue cells, called fibroblasts, directly into nerve cells, a new field has been opened up with the potential to take research on cell transplants to the next level. The discovery represents a fundamental change in the view of the function and capacity of mature cells. By taking mature cells as their starting point instead of stem cells, the Lund researchers also avoid the ethical issues linked to research on embryonic stem cells.

In experiments where two further genes were activated, the researchers have been able to produce dopamine brain cells, the type of cell which dies in Parkinson's disease. The research findings are therefore an important step towards the goal of producing nerve cells for transplant which originate from the patients themselves. The cells could also be used as disease models in research on various neurodegenerative diseases.

There's more at the link. The article doesn't talk about all the applications of this research, but if fibroblasts can be turned into nerve cells the implications for people who have suffered spinal cord and brain injuries are staggering. Permanently paralyzing injuries might become as rare as polio. It sounds too good to be true.

Long, Hot Summer

Bill sends along a link to the following video of a recent CNN broadcast. CNN is very supportive of the Obama presidency, so if their people are talking like this the president is in serious trouble. More importantly, if what Jack Cafferty says is true the nation is in serious trouble:

We could be in for a long hot summer and it won't have anything to do with global warming.

Plenty of Greenhouse Gas but No Warming

James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News. He has a column in Forbes in which he makes an interesting claim and poses a tough question to global warming "alarmists":

Global greenhouse gas emissions have risen even faster during the past decade than predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other international agencies. According to alarmist groups, this proves global warming is much worse than previously feared. The increase in emissions “should shock even the most jaded negotiators” at international climate talks currently taking place in Bonn, Germany, the UK Guardian reports. But there’s only one problem with this storyline; global temperatures have not increased at all during the past decade.

The evidence is powerful, straightforward, and damning. NASA satellite instruments precisely measuring global temperatures show absolutely no warming during the past the past 10 years. This is the case for the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, including the United States. This is the case for the Arctic, where the signs of human-caused global warming are supposed to be first and most powerfully felt. This is the case for global sea surface temperatures, which alarmists claim should be sucking up much of the predicted human-induced warming. This is the case for the planet as a whole.

If atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions are the sole or primary driver of global temperatures, then where is all the global warming? We’re talking 10 years of higher-than-expected increases in greenhouse gases, yet 10 years of absolutely no warming.

Taylor does not object to what he calls global warming theory, but he does think the alarmists have gone too far with their extrapolations and concerns. His brief column offers some helpful data on this issue.

Is Syria Next?

There are indications that the Obama administration has had enough of the massacres in Syria and is about to do something to stop it. At least that's what a report from debkafile suggests:

Debkafile's military and intelligence sources report that Monday, June 13, the US deployed the USS Bataan amphibian air carrier strike vessel opposite Syria's Mediterranean coast with 2,000 marines, 6 war planes, 15 attack helicopters, including new V-22 Ospreys, and 27 choppers for landing forces aboard. Also this week, US naval units went operational in the Aegean, Adriatic and Black Seas as part of the joint US-Ukrainian Sea Breeze 2011 exercise.

The USS Monterrey cruiser armed with Aegis surface missile interceptors has additionally been stationed in the Black Sea. Western sources additonally report a build-up of ship-borne anti-missile missile strength in the Mediterranean basin.

This huge concentration of naval missile interceptor units looks like preparations by Washington for the contingency of Iran, Syria and Hizballah letting loose with surface missiles against US and Israeli targets in the event of US military intervention to stop the anti-opposition slaughter underway in Syria.

Moscow, Tehran and Damascus, in particular, are taking this exceptional spate of American military movements in and around the Mediterranean as realistically portending American intervention in Syria.

That Obama would initiate yet a fourth major conflict in the Middle East is hard to believe, especially since the Libyan imbroglio seems to have sputtered to an inconclusive and embarrassing stalemate, and since Congress is now demanding that he secure their approval for continued military action in Libya as called for by the War Powers Act, and since any action against Syria will almost certainly elicit some sort of retaliation by Iran.

On the other hand, it costs a lot of money to move those naval assets around so there must be some reason for doing it.

Parenthetically, it seems peculiar that such portentous military preparations are apparently happening below the media radar. At least I haven't seen anything in the American press about them, but to be fair, the media have had a lot on their plate lately what with the Casey Anthony trial, Anthony Weiner's lewd text messages, Sarah Palin's emails, and other matters of equal importance for our nation's future. I'm sure they'll catch up soon.

Correction

In last Saturday's post Chasing Down Dawkins I mistakenly attributed the video to William Lane Craig's organization Reasonable Faith. The actual creator of the video is a talented fellow by the name of Peter Byrom (He's the gentleman asking the question in the clip below) who promises more great entertainment in the months between now and Craig's trip to England in October. We're looking forward to it.

My apologies to Peter.

Hitler's Ethic

A brief review of a new book by Richard Weikart is posted at Evolution News and Views:

One of the most controversial parts of the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was the segment where Ben Stein interviewed the history professor Richard Weikart about his book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany. Darwinists went apoplectic, deriding Stein and Weikart for daring to sully the good name of Darwin by showing the way that Hitler and German scientists and physicians used evolutionary theory to justify some of their atrocities, such as their campaign to kill the disabled.

Some critics even denied that the Nazis believed in Darwinism at all. Weikart challenges his critics to examine the evidence in his fascinating sequel, Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (Palgrave Macmillan, new in paperback), which examines the role of Darwinism and evolutionary ethics in Hitler's worldview.

In this work Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler's evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler's immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race. Hitler's evolutionary ethic underlay or influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improve human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination.

Once people reject the idea that morality is rooted in an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good being the next logical step is to abandon the idea that there's any objective moral standard at all. This leads inevitably to moral arbitrariness and subjectivity, i.e. what's right is whatever feels right to me. Moral subjectivism leads directly to egoism, i.e. the belief that one should put one's own interests ahead of the interests of others, and egoism leads to the ethic of "might makes right".

Hitler's "morality" was completely consistent with his rejection of a belief in a personal God. Hitler was who every atheist would also be if they a) had the power and b) were logically consistent. Thankfully, few of them are both powerful and consistent, but in the 20th century some were. Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot all were atheists who had complete power within their sphere and acted consistently with their naturalistic, materialistic worldview. The consequences were completely predictable.

Cartesian Theist makes a similar point in this video:

Pro-Life Progress

Elections have consequences and the election last November has had more than most. One arena in which this is especially the case is the matter of abortion legislation. This interesting article by Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra explains why:

The Oregon bill is one of 576 measures related to abortion that have been introduced so far in 2011 in 48 states, according to Elizabeth Nash, public policy associate for the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute.

[B]y early April, 142 abortion-related provisions had passed at least one chamber of a state legislature, compared with 67 in 2009. More than half of the 142 bills (57 percent) introduced this year seek to restrict abortion access, compared with 38 percent in 2010.

About 40 new anti-abortion laws were on the books by mid-April. They include:

• expanding the waiting period requirement in South Dakota from 24 hours to 72 hours, and requiring women to visit a crisis pregnancy center in the interim.
• requiring a physician who performs an abortion in South Dakota to provide counseling on all risk factors related to abortion.
• allowing any hospital employee in Utah to refuse to "participate in any way" in an abortion.
• making it a felony in Arizona to perform or provide money for abortions sought because of a baby's race or sex.
• prohibiting insurance plans that participate in the state insurance exchange from including abortion coverage in Virginia, Arizona, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee.
• prohibiting the abortion of a fetus capable of feeling pain in Nebraska, Kansas, Idaho, and Oklahoma.

Republican victories in the 2010 mid-term elections account for much of the legislative surge. Republicans....took 29 governorships and 680 seats in state legislatures, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. "The November elections brought huge change in the state houses," said Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life.

The legislation has been snowballing since the Republican sweep: "Just in the first three months of this year, we've provided testimony on 17 life-related legislative matters," she said. In previous years, the average number of testimonies provided was two or three for the entire year.

Restricting abortion through new state laws seems to be highly effective in reducing abortion rates. "We see that the number of abortions has gone down by 22 percent between 1990 and 2005," said Michael New, political science professor at the University of Alabama. "An important reason is the restrictions that more and more states are passing."

There's much more at the link. One interesting aspect of this that's not mentioned in the article has to do with how the rhetoric in the debate has changed. Back in the decades after Roe v. Wade (1973) we were often told by those who wanted to liberalize abortion laws that the majority of people in the country were pro-choice. We seldom hear that claim anymore. It'd be hard to explain, after all, why pro-choice majorities keep electing pro-life legislators to their state governments.

Politically Correct Beauty Pageants

I have very little interest in beauty contests, but I do have an interest in the suffocating miasma of political correctness that seeks to envelop all of American culture and social life, including beauty pageants. According to an article at Fox News Miss USA pageant contestants are now being required to answer questions about their beliefs concerning teaching evolution in schools and posing for nude photos:

According to Paula Shugart, President of the Miss Universe Organization (MUO), which also operates Miss USA, these “topics are very relevant and in the news.”

That they're in the news may be so, but what relevance does a young woman's opinion on teaching Darwinism in schools or her views on public nudity have to her qualifications for winning a beauty contest? None that I can see, so why ask about them? How would her answer affect her chances of winning?

A cynical observer might be forgiven for suspecting that these questions are intended to isolate and eliminate contestants who have strong religious commitments and values. Who else, after all, would be expected to object to either of these proposals?

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the tip.

Hitler Plays Dawkins

On Saturday I posted on the difficulty debate organizers have had persuading atheist Richard Dawkins to debate philosopher William Lane Craig on the existence of God.

Here's a funny You Tube video that uses a film clip from a movie about Hitler - a clip that's been put to many similar uses over the last year or so - to make the point.

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the tip.

Interracial Crime in Chicago

Chicago has recently been rocked by gang violence and crimes against innocent victims ranging in age from 14 to 68, and people are wondering why the Chicago Tribune omitted mention of one of the salient facts of the story. There was no mention in the original news reports of the races of the perpetrators and their victims and readers wanted to know why not. In response to their queries Times editor Gerould Kern offers an explanation, and several staff writers state their views on the matter here.

Kern writes:

We do not reference race unless it is a fact that is central to telling the story.

By all indication, these attacks were motivated by theft, not race. Further, there is no evidence to suggest that the victims were singled out because of their race. Therefore we did not include racial descriptions in our initial news reports.

There are circumstances when race may be relevant, such as describing a criminal suspect being sought by police. But this description must be accompanied by other detailed information, such as height, weight, scars, clothing, etc. By adhering to this practice, we guard against subjecting an entire group of people to suspicion because of the color of their skin.

I'm afraid this all seems a little lame to me, as did the thoughts of the paper's staffers on the matter.

There are at least two more plausible reasons Kern might have given as to why the Tribune does not mention the races of the thugs and their victims:

First, it'd be superfluous. There are certain crimes that one knows within a high degree of certainty when one reads about them the racial identity of the perps. If a report concerns white-collar crime or serial murder one can be fairly confident that the criminal is white. If the report is about violent gang crime, say, girls beating a victim in a MacDonald's or on a school bus, one is reasonably sure that the girls are black. Anyone who denies this simply isn't familiar with the logic of induction.

A second more plausible explanation is that the perps were in fact black, the victims were white, and newspapers feel a subliminal obligation to downplay black on white violence. I can't prove what I'm about to allege, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and speculate that were the thugs in these crimes white and the victims black the Tribune would have shown much less reticence about mentioning the races of the people involved. Indeed, if they didn't mention the races they'd have been accused of covering up an obvious instance of white racism. If a gang of whites had beaten a 68 year old black man I suspect the races of the parties would have then been "a fact central to the telling of the story."

Liberals, however, don't believe that there is any such thing as black racism, even though most of the racial animosity in this country today is directed against whites, and so when whites are victimized it simply doesn't occur to a liberal to think that race was a factor. Thus, there's a deep reluctance among liberals to call attention to black thuggery directed against whites but no corresponding reluctance to call attention to the racial nature of white aggression directed against blacks. Indeed, such crimes, on the relatively rare occasions in which they occur, often become national stories.

We have several serious social problems in this country, one of which is black violence (which stems largely from the breakdown of the black family which is largely a consequence of the Great Society welfare programs of the 60s and 70s). Pretending that race is irrelevant and sweeping it under the rug does nothing to help ameliorate the problems. The first step in any solution is clearly and definitively describing the nature of what we are up against. Violent crime in the U.S., including interracial violent crime, is largely minority generated, and we shouldn't cover it up or ignore it just because it's minorities who are doing it any more than we should cover it up if it were whites who were responsible.

Indeed, to treat people differently because of their race is the essence of what it is to be racist.

Chasing Down Dawkins

About a month ago we posted on the difficulty Christian philosopher William Lane Craig is having getting atheist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, to debate him.

Evolution News and Views has a very interesting promotional video, put out by Craig's organization, which summarizes the attempts to lasso Professor Dawkins into a debate:

A man who writes books and articles on atheism, who gives speeches on the fraudulent pretensions of religious belief, but who refuses to defend those beliefs against an able challenger, even though he has declared publicly that he welcomes such challengers, is tacitly admitting his lack of confidence in the intellectual defensibility of his convictions.

Dawkins surely realizes that the credibility of the entire "New Atheist" movement would rest on his shoulders were he to assent to debate Craig and that defeat would do the movement irrevocable harm. It would be the modern equivalent of the Bishop Wilberforce/ Thomas Huxley debate, or the Scopes Trial, and should he lose he'd be forever remembered as the atheist counterpart to William Jennings Bryant.

Dawkins apparently would prefer not to carry that burden. He'd rather be instead the childhood bully who liked to push around all the smaller kids until, confronted by someone who wasn't afraid of him, he backed down and slunk away.

Weiner's Problem: Christian Conservatives

I hope Chris Matthews is not typical of how most liberals think. According to Matthews Congressman Anthony Weiner's behavior - which I'm sure by now needs no description from me - is immoral, indiscreet, embarrassing, and gross. Yet, Mr. Matthews opines, the only people offended by such behavior are those culturally backward Christian conservatives. If only there weren't so many of them, Matthews seems to be suggesting, Weiner and the Democrats would be home free:

Evidently Matthews believes that immoral, indiscreet, embarrassing and gross behavior is no big deal to liberals. I wonder how many of them watching his show were offended by the implication.

In any event, it now turns out that the police are questioning an underage girl about contacts she had with Congressman Weiner, who being a liberal, is probably wondering why all the fuss. It's only culturally backward Christians who would be offended if it turns out that Weiner was sending lewd messages to this teenager.

Weiner, who's married, sent lewd photos of himself to various women on taxpayer time, lied about it to all and sundry, and refuses to resign his congressional seat. Nevertheless, in the morally bizarre world of Chris Matthews, where every night's Hardball show is like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, it's only the culturally backward Christian conservatives who find this appalling. Alec Baldwin, a real liberal's liberal, all but dismisses the behavior as a consequence of being a "high- functioning" man in the political pressure cooker of Washington.

My question for Messrs. Matthews and Baldwin is, what does a congressman have to do, besides be a Republican, for liberals like them to be disgusted by his behavior?

Shocking Revelations

Anticipating being parodied by John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and The Onion, The Washington Post yesterday launched a pre-emptive self-parody of the media feeding frenzy over the 24,000 Palin emails that they're sifting through hoping to find something with which to pillory Palin. At least I think it's a self-parody, but maybe not. Maybe these people are actually this shallow:

In one e-mail, written weeks before Palin was chosen as a running mate by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Palin praises a speech by the man who would be McCain’s opponent in the 2008 presidential race.

Then-Sen. Barack Obama “gave a great speech this morn in Michigan—mentioned Alaska,” Palin wrote to aides. In a speech in Lansing, Mich., Obama had spoken of the need to complete the Alaska Natural Gas Pipeline, and open more oil and gas drilling in Alaska. “So.... we need to take advantage of this [and] write a statement saying he’s right on.”

A year before, in February 2007, a staffer recommended to Palin that she meet Pete Rouse, “who’s now chief of staff for some guy named Barack Obama,” when she was in Washington, D.C. on an upcoming trip.

“I’m game to meet him,” Palin wrote back.

Other e-mails make clear that Palin relied on her husband, Todd Palin, for advice on policy issues. In a March 2008 e-mail, for instance, the governor makes clear that he also weighed in on how to deal with Alaska’s burgeoning wolf population, a topic of debate at the time among officials and environmental experts.

The governor told her fish and game commissioner in blunt terms that she opposed using state helicopters to hunt wolves and preferred paying private hunters.

“We have to act quickly on this as predators are acting quickly and rural families face ridiculous situation of being forced to import more beef instead of feeding their families our healthy staple of alaskan game. Nonsense. Unacceptable - and not on my watch,” she said.

Her source of information? “Todd interviewed buddies who live out there... Some confirmation that state intervention isn’t first choice w/the locals,” Palin said.”We need to incentivize here,” including providing money for trappers.

The e-mails also reveal Palin’s sensitivity to the way she was portrayed in the media, even at a time when the coverage came mainly from local outlets in Alaska. Palin’s contentious relationship with the national news media has become a major theme of her political persona in the years since the end of the 2008 campaign.

In 2008, for instance, one of Palin’s press aides sent her an essay about Jane Swift, the onetime governor of Massachusetts, who raised young children while in office. Palin responded with a barb about a recent column from a writer at the Anchorage Daily News.

“Pls remind Julia Omalley that ‘they’ said the same thing throughout my career- ‘too young,’ ‘pregnant,’ ‘kids’...’She won’t be able to do it,’ ” Palin wrote. “This coming from good ol’ boys who don’t like change...And so far along in my career we’ve proved them wrong at each turn.”

In another e-mail from 2008, an aide asks about a tanning bed at Palin's house. A Web site, he said, was implying that the state had paid for it--which had set off a flood of calls from other media.

“The old used tanning bed that my girls have used a handful of times in Juneau?,” Palin wrote back. “Yes, we paid for it ourselves.”

Wow. This stuff is amazing. It just about dooms any thoughts Palin might have had of ever being President, don't you think? It's great that our media is on the case making sure that corruption and incompetence among our (Republican) politicians is exposed to the light of day.

Next up at the WaPo this headline: "Media Demands Release of Barack Obama Emails From His Days in Illinois and U.S. Senate."

Just kidding.

New Low

Just when you might think our public intercourse couldn't get any more ridiculous, just when you think we've sunk to the lowest possible levels of sanity in our political discourse, word comes that the New York Times and the Washington Post are recruiting readers to help them pore through Sarah Palin's emails from her tenure as Governor of Alaska.

Apparently, these media titans can't wait to find something, anything, that'll make Palin look bad and they're willing to conscript hundreds of citizens to help them do it. The Washington Post is offering "micro-updates" as the revelations unfold. AOL offers viewers the chance to follow a "live email blog" as the damning documents become available. It's absolutely ludicrous, especially since the media has shown no interest whatsoever in learning anything at all about the man whom we have elected to the most powerful office in the world.

When some were asking for proof not so long ago that Mr. Obama was actually born in the U.S. the media was interested only to the extent they could deride those who were curious about the presidential provenience. When Mr. Obama refused to unseal his college transcripts the media said that that was just fine with them. When evidence mounted that Mr. Obama had in the past associated with some pretty unsavory characters the media just yawned and said "so what?", but when Sarah Palin's emails became available they're pushing and elbowing each other to be the first to discover some juicy tidbit they can hold up as proof that she's a whacko or a fraud.

Meanwhile, a complete unknown sits in the Oval Office with his hand on the tiller of the ship of state and the media couldn't care less. Is it a lack of common sense, a lack of intelligence, or a lack of maturity among American journalists that causes their priorities to be so absurdly inverted? Or is it that they're so psychologically blinkered by their emotional investment in the "first black president" that they've abandoned any pretense of journalistic objectivity and are simply unwilling to hold him to the same standards of scrutiny they apply to everyone else?

Give Us Better Arguments

Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker frets, understandably, over the uncommon weather phenomena we've witnessed this spring - tornadoes, floods, drought - and wonders when we'll wake up and realize something's going haywire in our atmosphere. She writes:

For decades, climate scientists have predicted that, as global temperatures rose, the side effects would include deeper droughts, more intense flooding, and more ferocious storms. The details of these forecasts are immensely complicated, but the underlying science is pretty simple. Warm air can hold more moisture. This means that there is greater evaporation. It also means that there is more water, and hence more energy, available to the system.

What we are seeing now is these predictions being borne out. If no particular flood or drought or storm can be directly attributed to climate change—there’s always the possibility that any single event was just a random occurrence—the over-all trend toward more extreme weather follows from the heating of the earth.

Except that Ms Kolbert is operating under a false premise. The planet is not currently warming, it's cooling, at least if this chart that we posted last week is accurate. Nor is the current mean global temperature at some record high. It's actually just a smidgeon above normal.

Ms Kolbert goes on to plead for a reduction of our CO2 emissions, but some scientists have argued, as David Evans did in an article in The Financial Post that we wrote about a couple of weeks ago, that:

[E]ven if we stopped emitting all carbon dioxide tomorrow, completely shut up shop and went back to the Stone Age, according to the official government climate models it would be cooler in 2050 by about 0.015 degrees. But their models exaggerate 10-fold — in fact our sacrifices would make the planet in 2050 a mere 0.0015 degrees cooler!

If this is true what's the point of driving our economy off a cliff just to reduce the mean temperature a fraction of a degree?

Moreover, most of the global man-generated CO2 is produced by the Chinese, the Indians, etc. Much of the rest results from volcanic activity. Any measures we take as a nation will be but a fraction of what's needed to achieve that .015 degree difference.

Of course, if the situation truly is dire then we should do whatever we can to prevent catastrophe, but without more convincing evidence than an aberrant springtime weather pattern it hardly seems wise to embark upon a total transformation, and probable collapse, of an economy that's based on fossil fuels.

Indeed, we may be facing a global climate shift that may be devastating. Maybe. We really don't know, but it's almost a certainty that abandoning or taxing fossil fuels at this juncture would cause seismic dislocations in our economy and throw millions of people out of work.

Ms Kolbert finishes with this thought:

Taking the steps that would reduce the risks of climate change is not going to be politically popular, which is why it is the President’s obligation to press for them. It may be beyond our power to control the climate, but we can determine it. This is precisely what we’re doing right now, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Perhaps, but given that we have very little influence with the rest of the world and even less with volcanoes, and given that most other industrialized nations will be loath to reverse their economic growth, I don't see how we can either control or determine (whatever the distinction is) the global climate.

I confess that I don't know what to think about climate change, but until those who believe we're headed for environmental disaster stop making bogus arguments and silly claims, and stop acting as if they have something to hide, it's going to be really hard to take them seriously.

Suppressing Dissent

When the movie Expelled came out documenting the ways in which Darwinists impose conformity of thought on the academy and other institutions and how they punish dissenting voices, one of the rejoinders was to sniff that the claims of censorship and discrimination were overstated by the film. Yet in the years since Expelled the situation just seems to be getting progressively worse.

The latest example is the decision by a mathematics journal to withdraw a paper they had already accepted for publication because one lone Darwinist blogger who had no particular expertise in mathematics complained.

Here's a summary of this absurd suppression of minority ideas (see also this):

Witness the brazen censorship earlier this year of an article by University of Texas, El Paso mathematics professor Granville Sewell, author of the book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. Sewell's article critical of Neo-Darwinism ("A Second Look at the Second Law") was both peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by the journal Applied Mathematics Letters. That is, the article was accepted for publication until a Darwinist blogger who describes himself as an "opinionated computer science geek" wrote the journal editor to denounce the article, and the editor decided to pull Sewell's article in violation of his journal's own professional standards.

Lepiscopo [Sewell's lawyer] points out that in retracting Sewell's article, Applied Mathematics Letters "effectively accepted the unsubstantiated word and unsupported opinion of an inconsequential blogger, with little or unknown academic background beyond a self-professed public acknowledgment that he was a 'computer science grad' and whose only known writings are self-posted blogs about movies, comics, and fantasy computer games." This blogger's unsupported opinion "trumped the views of an author who is a well respected mathematician with a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Purdue University; a fully-tenured Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas--El Paso; an author of three books on numerical analysis and 40 articles published in respected journals; and a highly sought-after and frequent lecturer world-wide on mathematics and science."

After Dr. Sewell's article was pulled, Darwinian zealots crowed about their achievement and maliciously speculated that the article was withdrawn because it wasn't really peer-reviewed or because it was somehow substandard. The journal, meanwhile, left Dr. Sewell to twist in the wind, seemingly endorsing the Darwinists' smears. The journal editor Dr. Rodin wrote a groveling letter to the Darwinist blogger who complained to him in which he agreed that publishing Sewell's article would involve "impropriety." Rodin further apologized "for our erroneous judgement in even considering this paper for publication."

The publisher of the journal has recognized the editor's blunder and has apologized to Sewell and agreed to compensate him for attorney's fees he's incurred in trying to appeal what he sees as a breach of contract, but they're still not going to run the article. There's much more information on Dr. Rodin's shameful behavior at the link.

The summary closes with this thought:

If there is a "war on science" today, it's not being waged by the critics of Darwinism or supporters of intelligent design. It's being waged by Darwinian fundamentalists who are attempting to prevent any voices except their own from being heard in the scientific community. They seem willing to do virtually anything to silence their critics--from denying them tenure, to preventing them from being hired, to engaging in cyber attacks, to censoring peer-reviewed articles by scholars with whom they disagree. Italan geneticist Guiseppe Sermonti has remarked that "Darwinism... is the 'politically correct' of science." How right he is.

It's ironic that Darwinists often criticize intelligent design advocates for not having published in peer-reviewed journals, but when they do the Darwinists either persecute the editors and publishers who publish them or do everything they can to get the articles expunged.

See here for an explanation of the contents of Sewell's paper sans the mathematics.

Should We Shun "Shrugged"?

Jason calls our attention to an article at First Things in which Joe Carter takes conservative Christians to the woodshed for their inexplicable fascination with Ayn Rand. Rand, Carter points out had a diabolical philosophy that conservatives, particularly Christian conservatives, should avoid like, well, like they should avoid the devil.

He makes a very good case, but one that in the end I don't find completely convincing. It can be said of Rand that when she was bad she was very bad and when she was good she was pretty good. Rand's militant atheism is off-putting, her eccentricities were weird and her personal morality was, in keeping with her overall egoism, repugnant, but when she wrote about the collectivist state, the sort of state envisioned by modern progressives, her marksmanship was excellent.

Carter seems to urge us to shun her for her vices, but should we shun scientists, historians, and filmmakers who are hostile to Christianity and traditional morality? There's much about Rand that I find objectionable but much else that I find valuable. It seems to me that we should separate the wheat from the chaff and hold fast to that which is good while discarding what is not.

Perhaps we should have the same attitude toward Rand that Augustine urged his readers to adopt toward the pagan society of his day. Writing c. 397 A.D. Augustine argued that:

[I]f those who are called philosophers, and especially the Platonists, have said aught that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who have unlawful possession of it.

For, as the Egyptians had not only the idols and heavy burdens which the people of Israel hated and fled from, but also vessels and ornaments of gold and silver, and garments, which the same people when going out of Egypt appropriated to themselves, designing them for a better use, not doing this on their own authority, but by the command of God, the Egyptians themselves, in their ignorance, providing them with things which they themselves, were not making a good use of; in the same way all branches of heathen learning have not only false and superstitious fancies and heavy burdens of unnecessary toil, which every one of us, when going out under the leadership of Christ from the fellowship of the heathen, ought to abhor and avoid; but they contain also liberal instruction which is better adapted to the use of the truth....

These, therefore, the Christian, when he separates himself in spirit from the miserable fellowship of these men, ought to take away from them, and to devote to their proper use in preaching the gospel. Their garments, also,--that is, human institutions such as are adapted to that intercourse with men which is indispensable in this life,--we must take and turn to a Christian use.

....that most faithful servant of God, Moses, had done the same thing; for of him it is written that he was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.

Should we make Rand a hero? No, I agree with Carter about this. Should we urge people to read her novels? Yes, for the same reason we should urge people to read books and watch films made by liberals and skeptics for the insights and lessons they offer. Rand's ability to skewer the pretensions and fatuities of collectivism is much needed and has had a salutary influence on generations of people who would never read Hayek or Friedman, but who would take time to read a novel, even an overlong and somewhat tedious novel like Atlas Shrugged.

They're Not All This Bad

This is getting too easy.

When I was going to college back in the sixties one of the knocks on conservatives was that they were all hard-hearted, mean, violent, racist, etc. When people would ask for examples of such execrable attitudes and behavior they were often met with stunned silence, like one gets when one asks for evidence that the sky is really blue. That conservatives were crass, tasteless, red-necks was something everyone in those years just took for granted, but no one could really give any evidence for.

The myth persists to this day. Just look at how the Tea Party has been caricatured as racist and dumb by the left-wing media even though not a single example of bigotry has been adduced and many Tea Party supporters have proven to be much more intelligent and successful than their left-wing critics would have dreamed possible.

On the other hand, examples of liberal racism, anti-semitism, crudity and violent rhetoric are as abundant as they are ignored by our watchdog media. We've featured them often on this site, so much so in fact that it's getting boring. Even so, lest we forget what sort of people tend to gravitate to the left side of the ideological spectrum I offer here another illustration.

This one features someone named Chris Titus who purports to be a comedian. He's appearing on the Adam Corolla Show:

Just as sickening as Titus' pledge to assassinate Sarah Palin is the audience's reaction to it. What sort of people are these who would laugh at such a boast? What's funny about this? Don't they realize how tawdry, base and disgusting they make themselves? Don't they care? To get an idea how strange and perverse such a reaction is and how tendentious the media silence, imagine the reaction if, say, Rush Limbaugh cracked such a "joke" about Barack Obama.

Anyway, recall how, in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting everyone was blaming "right-wing hate speech" for the murders even though no one could produce an example of it. Yet there's a plethora of examples provided by liberals of this very thing, but for some reason those don't seem to matter. When liberals laugh at the prospect of murdering a political figure, why, they're actually good people, you know, and they don't really mean it. If conservatives were to do it - though I'm not aware of any prominent conservative celebrity ever doing such a detestable thing - the outrage would be volcanic, as it should be.

I don't intend to imply that everyone on the Left is a sleaze. They're not, of course. There are many fine people who count themselves as liberals, but one would think after the last couple of years of hearing this sort of rhetoric from their ideological compatriots that they'd be asking themselves what in the world it is about liberalism that attracts so many low-lifes like Mr. Titus, and whether they really want to be associated with the view of the world that Titus' ilk finds so attractive.